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.
One such book is It Was The War Of The Trenches by Jacques Tardi. During that time I picked up a few titles that were off my beaten track: older newspaper comic collections or foreign material. After I stopped collecting weekly comics and focused on collections instead the first few months were relatively light since I was waiting for recent issues to be collected.
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