Reading Through 2021 98: I, Rene Tardi, Prisoner of War in Stalag IIB, by Jaques Tardi

I, Rene Tardi, Prisoner of War in Stalag IIB, by Jaques Tardi

2012, English edition 2018

It's a great story, and it has great art. Is it a great comic?

The oversized hardcover is perfectly printed

Previously I read the first volume of Tardi's Streets of Paris, Streets of Murder, and I loved it.  It really clicked for me.

I promptly ordered this series to see more personal work from Tardi and it's great. The cover notes promise "an artistic triumph," and it's hyperbole, but maybe accurate. The book is 180 pages of impeccably drawn and researched images of WWII era France and the camps of Germany.

The vast majority of the book is black and white, except a select few pages with accents

For Tardi, the book couldn't be more personal. This is his deceased father Rene Tardi's story of WWII. Tardi had asked his father to record as many memories of the war as he could, and his father obliged with detailed accounts supported by illustrations to make things clearer.

Father Rene's image on the left, and Tardi's own image based on it

Tardi then went and did his own research to create a more fleshed out image of the period, and proceeded to make three books out of it. This first volume covers the start of the war until the fall of the Reich in 1945.

Tardi inserts himself in the narrative as a boy, critiquing or questioning his father's story

The book maintains a consistent three-tiered, three-panel page throughout, and is narrated by the father as it happens. While the father goes about his life as a soldier or later, a prisoner, Tardi himself has dialogues with him about exactly what is happening.

Actually killing a person for the first time leaves the father with something like PTSD

As a story, it's as compelling as any other serious war narrative that takes the time to show the human cost and that there is no easy solution. Rene Tardi was a young man in his early 20s, and five years of his life are wasted fighting and later imprisoned in a neighboring country. France is occupied early on in the war, and the French soldiers are interned deep behind enemy lines where they are often used as slave labor. 

Tardi adds a little humor to his role as the artist of the book

Rene has few illusions about the reality that his life there sucks, but that it's also a lot better off as soldier from a country at peace (through its occupied government) than to be an interned soldier from a warring country like Russia. He is suffering, but realizes he could be suffering a whole lot more.

Tardi cuts no corners with the art. Every picture is drawn with attention to detail

Relative to war stories, it's not overly horrific, or I'm just getting numb to it all in my old age. Rene acknowledges all the other horrors of Nazi Germany, but is lucky to be shielded from the worst of it.

Camp life

This is an amazing story, it's a comic, but comparing it to his noir work, he avoids making this compelling or exciting with comic techniques. It's told in a dry manner. I read Paco Roca's excellent Twists of Fate this year, another book about a personal recollection of WWII. That book attempts to put you in the action, to let you experience what the main character did. In contrast, I, Rene Tardi, Prisoner of War in Stalag IIB seems more comparable to a Ken Burns documentary. It is full of scenes of the war, but doesn't so much show them as they happened as it does show that they did happen. 

The use of photos is one of the rare instances of comic panel-like images

I can't know why, but I imagine Tardi simply didn't want to "write" what happened to his father. He wanted his father's words to speak for themselves. Rene left ample personal notes on his time, and it seems to be an appropriate choice.

Nationality divides even prisoners in this world

A true story of war is not a happy one, but even acknowledging that, I was disappointed at first with this book. So much of the energy that I loved in Streets of Murder wasn't in here. As I sat down with it, I enjoyed it for what it was, and furthermore, understood that this approach to the book was the appropriate one. 

Tardi has managed to pay tribute to his father, and also give a vivid and personal account of WWII. We're all the richer for him sharing it.

I Really Should Read This 19: Streets of Paris, Streets of Murder 1, by Manchette and Tardi

Streets of Paris, Streets of Murder 1, by Manchette and Tardi

1978, 2005, 1980, collected edition published in 2020

Now I have a new artist to buy everything from: Tardi.

I ordered this two-book slipcase Tardi collection in November, and had given up hope on it arriving. It was released in November, so I should have had it shortly after it came out, but it arrived last week, some five months later. 

Why did I buy it, other than the fact that I've been buying too much since I stopped going out due to a pandemic? The past year I've been filling in holes in my reading, and I figured I should know some Tardi. I've even read some in my life. I saw his work in RAW 25 years ago, and though it looked good, it didn't make a huge impression on me back then. I just felt like reading it though. The noir vibe was something I was in the mood for. And this book blew me away.

No, not like that

It collects three works authored by a French novelist, Jean-Patrick Manchette, and drawn by Tardi: Griffu, a detective story from 1978; West Coast Blues, a detective story without a detective from 2005; and Fatale, an unfinished story from 1980.

Just opening to the first pages, I was in love with how he rendered the city.

That car with one side over the curb in the second panel... it's stuff like that that gets me

His art manages a trick of that Disney animation can do so well: it's real without being realistic at all. There is a weight and mass to everything, but it is not rendered in an illusionary way. It's just ink on a page. I went through Griffu loving the art, and was surprised to see West Coast Blues appear in stark black and white, no grays. At first, I was thinking that the later work might be weaker in its illustration, looser, that the 25 years between the two stories had worn him down a little, but no, it's just different. Probably he spent a little less time with a ruler in the second story, but it's a masterfully drawn work.

Showing off by drawing three completely different car models

Griffu was a good story. Not incredible. I'm not a noir super fan, but I'm aware of the genre, and this is the sort of story like the Big Sleep or the Long Goodbye, where the detective bounces around the city getting little sleep, barely figuring out what is happening, and getting a lot of bruises.

Not such a nice lead character

It's written by an older established writer in 1980, so there are a lot of little racist nods in the story (for example, Griffu continues to call the hotel clerk Mohammed after the clerk corrects him that his name is Rasak). As a reader in 2021, I try to figure out if the writer is writing a character that is racist, if the writer is being racist himself, or if France in that period was, and I can't figure that out, and it's probably a bit of each. It's too much for me to dissect. It wasn't overwhelming anyway, just noticeably not something we'd likely see today. It did make me think about whether the hero of a story needs to be a "good guy." Griffu is not quite a good guy. I'd have a hard time even pinning down his motivation by the end of the story.

That first thought balloon made me laugh out loud

It's a winding story with a dark ending, and it was good, but I liked the art more than the story. It was a good story with great art.

That's a big phone. The panel layouts in this are gold. Bold, clear images bathed in shadow

The second story though, wow, it is flawless. I was riveted from start to finish, and it was about something. A frustrated man is out driving one night and rescues another man from a car accident. That man had been in an assassination attempt and the killers are sent to clean up the rescuer afterward. That's it, a story of a Good Samaritan being punished. The story spins away from there, without a clean, straight-forward plot. It goes unexpected places and has a strange resolution which works as a pulp story but works as something more introspective as well.

After, I thought about my own boring life. It was a great 80-page story. It's amazing what a writer can do with a limited number of pages. 

The rest of the book is a 21-page story called Fatale, that was originally going to be 60 pages. It sounds like an unsatisfying read, but those 21 pages are all set up. While there is no resolution, it ends up reading more like a character sketch than the first chapter of a book. And it has one of the more striking images I've seen in a comic in a while.

A happy person wouldn't do this

With the Ed Brubaker Criminal books, the Parker series, Stray Bullets and this, I think I am a noir fan. Either that or I'm just lucky to stick to the finer stories.

I have the second book of this waiting to go. I'm going to give it a few weeks so that it can all sink in better, but I'm excited to read it. And I'll have to start in on his World War I books after that. This is an expensive hobby.