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It Was the War of the Trenches

Jacques Tardi,

Kim Thompson (Translator)

4.22 · Rating details · 1,794 ratings · 213 reviews

World War I, that awful, gaping wound in the history of Europe, has long been an obsession of Jacques Tardis. (His very firstrejectedcomics 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 Tardis defining, masterful statement on the subject, a graphic novel that can stand shoulder to World War I, that awful, gaping wound in the history of Europe, has long been an obsession of Jacques Tardi’s. (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.

Tardi is not interested in the national politics, the strategies, or the battles. 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. Yet he also delves deeply into the underlying causes of the war, the madness, the cynical political exploitation of patriotism. 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.

Trenches features some of Tardi’s most stunning artwork. 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. It is the indisputable centerpiece of Tardi’s oeuvre.

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. 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. ...more

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Hardcover, 118 pages

Published April 20th 2010 by Fantagraphics (first published January 1st 1993)

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Jan 17, 2020 Tina Haigler rated it really liked it

Shelves: graphic-novel

This was touching, sad, and heart wrenching. Thank you for your sacrifice.

This was not a light read. It will have an effect you. The way this book was written and drawn was very poignant. The author focused on one soldier at a time, and told his story until his tale ended, and then he would start the story of the next soldier, and so on. Focusing on one person at a time contributed to why it was so emotionally stirring for me. All of the main characters have distinct personalities and depth, so ...more

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Sep 29, 2014 ΞιsNιnΞ rated it it was amazing

Shelves: favorites-sequential-art, bande-dessinee-unsorted, influential-cutting-edge-comic-art, pb-fantagraphics-d-and-q-pantheon, ficgenre-war-and-espionage, ficgenre-historical-fiction, nonficgenre-science-history, killed-a-forest-to-stock-this, media-pencil-chrcl-ink-scrtchbrd, ohc-deluxe-hc-8x11in

Jacques Tardi vs. Otto Dix, & The Horrors of The War that Should Have Ended All Wars
This is Tardi working at the absolute peak of his creative powers. The passion & righteous hatred he derives from the subject matter:

01. The sheer waste, futility, and soul-crushing injustices of war, never more devastatingly demonstrated than during the protracted 4-year nightmare of trench warfare.
description

02. The arrogance and ignorance of the senior officers responsible for ordering hundreds of thousands of ...more

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Nov 25, 2015 Jan Philipzig rated it it was amazing

Shelves: comedy, historical, fantagraphics, activism, war, favorites, european, politics, espionage

According to Art Spiegelman, Jacques Tardis It Was the War of the Trenches is one hell of a book, and that description hits the nail right on the head. With a merciless eye for detail, it explores the depths of human depravity... and made me sick to my stomach. The tone throughout is one of existential despair: bleak, demoralized, absurd, macabre, dehumanized. The images of World War I feel both authentic and nightmarish, both historically accurate and timeless: Its not so much a matter of the ...more

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Sep 21, 2013 David Schaafsma rated it it was amazing

Shelves: best-graphic-lit-ever, graphic-history, gn-european, gn-war, wwi, books-loved-2015

In case you might have a tendency to romanticize war, any war, or maybe the century-distant WWI in particular, read this book. How could one come to romanticize a war that killed and maimed millions, the reverberations of which are felt even today? Maybe it might come about through a certain approach to history, or military history, one focused on battle strategies, the invention of particular weapons, the biographies of military commanders and politicians. This text, which I take to be the In case you might have a tendency to romanticize war, any war, or maybe the century-distant WWI in particular, read this book. How could one come to romanticize a war that killed and maimed millions, the reverberations of which are felt even today? Maybe it might come about through a certain approach to history, or military history, one focused on battle strategies, the invention of particular weapons, the biographies of military commanders and politicians. This text, which I take to be the still prolific Tardi's masterwork, is also one of the great texts in any format on war, and certainly of the literature of WWI. Consistent with the impulses of all great anti-war literature, of Crane, Hemingway, Remarque, and so many others, this text, dedicated to the author's grandfather, whose stories he grew up listening to, focuses on the soldiers, and vilifies, castigates, the commanders, the generals, the politicians, the engineers of destruction with their stupid abstract strategies that they go ahead with in spite of catastrophic evidence. Bad decisions are featured on every page that wreak havoc on ordinary boys--teenaged boys--that after all the horror, just want to go home to their mamas.

