It Was the War of the Trenches
Jacques Tardi
The First World War may be largely forgotten in the United States, but it still looms large over the French mind, or at least the mind of graphic novelist Jacques Tardi, whose brutal, stark It Was the War of the Trenches explores the plight of those suffering in the madness of the French trenches throughout the war. The nonlinear narrative is effectively composed of several brief stories, several only a few panels long and many occasionally interconnected through layers of association. Tardi mixes narrative voice and style both in the text and in his visual language, with wordy panels often accompanied by a run of silent, evocative panels, and though he jumps around in time, location, and theme, any incoherence seems born of the utter confusion and nihilism the war itself brought to western Europe and to the world. Each of the stories is personal, haunting, and ultimately effective, often told through reminiscences, though many are tragically broken by an omniscient voice offering details of the previous narrator's death. The tales are stark and often intoned in a dry manner, as devoid of emotion as the faces who offer them. These faces, poised between cartoons and more complex portraits, stare blankly ahead, offering a muted despair and haunting air of nonchalance to the reader, as a grayscale palette effectively sets the tone for a bleak, depressing conflict. The author intrudes occasionally with overtly political comments, but even these could plausibly come directly from his soldiers themselves, forced to fight in a war they never even believed in and facing execution for a display of the far-too-sane survival instinct. Both authors and characters are appalled at the circumstances of the war, yet trapped in a mess of illogical and inhumane decisions, the tragedy of war invading every line of every panel.
Tardi's drawings are crisp, but often portray a kind of confusion, a jumble of shell holes and barbed wire strewn across a desolate landscape, often punctured by impressionistic scenes of newly exploded, flying dirt, motion often appearing in brief bursts, perhaps in only one of the three large horizontal panels that dominate the book's pages. Yet the photographic quality of the work, sparse though it is, somehow heightens the emotion of the moment, allowing the story to feel as stagnant as the western front became. Transitions are scarce but never missed, as Tardi glides from one experience to another, the soldiers given names and acting in very specific scenes yet still retaining an everyman quality, representing the millions of tragedies of the war without overwrought moralizing or dehumanizing generalities. These are very human, very sincere stories, all the more tragic when played against a relentlessly gray landscape and with the futile desire to escape what readers know to be almost certain death, often delivered heavily in a single, brutal panel. Tardi knows how to render the bleak scenes of war, utilizing just enough gruesome details to be effective while focusing most of his imagery on the people and on the front; the book is never graphic for its own sake, and instead uses those panels sparingly, accenting the illustration of war as hell rather than composing it alone. It Was the War of the Trenches is a complete package, not quite a collection of short stories but also not a history of the war; instead, it is a brilliantly composed meditation on the horror of the First World War, at once intensely emotional and brutally cold and removed.
Grade: A
Jacques Tardi
The First World War may be largely forgotten in the United States, but it still looms large over the French mind, or at least the mind of graphic novelist Jacques Tardi, whose brutal, stark It Was the War of the Trenches explores the plight of those suffering in the madness of the French trenches throughout the war. The nonlinear narrative is effectively composed of several brief stories, several only a few panels long and many occasionally interconnected through layers of association. Tardi mixes narrative voice and style both in the text and in his visual language, with wordy panels often accompanied by a run of silent, evocative panels, and though he jumps around in time, location, and theme, any incoherence seems born of the utter confusion and nihilism the war itself brought to western Europe and to the world. Each of the stories is personal, haunting, and ultimately effective, often told through reminiscences, though many are tragically broken by an omniscient voice offering details of the previous narrator's death. The tales are stark and often intoned in a dry manner, as devoid of emotion as the faces who offer them. These faces, poised between cartoons and more complex portraits, stare blankly ahead, offering a muted despair and haunting air of nonchalance to the reader, as a grayscale palette effectively sets the tone for a bleak, depressing conflict. The author intrudes occasionally with overtly political comments, but even these could plausibly come directly from his soldiers themselves, forced to fight in a war they never even believed in and facing execution for a display of the far-too-sane survival instinct. Both authors and characters are appalled at the circumstances of the war, yet trapped in a mess of illogical and inhumane decisions, the tragedy of war invading every line of every panel.
Tardi's drawings are crisp, but often portray a kind of confusion, a jumble of shell holes and barbed wire strewn across a desolate landscape, often punctured by impressionistic scenes of newly exploded, flying dirt, motion often appearing in brief bursts, perhaps in only one of the three large horizontal panels that dominate the book's pages. Yet the photographic quality of the work, sparse though it is, somehow heightens the emotion of the moment, allowing the story to feel as stagnant as the western front became. Transitions are scarce but never missed, as Tardi glides from one experience to another, the soldiers given names and acting in very specific scenes yet still retaining an everyman quality, representing the millions of tragedies of the war without overwrought moralizing or dehumanizing generalities. These are very human, very sincere stories, all the more tragic when played against a relentlessly gray landscape and with the futile desire to escape what readers know to be almost certain death, often delivered heavily in a single, brutal panel. Tardi knows how to render the bleak scenes of war, utilizing just enough gruesome details to be effective while focusing most of his imagery on the people and on the front; the book is never graphic for its own sake, and instead uses those panels sparingly, accenting the illustration of war as hell rather than composing it alone. It Was the War of the Trenches is a complete package, not quite a collection of short stories but also not a history of the war; instead, it is a brilliantly composed meditation on the horror of the First World War, at once intensely emotional and brutally cold and removed.
Grade: A
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