It's the End of the Galaxy as We Know It.
- Rome was already entering its death throes by the age of "Bread and Circuses".
- The French Revolution started during the height of Aristocratic extravagance and luxury.
- The Great Depression hit right after the peak of the "Roaring 20's" . . .
Simply put, if the quality (or lack thereof) of entertainment is any way to gauge the health of a civilization, the 41st century is about to go down in flames.
Last Resort is a simple, straightforward reality game show; twelve criminals (all of whom who would just end up dying in jail anyway) play for one broadcast season in a series of life-threatening challenges, and everyone who survives the season finally gets pardoned and goes home happy. Let's face it, though; games where "everyone wins" aren't exciting. In fact, they're downright dull. So to make this something with watching, someone has to lose, and on Last Resort, losing is the last thing you'll ever do.
For that matter, just watching criminals isn't all that exciting either; watching innocent people against criminals is, though, so there's four more volunteers in the mix, for a total of sixteen contestants. To make sure that at least someone is working to kill off these criminals, four of those sixteen are Executioners -- squad leaders with more authority, more weaponry, and more freedom, all for the price of being expected to live up to their name every now and then.
For our first (and possibly only) season, the show's attracted the sort of
people you might expect; ex-soldiers, hardened lifers, even a couple innocents
(HA!) running around, not to mention a pair of Dead Inside -- those whose
souls have been altered (or corrupted, depending on who you ask) from their
original inert state. These criminal's crimes are as diverse as they are:
murder, espionage, assassination, and terrorism -- and that's just one of them!
There's always a wild card, though, and on Last Resort, her name is Jigsaw
Forte. A professional violinist and grad school dropout, she's a Talmi -- a
species of gnomish marsupials that have only been recognized as sophonts within
the past 500 years -- and none of those three things are what anyone was
expecting in a volunteer, let alone someone who became an executioner! The good news is that
she has one advantage over the other contestants and staff; she's a vampire, and
even after thousands of years of lore, everyone believes that only humans can
become vampires, so they're clueless as to what Jigsaw really is. The bad news
is, she doesn't have a clue either . . .
Start either at the very first Last Resort comic and get some insight into Jigsaw Forte and her first confrontations with the Vaeo family (as well as some artistic evolution), or skip to the beginning of the weekly pages, with "Don't Say Goodbye, Say Hello!"
