Last but not least, the essay by historian Jean-Pierre Verney that concludes the book is excellent as well. Much of the iconography is familiar, from the gas masks to bodies tangled up in barbed wire, but no less arresting or harrowing for that. We begin with bright greens, reds and blues, and then move via faded yellows, browns and grays to black, with frequent splashed of blood red. His squares are big, and color schemes varied. Tardi uses a realistic and detailed touch. I have a vague recollection of reading somewhere that parts of the narration are based on Tardi’s grandfather’s memoirs, but I might have imagined that, because writing this now, I have been unable to confirm that.Ī word on the artwork. He makes no bones of the fact that the war is senseless butchery.
The voice brings the incomprehensible horrors of war in front of the reader in full force. Tired, resigned, angry, even raging at times. When he gets vacation, he doesn’t visit his mother.īut that voice! It’s a living thing. Before the war he worked in a factory in Paris. The events are told by the aforementioned unknown soldier, and besides his voice we don’t learn much of him. The neat order of narrative cause and effect is absent. The book moves forward in chronological manner, one chapter covering one year of war. Does that sound less than appealing? Tardi pulls it off and then some. Things the reader won’t find in Goddamn This War! include plot and dialogue. This is a harrowing masterpiece of one unnamed soldier’s experiences in the Great War that so wholly failed to be the war to end all wars.
But call it what you will, it’s hard to deny its power. It’s not a comic book, and for a graphic novel it’s not very novelistic. Jacques Tardi’s World War I opus, Goddamn This War!, is a hard beast to categorize, at least when using English terminology.
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