It Was the War of the Trenches by Jacques Tardi

The potency of the soldiers' tragic stories is enhanced by the elegance of Tardi's lucid drawing and keen compositions that are accentuated by the use of three horizontal panels per page throughout. While the visuals, which draw upon battlefield photographs, are thoroughly convincing, the soldiers' harrowing experiences, fictionalized by Tardi, register as even more powerfully authentic. 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. 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. It is the indisputable centerpiece of Tardi's oeuvre. 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. Trenches features some of Tardi's most stunning artwork.

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.

Yet he also delves deeply into the underlying causes of the war, the madness, the cynical political exploitation of patriotism.

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. Tardi is not interested in the national politics, the strategies, or the battles. (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.

World War I, that awful, gaping wound in the history of Europe, has long been an obsession of Jacques Tardi's. Tardi's World War I masterpiece finally in English!

It Was the War of the Trenches by Jacques Tardi