Jacques Tardi
Like a Sniper Lining Up His Shot (2010)
What a downer. Well, wait, I guess Like a Sniper Lining Up His Shot is more of a measured downer. Tardi, adapting a novel, is decidedly distant from his characters. The finish might be tragic, but if the reader remembers he or she isn’t supposed to have cared particularly much for the characters in the […]
MoreThe Eiffel Tower Demon (1976)
When Tardi opens The Eiffel Tower Demon with a recap of the first Adèle Blanc-Sec episode, I should have known he was going to be incredibly complicated again. It was just so nice to understand exactly what had happened, without all the MacGuffin. But Eiffel Tower eventually reveals that previous story was basically all just […]
MorePterror Over Paris (1976)
Tardi’s approach, in terms of narrative and plotting, to Pterror Over Paris is surprising. For the entire first act, the reader is left without the expected protagonist. Adèle Blanc-Sec doesn’t initially figure into the story of a newly born pterodactyl terrorizing Paris. The majority of the first act is newspaper reports and small scenes of […]
MoreThe Arctic Marauder (1974)
It’s hard to know what to expect from The Arctic Marauder. It opens in the late nineteenth century. Tardi gradually establishes the protagonist–one Jérôme Plumier–who is conveniently on a ship traveling through the Arctic Ocean. The ship discovers a startling shipwreck (on an iceberg) and Plumier is part of the investigating boarding party. Now, it […]
More120, rue de la Gare (1988)
120, rue de la Gare has enough story for three full narratives. Jacques Tardi is adapting a novel–Leo Malet’s 1943 debut–and it’s unclear how much came from the source material and how much Tardi included because of the setting. As a comic, 120 is historical detective fiction. But when Malet published it… the novel was […]
MoreIt Was the War of the Trenches (1982-93)
Tardi jumps around quite a bit in It Was the War of the Trenches, but does follow a general sort of narrative progression. Though the stories–it was originally serialized, with some delay, in anthologies–all feature their own characters and situations, they move forward in time. Even when Tardi resets at one point, the subsequent vignettes […]
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