The 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 did not occur to me Plumier’s presence was contrived until now, sitting after reading Marauder and trying to explain it. Tardi is wholly convincing in ignoring the contrivance of it. Plumier was the only passenger who the story might involve, making his survival essential for there to be a story at all.

But, like I said, Tardi sells it.

Maybe I just wasn’t paying attention because the artwork is so amazing. Marauder is very, very dark. But then there are these icebergs or there’s nineteenth century France and Tardi works in all this detail. The people are not the point in Marauder–at one point, Tardi doesn’t even bother giving the supporting cast faces–but the landscapes and technology.

The layout is also important. Tardi’s panel composition and his placement of the panels on the page are amazing. In some ways, it’s my favorite art from him and in others not. He sacrifices personality and emotion for a great look.

Yet he still manages to tell an excellent story. Once the mystery perturbs far enough, he switches gears, turning it into a great riff on 20,000 Leagues.

Marauder is excellent, but not profound.

120, 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 just a detective novel. One assumes Tardi added a lot of historical details, but also a decidedly negative look at his protagonist. 120‘s hero, private detective Nestor Burma, is rude with his friends and frequently gives expository monologues in public. The people around him watch in silence. These are hilarious little touches, which occasionally imply Burma’s delusional.

I had read 120 before (it was my introduction to Tardi) and I still wasn’t positive Burma was a real detective with a real mystery to solve.

Tardi opens the comic in a POW camp, then moves to Lyons, then moves to Paris. Each setting is distinct from the other, especially in how Tardi moves Burma through the landscape. There is a lot of walking in Lyons, with Burma recently freed, and it discreetly fits the character–finally able to move about, he does.

The art is excellent, particularly when it comes to the supporting cast. Tardi doesn’t change characters’ looks much (Burma’s momentary five o’clock shadow is a shock), but they’re all fantastically distinctive. Even the silent scenes are full of personality.

120 is great historical fiction. As a mystery though, it’s too short.

It 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 resume that progression. The book ends with armistice.

To say the book is anti-war is something of an absurd understatement. It’s impossible to imagine a pro-war approach to the first World War, but here Tardi does find some–inspiring poetry and songs from 1915, juxtaposed against the book’s only trench warfare scene. Though most of the book takes place in the trenches, as the title suggests, he only does one sequence with the soldiers running out and getting gunned down. He does it against a white sky, so just the soldiers and the battlefield are visible. It reminds of Goya, maybe the only time in the book the visuals are truly horrific, as Tardi lets the reader imagine most of the violence. When he’s upfront about it, a soldier holding his intestines in with his helmet, the soldier’s monologue is more terrifying.

Tardi’s vignettes eventually leave the trenches, with a particularly jarring entry starting in a lush forest. He goes through a lot of narrative devices to get the feeling across; it’s never a history lesson, instead an imperative look at the nature of humanity.

It’s an outstanding piece of work.