Tardi's book, meticulously researched and drawn and respectfully written to honor the dead, is a cry of outrage at the architects and masters of war (as Dylan called them) whose names we read in our history books. We memorize these names, and biographies are made about them and movies are made to honor them. But Tardi honors the foot soldiers and brings them to life through their stories, using language he finds and sometimes of course invents to help us feel what they may have felt at the end. He shows us the amputees, the disfigured, the families left to mourn.

As he says, this isn't a coherent history of the war or of even individual battles. Tardi only cares about the suffering we bring upon ourselves through the rich and powerful's decisions to sacrifice the poor for political and financial gain. Mesmerizing, horrifying. As with all of the best comics ever done, this is a text to demonstrate to the world what comics are capable of illustrating. I was really angry and deeply sad when I read this through today. I think that was his purpose, and it worked for me. Highly recommended. I also recommend you read it with Joe Sacco's The Great War panorama open, and along the way, with the poetry of Sassoon and Owens. What a stupid cataclysmic mistake that war, and probably all wars. ...more

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Jul 08, 2012 Charles Hatfield rated it it was amazing

This war comicabsolutely a war comic, which is to say a profoundly antiwar comicis an awful masterwork of aggrieved and wounded humanity. Hovering between blunted affect, righteous fury, and pitch-black, absurdist humor, it is one of a very few comics to, and I mean this literally, give me the shakes. Tardi's barrage of fictional (though obsessively researched) soldiers' vignettes about the first World War goes off like a bomb in slow motion, the precise, pitiless unraveling of each anecdote This war comic—absolutely a war comic, which is to say a profoundly antiwar comic—is an awful masterwork of aggrieved and wounded humanity. Hovering between blunted affect, righteous fury, and pitch-black, absurdist humor, it is one of a very few comics to, and I mean this literally, give me the shakes. Tardi's barrage of fictional (though obsessively researched) soldiers' vignettes about the first World War goes off like a bomb in slow motion, the precise, pitiless unraveling of each anecdote like the ticking of a cruel clock.

The book's total effect strikes me as paradoxical. On the one hand it deemphasizes specific human "drama" through the very interchangeableness of the hapless soldiers: the whole book reads as a just that, a whole, each new vignette simply continuing the mood of the previous. The book gives off the air of helplessness before vast forces that I associate with literary naturalism at its bleakest. On the other hand, each tale is keenly, piercingly, specific; each is personalized and particularized with exquisite care, down to the varied likenesses of each and every doomed man. The result is stunningly powerful.

Tardi combines a searching moral imagination with ice-cold unsentimentality and an animating rage that he has sublimated into art. That the book succeeds in being a narrative about war rather than merely an obvious diatribe against it does not in any way lessen its angry, heartsore quality, its fury at the nightmarish self-destructive pointlessness of mass human slaughter. What makes all this work is the slight emotional remove of Tardi's narration (which alternates between third and first person but never gives in to mere sympathizing).

Above all, the book rests on Tardi's cool, measured formalism and the extraordinary vividness of his compositions: there are some staggering drawings and pages here. These make It Was the War of the Trenches a relentless black masterpiece.

Unquestionably an essential volume for any serious comics library, and one that is now embedded in my mind. ...more

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Jan 06, 2017 Greta rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: graphicnovels-comics-manga

It was the war of the trenches

This classic graphic novel could not really engage me. The stories were too fragmentary to be really compelling. Tardi's prose didn't appeal to me (it could be the dutch translation) and I also found the illustrations unattractive. All men looked very much the same, like caricatures.

Nevertheless it delivers a poignant message about the futility and cruelty of WW I.

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Jul 26, 2017 Cristina rated it it was amazing

Shelves: favorites, ww1, comics-graphic-novels

Jacques Tardi's sombre and unrelenting graphic novel on WWI hit me like a slap in the face.

The way he recounts tale after tale of dehumanising brutality, of normal lives thrown into the gaping crater of the trenches of the Western Front, is poignant and brutal but also enriched by an undercurrent of quiet black humour and humanity.

