It Was the War of the Trenches by Jacques Tardi

It Was the War of the Trenches by Jacques Tardi

Tardi's World War I masterpiece finally in English!

World War I, that awful, gaping wound in the history of Europe, has long been an obsession of Jacques Tardi's. (His very first--rejected--comics story dealt with the subject, as does his most recent work, the two-volume Putain de Guerre.) But It Was the War of the Trenches is Tardi's defining, masterful statement on the subject, a graphic novel that can stand shoulder to shoulder with Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front and Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms.

Tardi is not interested in the national politics, the strategies, or the battles. Like Remarque, he focuses on the day to day of the grunts in the trenches, and, with icy, controlled fury and disgust, with sardonic yet deeply sympathetic narration, he brings that existence alive as no one has before or since. Yet he also delves deeply into the underlying causes of the war, the madness, the cynical political exploitation of patriotism. And in a final, heartbreaking coda, Tardi grimly itemizes the ghastly human cost of the war, and lays out the future 20th century conflicts, all of which seem to spring from this global burst of insanity.

Trenches features some of Tardi's most stunning artwork. Rendered in an inhabitually lush illustrative style, inspired both by abundant photographic documentation and classic American war comics, augmented by a sophisticated, gorgeous use of Craftint tones, trenches is somehow simultaneously atypical and a perfect encapsulation of Tardi's mature style. It is the indisputable centerpiece of Tardi's oeuvre.

It Was the War of the Trenches has been an object of fascination for North American publishers: RAW published a chapter in the early 1980s, and Drawn and Quarterly magazine serialized a few more in the 1990s. But only a small fraction of Trenches has ever been made available to the English speaking public (in now out of print publications); the Fantagraphics edition, the third in an ongoing collection of the works of this great master, finally remedies this situation.

Jacques Tardi is a pioneering cartoonist in Europe. Luc Besson converted his Adele Blanc-Sec series into a feature film, and he directed the current animated film April and the Incredible World. His comics have won numerous awards, including the Eisner Awards in the United States. He and his wife, singer Dominique Grange, live in Paris with their kitties.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781606993538
ISBN 10	1606993534
Title	It Was the War of the Trenches
Author	Tardi
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Fantagraphics
Year published	2010-04-20
Number of pages	120
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.