The One With The Biggest Disappointment Ever

D'Artagnan: Journal d'un cadet

Well, maybe that is a bit of an exaggeration... Or mabe not...
Anyhow, I stand by my opinion that every variation on Alexandre Dumas' The Three Musketeers is better than the original book itself - may it be a movie, may it be, as this time, a comic book. As much as I love historical novels, I passionately hate this particular one.

D'Artagnan: Cadet's Journal by Nicolas Juncker is based on the Dumas' book, the one we are all familiar with. Or, at least, we are familiar with its countless film adaptations.
Some of the movies based on The Three Musketeers are quite good, some are terrible. The one from 1973, staring Michael York as D'Artagnan (plus Richard Chamberlain, Charlton Heston, Geraldine Chaplin, Faye Dunaway, Christopher Lee...), is my personal favourite. It was the first one that did not treat the subject so very seriously, but was not over the top with humour either - already a comedy, not yet a parody.
There are many more, however, and I have got my own system to distinguish one from another - namely by the way Constance de Bonancieux dies: she gets shot, stabbed, poisoned (as far as I recall, this one conforms to the book), strangled with rosary beads, etc... and there is even the case where she survives (sic!).

D'Artagnan actually existed - or rather there lived a musketeer named Charles Ogier de Batz de Castelmore, Count d'Artagnan. He served at the court of Louis XIV of France, not Louis XIII, but never mind that. He was d'Artagnan's model and indeed wrote a journal. Which inspired Dumas to write his novel. Which, in turn, inspired Nicolas Juncker to create the comic. But what I am just trying to say here is that the very idea of giving the narrative form of a journal is not entirely out of the blue, not at all - in fact, it brings the whole story closer to the source.
Furthermore, making d'Artagnan's journal a comic book is a clever move - it results in an extremely efficient means to disclose the contrast between what the characters believe they do and how others perceive their actions, between what they say they did and what they actually did. As a result, we get plenty of self-explanatory jokes, which otherwise would require tons of additional paragraphs of text.
In this case, the comic book has all advantages of the book and movies and hardly any of their disadvantages. It focuses on the details that almost every film purposely overlooks: background threads e.g. private lives of secondary characters. Here, the main affairs are only mentioned in between, casually, randomly, by the way, as if they were more accident than design and only supporting the main plot.
Quite refreshing.

Stay tuned.

The One With All The Comics

This morning I left with one book in my backpack.
I came back carrying two more books and two comic books. And not some thin, a-few-sheet-long comic books - but quite solid ones, the ones that do deserve the name.
I would have brought more... but 4 is the limit on how much you can borrow.

And I met a man who, while talking about comics and theatre, used such fancy words as entourage or transgression in a very natural manner, and who I know to be a quick-witted, popular artist.
At the same time, the man embodied all the stereotypical features you could associate with somebody who, hmmm, let's say a person who you would believe not to even have heard any of such words. Or at least somebody who had never heard of Guy Fawkes (but should have).

All that in the library, where a comic book section was brought to life some time ago, and where comic related meetups are hosted ever since.

Stay tuned.