A highly versatile artist, Tardi has managed to successfully adapt controversial novels by French writer Louis-Ferdinand Céline (infamous for his anti-semitic views) or Anarchist crime novelist Léo Malet as well as create French comic-strips' most famous heroine in the shape of Adèle Blanc-Sec. This series recreates with great style the Paris of the early 20th century where the moody heroine manages to get mixed in with supernatural events, state plots, cults and cryogenics.
His obsession with the First World War and the pitfalls of patriotism have spawned many albums (Adieu Brindavoine, C'était la Guerre des Tranchées,Le Trou d'Obus...) and was brought on by his inability to believe that his grandfather could have been involved in the day-to-day horrors of trench warfare.
His style can at times seem to be similar to Hergé's ligne claire style (clear line), paired with meticulous research and an asexual hero (Adèle Blanc-Sec is quite a misandrist at times) but Tardi's work endlessly satirises the concept of the flawless hero by using a series of inept, naive or anti-heroic as main characters and his readership seems to mainly be a literary, French-speaking adult public.
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wikipedia.org dumped 2003-03-17 with terodump