Jacques Tardi

In May 1968, France exploded. Leftist student groups occupied the streets of Paris, riot police clashed with protesters, and a general strike spread across France like wildfire, threatening to grind government and industry to a halt. And at the heart of it all - Elise. Ten years earlier, Elise came to Paris to try her luck in show business. While...

Paris, 1914. In one auspicious night, Lucien Brindavoine's humdrum life is thrown into wild disarray. Out of the blue, a strange old man visits Brindavoine's flat and implores him to go to Istanbul to seek his destiny. No sooner are these fateful words spoken than a shot is fired through the window and the man is murdered by a mysterious...

The second of two volumes presenting all four hardboiled graphic crime novels by Jean-Patrick Manchette and Tardi. Like a Sniper Lining Up His Shot — Martin Terrier, killer-for-hire, needs just one more big job so that he can turn in his guns for good and return home to marry his childhood sweetheart. But soon, he's on the run — not...

Fantagraphics presents two experimental, early works by the French cartooning legend Tardi. These comics, created in the mid-'70s, provide a fascinating preview of the masterworks of his prolific career. While they are not narratively linked, an eerie sense of foreboding suffuses stories in this collection: they both depict sex and brutal violence and condemn the horrors of war. The True...

Captured by the Germans and sent to a POW camp where he spends the rest of the war, René Tardi lives a harrowing day-to-day existence. He recalls in vivid detail roll calls in sub-zero temperatures, senseless executions— and especially the gnawing hunger. And yet, in the face of daily brutality, he perseveres, thinking of his wife Henriette, awaiting his return...

Michel Hartog, a rich industrialist, hires a troubled young woman, Julie, straight out of the psychiatric asylum to which she has been consigned for several years, to work as a nanny for his bratty nephew Peter. But Hartog's seemingly altruistic impulse hides a darker motive. He plans to stage a fake kidnapping of his nephew and use Julie as a...