Fantagraphics Books is bringing legendary French cartoonist Jacques Tardi, better known as Tardi, to the US in an ongoing series of hardcover books. Tardi has won every French cartooning award in existence, plus a flock from around the rest of Europe. He has created over 30 graphic novels in a wide variety of genres, and is still working. His most recent productions include 2008’s World War I tale Putain de guerre, 2006’s satirical thriller Le Secret de l’étrangleur. He has also done several graphic adaptations of popular novels.
Fantagraphics will start Tardi’s run in English with West Coast Blues (Le petit bleu de la Côte Ouest, a hard-boiled crime thriller Tardi adapted from the novel by Jean-Patrick Manchette), and You Are Here (Ici même, a satirical, surreal story written for Tardi by Barbarella creator Jean-Claude Forest). Both will be released simultaneously in August, in what series editor Kim Thompson calls a “double-pronged shock-and-awe assault on the American readership, to immediately show off Tardi’s versatility.”
Thompson, who will also be translating the series into English, said “Tardi has always been one of my top favorite European cartoonists. I’ve wanted to do this for many years—pretty much as long as we’ve been publishing—and I think the time is ripe. In today’s graphic-novel world, the
audience is finally ready for Tardi.”
Following in Spring 2010, Fantagraphics will bring out the first complete English-language version of the World War I-themed It Was the War of the Trenches. And later in the list will come his best known creation, “the saturnine early-20th Century heroine Adèle Blanc-Sec.” Adèle, a moody heroine, “encounters supernatural events, state plots, occult societies, and experiments in cryogenics,” according to Tardi’s Wikipedia entry.