The artwork is stunning - overwhelmingly black and grey, the background to each frame is a nightmare of barbed wire, mud and decaying corpses.

The characters are ...more

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Jul 25, 2011 Tony rated it really liked it

Shelves: graphic-storytelling

In case you missed the memo, World War I was a nightmare of pointless suffering for millions upon millions of people. This beautifully produced (and translated) reprint of a 1993 French graphic collection takes you there via a loose collection of personal stories from the French trenches. There's no protagonist, no plot, no narrative, just, as the author writes in his foreword: "Nothing but a gigantic, anonymous scream of agony." Each of these "screams of agony" is the story of a French soldier ...more

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Aug 15, 2017 Alex rated it it was amazing

Shelves: european-comics

Tardi gives everything he has in this comic book. Driven by his absolute hate for every type of warfare, he uses his grandfather's experiences and transforms them to pure war brutality on paper. A must have for every WWI enthusiast who wants something more than big explosions and poetic sacrifice. 5/5

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Jan 16, 2019 aleks rated it really liked it

Shelves: i-need-therapy-after-this, 4-stars, controversial, eye-opening, university-reading, historical-fiction, graphic-novels-and-manga, french

I feel really weird rating this because if I was rating it by enjoyment... Well, first of all, reading about the horrors of WWI is not the nicest experience, and second of all, I wasn't very invested, but philosophically I agree with everything Tardi says and the way he drives his point home is simply brilliant. Anyhow, we need more of this anti-war rhetoric, don't we?

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Apr 18, 2010 George Marshall rated it it was amazing

I have a strong interest in first world war history (and graphic novels too) but I have yet to see the brutality and horrors of life in the trenches portrayed so vividly in any other visual medium. Tardi works with actual testimony, and has a meticulous eye for detail. And he is also an outstanding artist - one of the best French graphic artists. Outstanding, and further evidence of the power of comics as a communications medium.

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Oct 21, 2016 Julia rated it really liked it

Shelves: graphic-novel, history

This is a bleak, grim picture of several soldiers in World War I.

My name is Jean Desbois. I belong to the 3rd Company which is going to charge as soon as the artillery holds its fire. Well climb over the edge of the trench and well be out in the open, exposed to the German machine guns I am afraid of being killed. Yesterday I had a near miss.(34) For twenty panels the 3rd Company, dies, wanders, and dies some more. For the third time in forty-eight hours, their charge has been broken. ...more

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Apr 24, 2011 Jamie rated it it was amazing

Shelves: graphic-novels, war, 16-18

I'm probably giving this a perfect rating because it is EXACTLY the kind of book I like - finding the human stories in the face of "history." I don't know that I've ever read anything that shows you quite like this how war is just so totally stupid. The one that sticks with me the most is when a German and French soldier both get lost from their regiments and concoct a plan. If the German soldiers find them first, they'll say the German soldier captured the French and vice versa. That way, the ...more

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Apr 16, 2018 Carol Storm rated it liked it

Good clean drawings and a fast-moving style, but there's nothing here that wasn't said better in ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT. Clearly these poilus are no match for Fritz!

Every story is a bummer and every soldier ends up crippled or dead. There are ways to write anti-war propaganda that are a lot more subtle than this. Oddly enough, some of the stories are so over the top that they come across as being a lot like the atrocity propaganda that the Great Powers used to whip the masses into a Good clean drawings and a fast-moving style, but there's nothing here that wasn't said better in ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT. Clearly these poilus are no match for Fritz!

Every story is a bummer and every soldier ends up crippled or dead. There are ways to write anti-war propaganda that are a lot more subtle than this. Oddly enough, some of the stories are so over the top that they come across as being a lot like the atrocity propaganda that the Great Powers used to whip the masses into a frenzy in 1914. For example, one poilu claims he saw German soldiers marching down the road with a crowd of Belgian women and children in front of them, acting as human shields. But if you think about it, that wouldn't do the Germans much good if they were actually trying to shoot at the French. And marching along with your gun pointed at some woman's back would be slow, cumbersome, and dangerous, and not really be very effective either.

