![]() ![]() 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. Yet he also delves deeply into the underlying causes of the war, the madness, the cynical political exploitation of patriotism. ![]() ![]() 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. Tardi is not interested in the national politics, the strategies, or the battles. (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. World War I, that awful, gaping wound in the history of Europe, has long been an obsession of Jacques Tardi's. Tardi's World War I masterpiece finally in English! ![]()
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