The Complete I, Rene Tardi, P.O.W. (Fantagraphics, 2024, $99.99)
Guest Review by Paul Buhle
To say that Jacques Tardi is a major figure in comic art and in the development of contemporary comic art, its meaning and its expression, is insufficient. To many thoughtful readers, Tardi has not only the brilliance of the artist but also the courage and resolve of the resister within a world where “resistance” is often described as futile and its activists are derided as a public embarrasment when not a menace.
There is something about Tardi’s work that is, for many readers including this one, deeply personal. CLR James, the great Pan African historian but also world-historic writer on the game of cricket, remarked that a good writer can say “it happened” but only a great writer (or artist) can say, “I see it, myself.” And make that claim credible. Again and again, Tardi shows us convincingly what he has seen and by doing so, why it is important. That the son appears always young while talking to the father in various stages of 1930s-40s life is a convention to make this personal story possible.
If another prefatory remark to a review of this trilogy does not overburden the reader, I would add that Tardi is the master of oral history, a “field” so recent that it has never reached academic respectability and so rooted in human history that it surely goes back to the earliest tribal communal expressions. The trilogy is an extended oral history, easily one of the first nonfiction efforts in comic form and almost certainly the longest.
The first volume.
He has been at this work a long time. Back in the 1990s, Tardi produced a two volume comic about the massive truma suffered during the First World War. It Was A War of the Trenches, noted for its realism, was followed by Goddamn This War!, praised for its accuracy as well as its sardonic, “black” humor.
In this stunning new three volume set, with its art intermittently tinted, Tardi tells the story of his father but by extension, the story of many millions of participants in war, non-participant victims and those destined or trapped to see the horrors up close.
In the first volume of the trilogy, Tardi’s wife and collaborator Dominique Grange offers five large prefatory pages of photos and drawings. Tardi himself chimes in with three more, mostly an acknowledgment of assistance from various quarters. They are paying homage to a generation fast slipping away. They are also telling younger people about their own collective past, their collective responsibility to French history, sometimes heroic, sometime monstrous (think of colonialism), but real and continuing.
These books are, crucially, also a testament to oral history of a certain kind, in this case assissted but only assisted by diaries that Tardi’s father had kept. A handful of other artists working on subjects ranging from the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s to the Vietnam War and the Israeli Occuption of Gaza have run up against the familiar problems. “Truth,” if the word is useful at all, is the truth of the story, the vividness and detail of memory rather than its factual accuracy. The son asking his father about a past that would be more painful than pleasant to detail, adds himself to the story.
It is oral history, after all, that allows the depth of detail but also a running dialogue about the details and meaning of memory. At every stage, generational conflict is on display.
A son who becomes a father resents the tedium of small town life and the dull certainties of a civil service career. A grandson, obviously devoting years to collecting a story, nevertheless needles his father, especially but not only about recruitment into the military and repeated re-enlistment. How could one choose an authoritarian organization full of class privilege, romanticizing violence and practicing violence on colonial victims from Africa to Asia? These are good questions answered with the stoicism of the working class or lower classes anywhere to military enlistment: a feeling of few alternatives for young people, and the often-later-regretted impulse to get away from home and “see the world.”
But there is more here, of course. This is also the story of Grange, the scriptwriter proper, Tardi’s partner in life and the daughter of another veteran of the same war. Her father died too early for Grange to get a detailed reminiscence, but this trilogy is very much a partnership. A recent outing by the pair, Elise and the New Partisans, in another fine Fantagraphics production, tells the story of the courageous radicals from the new left era, seen through the eyes of a Maoist-feminist militant.
The “Partisan” label has remained since the 1940s a crucial sign-of-sorts in French culture and politics. For outsiders, the “Resistance” is the official narrative: Marshall DeGaulle and the Free French Army march on Paris and heroically end the German occupation. As the concluding volume of I, father Tardi notes with special bitterness, De Gaulle had been off protecting the French empire in Africa from anti-colonial rebels while the dangerous and heroic antifascist struggle took place within France itself.
That the influence of Communists weighed heavily among the Partisans, a key source of post-war Left political popularity, offered another reason for a contrary and “official” narrative shared most of all by Americans. Not so in much of Europe: even the horrors of Stalinism in the War and after could not abolish the heroism of Partisans across large parts of the continent. The artist titled his latest volume The New Partisans for a reason: the memory has not gone away, even as the last of the antifascist underground pass, receiving good obituaries as far from France as the New York Times. The memory of the Partisans is not only a celebration of life and commemoration of bravery. It is also a reminder of the cowardice of the collaborators.
Rene himself remains, however, distant from all poltiical parties, saving much of his bitterness for the phony heroism of DeGaulle. Likewise for the bourgeois French citizens who made fortunes on the black market, likewise for the French police who rounded up Jews for deportation to the Death Camps, joining the Resistance just ten days before the liberation of Paris. A hard-bitten veteran of real war, he saves the rest of his bitterness, the largest part, for the French Army leadership and the politicians who might have crushed the Germans in their first violation of the Versailles Treaty of 1919, but waited and waited. By the time they mobilized, the Wehrmacht was overwhelming, while French officaldom stupidly counted upon their revised Maginot Line to halt the German march. And then, among the officer corps, fled the Germans alongside the refugees, throwing down their guns along the way.
All this reflects a bitterness that revives a bitterness that he feels by generational sensibility to the soldiers and civilians of the First World War, the grandparents of Tardi and also of Grange. They survived but many of their own relatives did not. The false expectations of glory and easy victory, the painful sense that the Germans had been pushed back only because the Americans entered the war, and above all the horrors of the trenches left behind a collective sense of exhaustion. Tardi’s parents grow up under this shadow, a postmaster and postmistress who are satisfied, more than satisfied, to be civil servants with a quiet life in small (and to him, boring) French village.
Thus Tardi’s father, restless in adolescence and feeling a sense of nationalism at the first stirrings of German revanche expressions, makes his great error (or so Tardi the son believes) enlisting in the army. Tardi’s youthful disdain in this decision is perhaps the only real moment of disagreement in the comic, reflecting conversations that might have happened or might have taken place mainly in the young man’s mind, finalized on paper.
A kind of generational peace is achieved, perhaps, when Rene recounts the only violence that he actually committed: in his day running a tank, he runs over German soldiers so thoroughly that only traces of body parts remain, a memory that haunts him for years. Still, even this apparently guilt-ridden retelling is an artistic re-enactment.
And perhaps that disjuncture between reality and retelling is the last important conceptual point of this trilogy. The artist and his scriptwriter cannot really go back in history. And yet their effort to do so, based on an informal but deeply felt and ardently pursued oral history, father to son, is something remarkable, something still little seen in a comic art world where non-fiction remains a fairly small category with no rules.
What does the enormous achievement of Jacques Tardi but also Dominique Grange mean for comics in particular, for comic art and a fairly recent method of the telling of some large and complicated history? These are not likely questions asked by the casual comics reader or even the armchair critic. Or I should say: not asked easily. The trilogy under review will be at the center of scholars and reviewers, also readers of French history in particular, for a long time. And for good reason.
