Kim Thompson joined the Inkstuds for a chat about the work of Jacques Tardi. Fantagraphics has started on an ambitious reprint project, translating a selection of Tardi’s fine work for North American audiences. I have been a big fan of Tardi for a long time, after seeing his work in Raw, Drawn and Quarterly and a whole bunch of other anthologies. I highly recommend checking out West Coast Blues. It really stands out among the recent amount of Noir work that has been seeing print lately. It is strong compelling work that avoids a reliance of the standard tropes of detective pulp.
I’m listening to this for breakfast… TALKRADIO – YAY!. With Inkstuds Comic-action of course.
I must say I have kind of neglected Tardi so far, maybe I’ve grown to take him for granted, having other guys around to choose from. Like Boucq or Edmund Baudoin. I guess I wanna change that… Reading him, I feel, generally he has action, beauty and weirdness put into his mix of making Comics. Aaaand a sense of putting tense and fragile moments into the people in them.
How could you live in Europe and not be all over that Tardi stuff. it is some of my fav Euro comicking.
Man, I don’t know… just really, I think I have been sidetracked by all the other Euro comic thingys around. I have to see how things are on the Tardi front, those two collections looks fantastic. Here, almost all of his stuff is translated quite well into german.
I like that Fanta is keeping it up with the album format on those, by the way – if I saw that right. The Ignatz series outfit would have fitted him nicely too, but he’s not around for that sadly.
Tardi is still alive. He is working on some masterpiece book.
Yeah, …this shows how off I am, sorry for calling you dead Mr. Tardi.