Jacques Tardi - Review

The Arctic Marauder

Fantagraphics continues its programme of issuing the works of Jacques Tardi with this, a translation of a comic from the earliest stages of his career. It’s a slim volume (64 pages), written and drawn in a style that reveals another facet to his diverse abilities. It’s also the least satisfying of his works to appear in English to date.

Blazing Combat / It Was the War of the Trenches

What makes a comic an Important comic? Here are two collections that are thematically linked, and which can both be considered to be landmark comics of their type.

Adèle Blanc-Sec

Welcome to the first in what I hope will be a series looking at film adaptations of comics. Everyone knows, of course, that comics have been hot properties in Hollywood for a while now, as superhero movie after ill-conceived superhero movie stacks up on every self-respecting nerd’s DVD shelf — but there are all kinds of comics, and all kinds of movies being made out of them, and one of my goals is to use film adaptations as an excuse to get around to reading, or revisiting, some of the world’s greatest (or otherwise; Marmaduke got made too) comics.

West Coast Blues

What else could you expect? I mean honestly, when you combine one of the finest living comic book artists with one of the greatest writers of hardboiled crime fiction. Really. Don’t even bother reading the rest of this review. Just buy the book. Is there anything I can do but state the obvious?