Another interesting point is that "Tardi" is totally sold on the French soldier as a victim, and nothing more. So he leaves out a lot of stuff that would complicate that. The French army and the Russian army were both shaken by large-scale mutinies in 1917. Tardi shows troops being shot for cowardice and desertion, and he even shows one soldier shooting a couple of gendarmes. But there's no mention of organized mutiny on a massive scale, which certainly happened. And there's no mention of Communists in the ranks, either. And aside from a single anecdote about a Jewish soldier being shot down while his French comrades look on and laugh, there's no discussion of anti-Semitism in Europe or what the future really holds in the next war.

What really strikes me is that as a modern Frenchman Tardi is protesting too much. The sufferings of the French soldiers in the Great War were terrible, but no matter how terrible it's not enough. There have to be more rats, more corpses, more horror on every page. French suffering in World War One has to cancel out everything that was to come.

Because how else can an enlightened, liberty-loving nation look itself in the eye after collaborating with the Nazis?
...more

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Jun 08, 2014 Fredrik Strömberg rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: language-swedish, comics, origin-france, theme-war, theme-wwi, format-album

Phew! Reading this harrowing book sitting in the shade under a tree in our garden on this lovely summers day was really strange. After a few panels I was totally into the scary, dysfunctional world of WWI, almost feeling the cold, the rats, the fleas, the angst. And then I would look up into suburban bliss and see my little daughter playing on the lawn. And then down into the darkens again...

There's no hiding the fact that I really, really like the art and storytelling of French comics master Phew! Reading this harrowing book sitting in the shade under a tree in our garden on this lovely summers day was really strange. After a few panels I was totally into the scary, dysfunctional world of WWI, almost feeling the cold, the rats, the fleas, the angst. And then I would look up into suburban bliss and see my little daughter playing on the lawn. And then down into the darkens again...

There's no hiding the fact that I really, really like the art and storytelling of French comics master Jacques Tardi. I've read his comics for more than three decades now, and own copies of most of the things he's done, in one language or another. There's probably no other comics artist alive today who has such distinctive line as he does. OK, so Tardi's style was once inspired by among others Hergé, and there are, after a long and successful career, generations of artists that have been inspired in turn by Tardi. But despite all of this, there's no denying that you can usually tell that a drawing is by Tardi by just a glance.

Tardi has been obsessed with WWI for a long time and produced book after book about that specific era in history. This graphic novel is his tour de force, though. It doesn't trivialise the subject by introducing adventure elements into it, as with some other works by Tardi. In fact, this book is all about war, and as far as this is possible, the war is even the main character. We get to follow a number of soldiers in a kind of slice-of-life stories, and though Tardi is very specific with their stories and the details both in the narrative and in the visuals, they feel more or less interchangeable. This is of course the effect Tardi is looking for, as it points towards the inhumane aspect of war in general and of WWI in particular.

You can feel the anger Tardi harbours towards the horrific things that happened during "The Great War", but he never allows the story to turn into simple didactic anti-war propaganda. Tardi is much more subtle than that. The feeling after having read this book is one of disgust but also of some understanding of what it was like to actually be there. Tardi's use of first and third person storytelling, combined with his incredibly evocative, artistic yet detailed and realistic images are very efficient in transporting you to the front, transmitting the very essence of war. This is a master storyteller at the hight of his game, penning the end-all graphic novel about the senselessness of war.

Again, I'm really thankful to the Swedish publisher, in this case newly started Placebo Press, for giving me the occasion to revisit this story. Makes me realise that I really need to re-read the rest of Tardi's oeuvre. The fun never ends! ...more

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Jun 17, 2012 Robert rated it it was amazing

Some graphic novels and collections transcend their medium and this is a prime example, becoming literature which happens to also be illustrated.

Effective story-telling on a subject and time that is all but forgotten, it magically humanizes an incredibly dehumanizing time for Europe and the world with an obviously French-centric emphasis. Tardis shares vignettes and tales related to him by his late grandfather and doesn't embellish or wax romantic but only reminds readers that war should not be ...more

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Sep 23, 2016 Jon Nakapalau rated it it was amazing

Shelves: history, war, graphic-novels

I was so glad to come across this book and discover Jacques Tardi. Puts you in the trenches as brave men try to escape the 'maze of death' that they must run through every day...only to find the next day they are still in the maze; their dead comrades the only proof that they have 'survived.'

