{"id":4046,"date":"2010-07-16T01:09:05","date_gmt":"2010-07-16T05:09:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/?p=4046"},"modified":"2010-07-16T01:09:05","modified_gmt":"2010-07-16T05:09:05","slug":"forever-and-then-more","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/?p=4046","title":{"rendered":"Forever. And Then More."},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>For most of Jacques Tardi<\/a>\u2019s newly translated book, It Was the War of the Trenches<\/em><\/a>, I was stuck thinking \u201cit is what it is,\u201d while moving from one deadly stack of horizontal panels to another. It\u2019s a book<\/a> that pounds on those stacks with such blunt force \u2013 such unbelievable seriousness \u2013 that all you can really do is recognize that Tardi knows that, yes, it was what it was. That war \u2013 it was horror.<\/p>\n

While matter-of-fact about the regularity and objectivity of the gore, Tardi does not fetishize the \u201ccommon.\u201d\u00a0 He never goes in for the dramatic \u201cgravitas\u201d of my paragraph above: It\u2019s a simple fact for him, but one shot through with a million stories of young men stumbling into death. We hardly learn what is being fought for, or who is even fighting, as It Was the War of the Trenches<\/em> is comprised of a series of short stories, each focusing on relatively microscopic and isolated events in time during World War I. The soldiers are French and German, mostly, though it hardly matters. Replacing the usual macro-war narrative is the fight and the death. Tardi quite literally inflicts tunnel vision here: every panel is composed as though we\u2019re moving right into it with blinders on \u2013 a face in profile framing a view, sad-eyed soldiers staring out from the page, an explosion demolishing the foreground. It\u2019s a deceptive style as well, since the panels at first appear static \u2013 too resolutely composed \u2013 but then details emerge (a torn trouser and raised foot signaling the demise of Pierre on page 96, for example) to humanize the conflict and wipe away the filter between you and it.<\/p>\n

And when you\u2019re drawn into the world it\u2019s hard not to rhapsodize about the drawing itself \u2013 Tardi\u2019s gaze may be level, but his lines are sure and lush. His gentle contour line drawings are almost delicate, but then he fills them with a gray tone, or attaches them to nearly psychedelic intestines. It\u2019s art that comes over you and stays with you \u2013 nicely offsetting an otherwise icy stare.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a book that one could unpack for a long time \u2013 formally rigorous and sadly beautiful, of course, but also so very foreign to the American sensibility. I\u2019m struck in particular by the absence of machismo in Tardi\u2019s narrative. Soon after finishing It Was the War of the Trenches<\/em> I read The Forever War<\/em><\/a>, by Dexter Filkins. It\u2019s an excellent collection of reportage from Afghanistan and Iraq written over the last ten or so years. But it is also (necessarily?) a macho book. This guy is embedded with marines or out exploring the Taliban, and things are overwhelmingly crazy. That much is clear. Like Tardi, Filkins does not bother with the macro, instead focusing on the stories of small groups, towns or individuals. But as opposed to Tardi\u2019s steady backwards look, Filkins is almost punch drunk, composing sentences to reflect his own immediate, present-tense experiences. I suppose I mention Filkins here because it seems like these books built from the pounding of experience on top of experience, hardly ever looking up, are rarely so graceful and so moving. Both should be read to somehow reckon with life among the dead\u2026<\/p>\n

I can\u2019t speak to Filkins\u2019 place in the firmament, but for me, finally, Tardi seems a master, and this work a rare and intensely humane book.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For most of Jacques Tardi\u2019s newly translated book, It Was the War of the Trenches, I was stuck thinking \u201cit is what it is,\u201d while moving from one deadly stack of horizontal panels to another. It\u2019s a book that pounds on those stacks with such blunt force \u2013 such unbelievable seriousness \u2013 that all you can really do is recognize that Tardi knows that, yes, it was what it was. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[610],"class_list":["post-4046","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","tag-tardi"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4046","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4046"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4046\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4046"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4046"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4046"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}