The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec, Volume 1. Jacques Tardi. Cynthia Rose (introduction). Seattle: Fantagraphics. 2026. 199pp. $29.99.
Review by Paul Buhle
It would be difficult to grasp the full influence of the artist who goes under the cognomen of his last name, thus “Tardi,” within France and beyond. Not because he lacks readers world-wide or influence on graphic novels at large. Rather, his work embraces French society and culture of two centuries’ running, providing a cultural view as penetrating as Walter Benjamin’s famed but uncompleted work on the Arcades.
Viewing Tardi’s work from outside of France and French culture, we wonder if we can possibly grasp his impact on the national scene. And then again, he will not let himself be confined: given every imaginable comics award, including several Eisners, he actually turned down the (French) Legion of Honor, insisting he would not be “held hostage” by nationality.
His realism, delivered in highly personal tones—above all the stories of his father and grandfather amidst the grimness of two world wars, in five volumes—has proven itself both gritty and funny, with brilliant art and a driving narrative. This, I think, must be his most identifiable style. Possibly, it is merely the artist’s style that the socialist critic likes best.
Tardi first successfully reached a genuine mass audience in a very different form and space. He began in the pulps. The periodicals that published him back in the 1970s could be called French comic books or even “Underground Comix,” if that term were sweeping enough. An obsessive teenage reader of comics and of fiction, he came up with a way of entering on his own terms.
Born in 1946, Tardi was thirty when Adèle Blanc-Sec (her last name happens to be the term for a dry French wine, i.e., lacking sugar) first appeared. As Cynthia Rose suggests in the introduction, the periodicals of the day brought the new kind of comic—more realistically sexualized and more directly political than the underground comix of the US—into the center of young people’s culture. Definitely influenced by American Underground Comix, the French counterpart took on new life just as the US version faded. Adèle first appeared in a daily paper, in black and white, then color on Sundays, with a distinctive green dress set off from her red hair. So, too, her era, the real subject of the strip.
Adèle, the forerunner to cool women characters in comics.
There had always been both housemaid types and “sex bombs” in French comics, without much in between. Adèle has a mind and character entirely of her own, and accounting for other differences, could have appeared in Ms Magazine (where Wonder Woman took on a new life) or even perhaps the sexist-but-sensational National Lampoon. Not apparently sex-driven at all, she is She independent-minded, sarcastic and contemptuous of male prerogatives.
Adèle, Tardi’s answer to the new woman of Paris.
She lives out her adventures in Paris of the Belle Epoch, the early 20th century.
This Paris has been and remains a source of world wide fascination. In Adèle, Tardi recaptured not only the moment in chronology and place, but Paris as it has been seen in contemporary periodicals and revisited in film. The styles of the time, from architecture to clothes, have repeatedly been interpreted artistically alongside the terrors and anxieties that anticipated the First World War.
Tardi and his female lead eventually hit the mark in one distinctive, presumably unexpected way. The Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec reached the French movie screens in 2010, as a stylish adventure that did not take itself too seriously. Heroine-actress Louise Bourgeoin made her name here with audiences that enjoyed the humor of the improbable. Perhaps we could regard it as the successful version of Joseph Losey’s Modesty Blaize, (1966) somewhat of a satire on the first James Bond series.
An earlier step in Tardi’s career had found him in the steam-punk world with strong female characters. Here, in The Adventures, she is an erstwhile popular novelist who takes up the life of an investigative journalist, stumbling into unimagined and indeed incredible adventures. Along the way, she tests the depths of official corruption and incompetence, anticipating the real-life bungling France into the catastrophe of world war.
French critics noted that Tardi hardly misses a note of the Belle Epoque, from clothes to manners. Indeed, the fantastic stories, with abounding monsters from Pterodactyls to talking gorillas and walking mummies, seem to have been created to keep the plot moving, as the funny paper artists of yore invented the improbable out of necessity.
“And that is how a cat, a simple passing cat, can alter the story line of a comic book. Just because we are dealing with a neurotic killer….” (p.182). The artist and his audience are always on the set, the third or fourth screen of post-modern if not post-narrative art that is the modern comic style.
This is not true of all artists, by any means, nor even of Tardi at his more didactic moments. It is difficult but not quite impossible to find the message beneath the style. Cynthia Rose articulates what can only be found between the lines or buried in the characterizations. The wealthy and powerful share with crooked politicians what they deprive the rest of the population from enjoying.
Paris of Belle Epoque, with so much promise in its Modernism—before the catastrophic war punctured the balloon—saw the emergence of electricity all around, apartment building and restaurant city lights to automobile headlights to the glittering Eiffel Tower. Optimists and other wild dreamers imagined that all existence was being modernized in the best and most vivid ways. Not everyone thought so. Desperate anarchists plotted revenge against the monstrously rich and irresponsible bourgeoisie. In failing, they nevertheless threw a scare and raised hopes that the newest forms of capitalism could not possibly last long.
One more factor weighs upon this review: nearly half of French citizenry continues to read printed comic art in one form or another, making Tardi the rare artist of any kind, but especially the radical comic artist, an extraordinary public figure. Or at least his art. He speaks to them, for them and about them as no other comic artist in the world. At least, that is my view.
Paul Buhle is an American historian, who is (retired) Senior Lecturer at Brown University, author or editor of 35 volumes, including histories of radicalism in the United States and the Caribbean, studies of popular culture, and a series of nonfiction comic art volumes. He is the authorized biographer of C. L. R. James.
