| The Author: Jacques Tardi
The following article appears in French on the Éditions Casterman website. English translation by Ric Morris
His first comic books were the weekly Tintin, slipped under his garden gate by a childhood friend. Fascinated, he then discovered the great Belgian magicians dedicated to the genre: Hergé, Edgar P. Jacobs, Paul Cuvelier... After studying at the School of Fine Arts in Lyon, and then at the School of Decorative Arts in Paris, Jacques Tardi made his début in 1969 in the weekly comic magazine Pilote. In 1972, his first long story appeared - Rumeurs sur le Rouergue, written by Christin, published by Futuropolis in 1976. Aside from various unfinished works, he published Adieu Brindavoine with Dargaud in 1974 (republished by Casterman in 1979, followed by La fleur au fusil), then Le démon des glaces. In 1974, Le véritable histoire du soldat inconnuwas published by Futuropolis, in the "30x40" Collection. In 1976, Jacques Tardi won his first Casterman publication and begins the series of the Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec. Their success is immediate: Adèle et la bête, Le démon de la tour Eiffel, Le savant fou, Momies en folie, Le secret de la salamandre, Le noyé à deux têtes, Tous des monstres! At the same time, Jacques Tardi continued to develop and enrich his pace with other stories, including: Griffu (story by J.P. Manchette, published by Dargaud in 1982, republished by Casterman in 1996); Ici-Même (story by J.C. Forest, prepublished as a serial in the magazine A Suivre in 1978, published by Casterman in 1979), Le trou d'oblus (1984, Imagerie Pellerin), and Tueur de cafards (story by B. Legrand, Casterman 1984). In 1982, Jacques Tardi published a cartoon adaptation of Léo Malet's famous police novel Brouillard au pont de Tolbiac, and in 1988, he continued the tradition with 120, Rue de la Gare and in 1996, Casse-pipe à la nation (all three Casterman). The remarkable career, the originality and richness of his artistic production have made Jacques Tardi one of the most noted graphic novelists in Europe today. His creativity has furthermore been recognized with various distinctions and awards: The Grand Prix Phénix (1974); Tardi was illustrator of many short works: in 1985, the Futuropolis Publishing House released two important volumes: Mines de plomb and Chiures de gomme, which were exhaustive anthologies of all his graphic works (book covers, movie posters, sketches, portfolios, caricatures...) as well as numerous unpublished works. It was in 1988, however, that Jacques Tardi realized his dearest dream by magnificently illustrating - with some 600 black and white drawings - the powerful work of Louis Ferdinand Céline: Voyage au bout de la nuit (Futuropolis/Gallimard). This publication achieved formidable success, and Jacques Tardi went on to illustrate two more works from Céline's series: Casse-pipe (1989) and Mort à crédit (1991). During this same period, Jacques Tardi developed the program of the exhibition "The Petit Palais: When Paris Danced with Marianne" (Paris-Musées, 1989), the book Une gueule de bois en plomb, based upon characters created by Léo Malet (Casterman, 1990), "Tardi en banlieue," program of his charcoal-drawing exhibition at the Galerie Escale in Paris (Casterman, 1990), and Le sens de la Houppelande, a novel by Daniel Pennac (Futuropolis, 1991). Jeux pour mourir, adapted from the novel by Géo-Charles Véran, was released by Casterman at the end of 1992. In October 1993, C'était la guerre des tranchées was published, a work many years in development, based on documents and archives from that era which allowed him to capture, in graphic novel form, some of the absurdity and horror of the First World War, the war of his grandfather. L'Historial de la Grande Guerre, in Péronne Castle, inaugurated this work on May 15, 1993, with an exhibition of original pages from the soon-to-be-published work. |
Born in 1946, Jacques Tardi spent the first years of his life in postwar Germany, where his grandfather was a career soldier. Later, the atrocities of World War I (1914-1918), in which his Corsican grandfather fought, haunted young Jacques' dreams, and much later would become a driving theme in his creative work.