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Feb 01, 2015 Brendan Hodge rated it liked it

I discovered somehow or other that there have been a number of French graphic novels in recent years dealing with World War One, and I was immediately curious to get a look at some, because I'm curious about how the Great War is views by those in the countries that fought in it a hundred years on. (Despite the heavy bloodletting of 1917-1918, the US almost doesn't count as there's virtually no cultural memory of the first world war here, our stories are all about the second.)

The only ones I I discovered somehow or other that there have been a number of French graphic novels in recent years dealing with World War One, and I was immediately curious to get a look at some, because I'm curious about how the Great War is views by those in the countries that fought in it a hundred years on. (Despite the heavy bloodletting of 1917-1918, the US almost doesn't count as there's virtually no cultural memory of the first world war here, our stories are all about the second.)

The only ones I found which were available in the US was Jacques Tardi's It Was the War of the Trenches and its sequel of sorts (it's about the same subject matter, though not the same characters) Goddamn This War! .

Interlibrary loan was my friend, and I got hold of copies of both, of which I've now finished It Was the War of the Trenches. I'm not usually a reader of graphic novels, and usually I find myself flipping pages fast. I found myself probably reading this one more slowly than if it had been the same vignettes told in text, because Tardi has definitely done a huge amount of research and so for someone interested in the period there's a huge amount of detail to look for in each panel.

Unfortunately, the writing is, by intention I think, very much one note, and the story suffers as a result. Tardi writes in his introduction, "There are no 'heroes,' there is no 'protagonist' in this awful collective 'adventure' that is war. Nothing but a gigantic anonymous scream of agony."

You can write an engaging story in which there is no "hero" in the sense of a good and admirable character, but it's very hard to write a story in which there are no protagonists, no characters about whom we care. And this is the problem here. Tardi provides one gigantic scream of agony, but the result is a portrayal so fragmented, so partial that we no longer see the participants as people, only as sufferers. They are suffering because stupid and unseen commanders send them into hopeless attacks, they are suffering because those around them are stupid, they are suffering because the anonymous Germans on the other side relentlessly kill characters in order to express the futility of it all.

Tardi says in his introduction that he is only writing about French characters because he knows France, he has not intention to seem nationalist. And yet, there is a sense in which the narrative he puts forward begins to seem nationalist because his characters only suffer, they seldom act in any way that would hurt the opposing side. So while we see many French characters killed by German snipers and machine gunners who are either unseen or seen only as helmeted silhouettes, we only once in the book seek a French soldier kill a German soldier (or even shoot at one) "on screen". By contrast, we see five French soldiers shot by firing squad, one French soldier shot by his comrades while he's wounded on the barbed wire (because they're tired of hearing his moans), two French gendarmes killed by a French soldier, and one French soldier kill himself.

We get a very good sense of how 1.4 million Frenchmen died in combat during the war, but it's utterly mystifying how more than a million Germans died on the Western Front. The reason is not some sort of anti-German feeling, nor any pro-French sentiment (the characters are equal opportunity misanthropes), but rather that Tardi is so busy seeing his characters as victims -- of the officers, of the mud, of the enemy, of 'this goddamned war' -- that he fails to account for the fact that France's soldiers in the Great War (like those on all sides) were actors as well as victims. They were not just killed, they killed in their turn.

The sources of suffering here are always other: the artillery pounding in from above, the stupid officers who execute men for imaginary crimes, the faceless enemy who shoot soldiers as they try to slink to the listening post that the heartless officers have assigned them to. But by othering all the causes of suffering, the story in a sense takes an easy turn. There is perhaps no clearer example of this in the book than the prevalence of executions. We see five soldiers shot by firing squad -- which is a high number given that out of the 1.4 million French soldiers who died violently in the great war only 600 were executed (including both men killed perhaps unjustly for cowardice and those punished for normal crimes such as murder or rape committed while in uniform.) Thus, this short book with its score of characters chronicles almost 1% of the number of total executions carried out during four and a half years in an army of 8,317,000 men.

