By Tardi with Jean-Pierre Verney, translated by Kim Thompson & Helga Dascher (Fantagraphics Books)
ISBN: 978-1-60699-353-8 (HB Trenches) & 978-1-60699-582-2 (HB Goddam)
Win’s Christmas Gift Recommendation: Because Beautiful Ugly Truths are Always Necessary… 10/10
As regulars well know by now, for years I’ve been championing Charley’s War as the best comics story about the First World War ever created. However, whilst I’m still convinced of that fact AS A FACT, there’s a remarkably close contender for the title: Tardi’s astonishing, award-winning conception C’était la guerre des tranchées. It began serial publication in France in 1993 and first released in an English edition by Fantagraphics in 2010. Three years later it was supplemented by an even more impressive and heart-rending sequel…
Credited with creating a new style of expressionistic illustration dubbed “the New Realism”, Jacques Tardi is one of the greatest comics creators in the world, blessed with singular vision and adamantine ideals. He’s even apparently refusing his country’s greatest honour through his wish to be completely free to say and create what he wants. The auteur was born in the Commune of Valence, Dróme in August 1946 and subsequently studied at École Nationale des Beaux-Arts de Lyon and the prestigious Parisian École Nationale Supérieure des arts Décoratifs. From there he launched his career in comics in 1969 at Pilote – acknowledged home of modern French comics.
From illustrating stories by Jean Giraud, Serge de Beketch and Pierre Christian, he moved on to Westerns, crime tales and satirical works in magazines including Record, Libération, Charlie Mensuel & L’Écho des Savanes whilst simultaneously graduating into adapting prose novels by Louis-Ferdinand Céline & Léo Malet. The latter’s detective hero Nestor Burma became the subject of all-new albums written and drawn by Tardi once the established literary canon was exhausted, and led in 1976. to the creation of Polonius in Métal Hurlant and a legendary, super-successful star turn. Les Aventures Extraordinaires d’Adéle Blanc-Sec is an epic period fantasy series which initially ran in the daily Sud-Ouest. The series numbers ten volumes thus far and is still being added to. Stayed tuned to this channel for more of her rather soon…
Impassioned creator Tardi has crafted many unforgettable anti-war stories – Le Fleur au Fusil, Le trou d’obus, Adieu Brindavoine and more – all exploring and examining the plight of the common soldier, and he has written novels, created radio series, worked in movies, and co-created (with writer Jean Vautrin) Le Cri du Peuple – a quartet of albums devoted to the Parisienne revolt of the Communards.
Whilst his WWI creations are loosely inspired by experiences survived by his grandfather, Tardi’s 2012 graphic novel Moi René Tardi, prisonnier de guerre au Stalag IIB focussed on the experiences of his father, a POW in the second conflict to ravage France in a century. Far too few of this master’s creations are available in English (barely 20 out of more than 50) but, thanks to NBM, iBooks and now Fantagraphics, we’re quickly catching up…
An international multi-award winner and incontestable masterpiece, It Was the War of the Trenches begins with Tardi’s forthright Foreword detailing his process and motivations, plus a copious and chilling Special Thanks page, before a cartoon catalogue of humanity’s greatest folly unfolds.
These interlinked, cross-fertilising vignettes are all about people, not causes or battles or the fate of nations, with each short tale linking to others. These are comprised of epigrammatic, anecdotal observations of the war moment-by-moment as experienced by ordinary “poilu”: the long-suffering (if they were lucky) grunts and expendable soldiery. The saga first saw print in A Suivre before being stitched together as a patchwork quilt of endurance, complaint, venality, misfortune, bravery, cupidity and stupidity, all unceasingly informed primarily by Tardi family stories, but always thereafter verified and augmented by focussed research.
As the pages turn, a litany of injustice and abiding horror unfolds wherein scared, weary, hopeless, betrayed and crazy men of every type suffer constant pressure, relentless ennui, physical abuse and imminent death…
Seeking and succeeding in bring those appalling experiences to life, Tardi forensically displayed the constant shelling, awful weather, death in and from the skies and in the mud plus every possible variation in between them as an ever-changing roster of reluctant warriors wait for their end. They think of past lives and wasted chances and what turn of fate brought them to this muddy hole in the ground…
Especially poignant are those twists of luck that so often place supposed enemies together against the War itself, but always brief friendships end abruptly and badly, with the only winners being death and guilt and shame…
This is a book no one could read and sustain any vainglorious illusion of combat and honour as noble inspirations. This is a story that begs us all to stop war forever…
In 2013, after more than a decade of meticulous research and diligent crafting, It Was the War of the Trenches was finally supplemented by a sequel…
Goddam This War!
Translated as a potent and powerful hardback edition in full colour and moody, evocative tonal sequences, this follow-up pictorial polemic was originally released as six newspaper-format pamphlets entitled Putain de Guerre! From there it was collected in twinned-albums and came to us English-speakers as Goddamn This War!, tracing the course of the conflict through the experiences of an anonymous French grunt.
At once lucky, devious and cynically suspicious enough to survive, he is a tool used to relate the horrific, boring, scary, disgusting and just plain stupid course of an industrialised war managed by privileged, inbred idiots who think they’re playing games: restaging Napoleon’s cavalry campaigns, but this time as seen from the perspective of the poor sods actually being gassed and bombed and shot at…
Divided into five chapter-years and running from ‘1914’ to ‘1919’ (as the global killing didn’t stop just because the Germans and their allies signed an Armistice in 1918 – just ask the Turks, Armenians, Russians and other Balkan nations forgotten when hostilities officially ended), the narration is stuffed with the kind of appalling facts and trivia you won’t find in most history books. Here, our frustrated, disillusioned protagonist staggers from campaign to furlough to what his bosses call victory, but notes no credible differences between himself and the “Boche” on the other side of the wire, and huge gulfs between the men with rifles and the toffs in brass on both sides…
This staggeringly emotional testament is backed up and supplemented by a reproduction of ‘The Song of Craonne’ – a ditty so seditious that French soldiers were executed for singing it – plus a capacious, revelatory year-by-year photo-essay from historian, photographer and collector Jean-Pierre Verney. His World War I: an Illustrated Chronology chillingly shows the true faces and forces of war and is alone worth the price of admission…
It Was the War of the Trenches (C’était la guerre des tranchées) © 1993 Editions Casterman. This edition © 2010 Fantagraphics Books.
b>Goddamn This War! (Putain de Guerre!) © 2013 Editions Casterman. This edition © 2013 Fantagraphics Books.