It was the War of the Trenches (Batmanatee Begins-Novus) [NVS-D]

And here you go, Jacques Tardi's "It was the War of the Trenches".

This book was a huge surprise to me, since my interest in war books is around zero, and I have only ever liked 3 war movies. I only got this because I was getting The Arctic Marauder anyway, and figured I might as well grab this, and scan it if it was worth it.
And damn it was worth it!

Even during editing, this book made me cry. It pulls no punches, and shows the violence and senselessness of war, in start black and white that almost grates the soul to read. I added this book to my "recommended euro books" list even before I was halfway done editing it.
If you want a book about war that glorifies war, and show heroic acts, and are semi-propaganga, this is NOT a book for you. If you want a book that shows why mankind should NOT wage war, this is the essential comic for it.


This book won an Eisner in 2011 for "Best Reality-Based Work and Best U.S. Edition of International Material".

It also got high praise from one of the giants in war comics, Art Spiegelman:
"‘The war to end all wars’ has become a magisterial comic book to end all comic books. I seldom give blurbs, but this book is an essential classic. Among all of Jacques Tardiss towering achievements as a comics artist, nothing looms larger than this devastating crater of a work. It’s a compulsively readable wail of Existential despair, a kaleidoscope of war’s dehumanizing brutality and of Everyman’s suffering, as well as a deadpan masterpiece of the darkest black humor. The richly composed and obsessively researched drawings - perfectly poised between cartoon and illustration - march to the relentless beats of Tardi’s three horizontal panels per page to dig a hole deep inside your brain. This is one Hell of a book."



World War I, that awful, gaping wound in the history of Europe, has long been an obsession of Jacques Tardi’s. (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.

Tardi is not interested in the national politics, the strategies, or the battles. 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. Yet he also delves deeply into the underlying causes of the war, the madness, the cynical political exploitation of patriotism. 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.

Trenches features some of Tardi’s most stunning artwork. Rendered in an inhabitually lush illustrative style, inspired both by abundant photographic documentation and classic American war comics, augmented by a sophisticated, gorgeous use of Craftint tones, trenches is somehow simultaneously atypical and a perfect encapsulation of Tardi’s mature style. It is the indisputable centerpiece of Tardi’s oeuvre.