The French executed more of their own men than any other nation in the Great War (the British were second with 300, while the Germans were comparatively sparing in and shot only 18), and it is not hard to see that many of these cases must have been unjust. Tardi, however, wants to make sure we don't miss the point, so in the first vignette we see a soldier from Corsica who doesn't speak any French being executed because he hadn't obeyed an order he didn't understand. I suppose something like that could have happened, though I kind of wonder how a soldier who didn't speak the language of his offices even got that far, but by picking such an extreme example the story in a sense takes an easy way out.

Third Republic France had its problems, but it was arguably the most democratic and the most egalitarian nation involved in the Great War. It was also fighting against invaders on its own soil, with parts of France occupied throughout the war. To my mind, the hard question here, the question which would produce real drama instead of easy pathos in a story, is: What is it that drove this democratic society to believe that its citizens army could only defend its own homeland under the threat of the firing squad? What is the desperation which leads people to execute their own for cowardice? Don't tell the easy story about how stupid and heartless officers execute a completely innocent man, tell the hard story about how officers who would normally be horrified by this kind of cold violence feel that they need to go through with a execution for cowardice because the very existence of their country is at the breaking point. The easy story makes you think "of course, any reasonable person is with the victims", the hard story makes you think, "perhaps I would have been with the ones who did this." ...more

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Nov 06, 2019 Urian rated it it was ok

Didn't finish it. What I did manage to read was pretty good, but it was just too dark for my taste.

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Nov 09, 2019 Sylvester rated it it was amazing

Shelves: life-and-death, graphic-novel, non-fiction, art, favorites, history, war, exceptional-illustration, 2019

Incredible. If this doesn't give us a taste of the reality of war, I don't know what will.

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May 09, 2016 Roman Stadtler rated it liked it

Shelves: graphic-novels, band-dessinee-franco-belgian-comics

Well, I'm certainly in the minority of readers who won't be giving this book top marks, and I'm not doing so because I don't think it's good, either as an eye-opener or reminder of the horrors of war. It's very well done, presented well, beautifully rendered . . except for the actual men of the mud and trenches. Perhaps they were drawn in an everyman style to expand our relation to them, but, to me, they looked like caricatures, too softly detailed in their faces, which contrasted against their ...more

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Oct 03, 2014 Elliott rated it it was amazing

Shelves: the-lost-generation

Someday, and hopefully soon, the world will look at the short Twentieth Century (1914-1991, for reference) as something like a man made Black Death, artificial in that we'd substituted steel, and iron for germs; long trajectories for transmission. Popular media has largely embraced the Second World War for its narrative potential, and so we're left with a noble "happy" end to usher in the Pax Americana as if Hitler had sprung impishly from a vacuum in human history. It ought to be unsurprising ...more

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Jan 05, 2015 Bob rated it it was amazing

Shelves: graphic, war

WW-I in the trenches, through a soldier's eyes. Brutal. Somewhat like War Stories by Garth Ennis.

Reminds me of my great uncle, who was in the infantry in WW-I. I was maybe 8 years old or so, and asked him what it was like to be there. He did not answer me for a long time, but just looked at me as if he was thinking what to say. Finally, he told me, "If you knew how many battlefield deaths were from being shot in the back, it would shock you." Then he walked off, leaving me to figure this out ...more

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Nov 20, 2015 Bjorn rated it really liked it

Shelves: france

OK, I'm not the squeamiest person, but I honestly had trouble sleeping after finishing this one.

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Apr 13, 2020 Sugarpunksattack Mick rated it it was amazing

Jacques Tardis two comics on World War IGoddamn This War and It Was the War of the Trenchesare absolutely amazing in terms of the stories they tell, the art style, and their critically anti-war politics. ...more

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Oct 22, 2018 Mateen Mahboubi rated it it was amazing

It would be hard to find a better representation of the brutality of life in the trenches on paper. Tardi holds no punches and removes any glorification from The Great War. A must read for anyone. A testament to the power of graphic novels.

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Mar 02, 2019 Peter A. van Tilburg rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: military-history

This book illustrates very clear the madness and senselessness of the Great War. It is sad and dark just like that war was.

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Oct 21, 2015 Karyl rated it it was amazing

Shelves: library-reads, non-fiction, history, graphic-novels, 2015, wwi, war

I seem to be on quite the World War I kick. But it's a hundred years later, and it seems to be rather a forgotten war. What were we fighting for or against in that war? It was less clear-cut than WWII, in which we fought the absolute evil of the Nazi regime to liberate the Jews who had been mercilessly and brutally murdered simply for their religion and ethnicity. But we can't really point to a reason for the First World War, other than each nation felt they were in the right, though this ...more

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Dec 05, 2016 Jeff rated it really liked it

Recommended to Jeff by: almost everybody whose reviews i follow

Shelves: lieberry_books, comics

I want to rate this 4 stars ... because i'm miserly that way. But also because i wasn't as moved as i was by March. Though each book covers a topic that boils my blud, i reacted more strongly to March's "happy ending"the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965whereas IWTWOTT's ending is just as dismal as its beginning and despair-inducing.

While reading IWTWOTT, i only wanted to reach the cease fire (and that fucker gave it to me alright!) and hoped only for a single measly little non-ironic ...more

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Feb 11, 2012 Blodeuedd Finland rated it liked it

Shelves: graphic-novel

It was a bit jumpy so for that it would get a 2, but still he used poems and the way the novel was done, well it gets a 3 for that. Impressed I was not, but it was still a very good WWI graphic novel. It showed the horror in its truth.

I liked the way it portrayed war. The horrible thing is not men killing the enemy. It's war after all. Yes it is unimaginable why it is being done, but that is the way it always have been. The horrible thing here is killing your own.

There was the man who did not ...more

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About Jacques Tardi

Jacques Tardi

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Jacques Tardi is a French comics artist, born 30 August 1946 in Valence, Drôme. He is often credited solely as Tardi.

After graduating from the École nationale des Beaux-Arts de Lyon and the École nationale supérieure des arts décoratifs in Paris, he started writing comics in 1969, at the age of 23, in the comics magazine Pilote, initially illustrating short stories written by Jean Giraud and Serge Jacques Tardi is a French comics artist, born 30 August 1946 in Valence, Drôme. He is often credited solely as Tardi.

After graduating from the École nationale des Beaux-Arts de Lyon and the École nationale supérieure des arts décoratifs in Paris, he started writing comics in 1969, at the age of 23, in the comics magazine Pilote, initially illustrating short stories written by Jean Giraud and Serge de Beketch, before creating the political fiction story Rumeur sur le Rouergue from a scenario by Pierre Christin in 1972.

A highly versatile artist, Tardi successfully adapted novels by controversial writer Louis-Ferdinand Céline or crime novelist Léo Malet. In Malet's case, Tardi adapted his detective hero Nestor Burma into a series of critically acclaimed graphic novels, though he also wrote and drew original stories of his own.

Tardi also created one of French comics' most famous heroines, Adèle Blanc-Sec. This series recreates the Paris of early 20th century where the moody heroine encounters supernatural events, state plots, occult societies and experiments in cryogenics.

Another graphic novel was Ici Même which was written by Jean-Claude Forest, best known as the creator of Barbarella. A satire, it describes the adventures of Arthur Même who lives on the walls of his family's former property.

Tardi has produced many antiwar graphic novels and comics, mainly focusing on the collective European trauma of the First World War, and the pitfalls of patriotism spawned several albums (Adieu Brindavoine, C'était la guerre des tranchées, Le trou d'obus, Putain de Guerre...). His grandfather's involvement in the day-to-day horrors of trench warfare, seems to have had a deep influence to his artistic expression. He also completed a four-volume series on the Paris Commune, Le cri du peuple.

Fantagraphics Books translate and publish in English a wide range of Tardi's books, done by editor and translator Kim Thompson.[3] The books released so far are West Coast Blues (Le Petit bleu de la côte ouest), You Are There (Ici Même), and It Was the War of the Trenches (C'était la guerre des tranchées); a single album collecting the first two Adele Blanc-Sec volumes has also been published.

->http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_... ...more