[In in the return of our Editors Notes series, Kim Thompson interviews himself (in a format he's dubbed "AutoChat") about New York Mon Amour by Jacques Tardi, now available to order from us and at a comics shop near you. – Ed.]
This is going to be a particularly discursive and rambling one, so reader, be forewarned. I don’t want to see any complainin’ in the comments section about how self-indulgent this is; you’re being told that going in. That said…
Okay, so… New York Mon Amour. This is what, your eighth? Ninth Tardi book?
I’ve reached the point where I have to go back to our website and count them off myself to keep track. Eighth. A Fellini-esque 8½ if you count the Fatale giveaway.
You’re cranking them out — eight in two and a half years. Why the hurry?
Because I’m afraid someone will catch on and stop me? No, it’s just that these are some of my very favorite comics, and I think it’s disgraceful that it’s taken this long for them to be released in English — so I’m making up for lost time.
And, to be honest, they’ve been selling unexpectedly well. I went into this Tardi venture with a samurai assume-you’re-dead-when-going-into-battle mindset figuring we could publish a handful before dire sales drove us into the ground, but on the contrary, we’re into second printings of four of our first five — in some cases third — and they’ve gone over great. So why not?
Also, Tardi works in so many different genres that even with two or three books a year, you don’t really repeat the way you would if you published many other authors. I can switch from his crime mode to his serious WWI mode to his Adèle stuff…
This book, or at least most of it, has already been released in English in one form or another. Why pick this one?
Well, with the exception of one short story which is buried in a huge British-published crime anthology, all of it’s been out of print for a while. And I had some problems with the way "Tueur de cafards" had been presented in the NBM title, including the reproduction and the lettering…
Yes, the new edition is noticeably better.
I don’t want to rag on the NBM version because the digital revolution has helped us so much in the intervening years. Our printing is far cleaner because we had first-generation digital files rather than second- or third-generation negatives or Photostats, and being able to use fonts instead of hand lettering, especially with Tardi’s eccentric caption design, is so much easier. So I am being helped by that. But I’d like to think that we added our own skills to the mix in addition to just surfing on those advances.
You even changed the title, from “Roach Killer” to “Cockroach Killer”…
I always hated the Dark Horse/NBM title, “Roach Killer.” As Tony Montana reminded us, “Cockroach” is such a great word, with its hard “k” sounds, and the BAM-bam BAM-bam rhythm of the whole title; I never understood why they opted for what they did. It always, uh, bugged me. Apparently Art Spiegelman didn’t either, because when he wrote the introduction for the NBM book version he automatically used the title “Cockroach Killer” (and that’s how they printed it in the book).
Did you go back to the earlier English translations?
Yes and no, mostly no. For “(Cock)roach Killer,” I remember thinking the original translator just hadn’t quite nailed the gritty conversational urban tone of the work, and I take some pride in my way around unbridled profanity, so I did that from scratch. “Hung’s Murderer” was short enough that I figured it was just as easy for me to do it rather than to fiddle around getting the rights…
What about “Manhattan,” which was printed in RAW?
Well, it’s fucking RAW. Spiegelman and Mouly knew their shit. I went over the RAW translation and I didn’t think it could be improved upon, at all; I just asked Art if I could use it and he said “Sure.” (Just as with the Joost Swarte strips for his book.) I think I changed one word, literally. And even though the original lettering was excellent, I re-lettered it using our Tardi font just for the sake of consistency throughout the book.
One interesting thing: There was one caption in the RAW version that’s not in the new version. It wasn’t in the new French version’s files I was working on and I emailed Casterman wondering if they’d left it off by accident, and no, Tardi had decided upon reflection that it was superfluous and eliminated it. So there you go.
Whose idea was it to combine “Killer” with the three other New York based stories for this book?
Apparently everyone’s. I had figured out I wanted to add “Manhattan” and “Hung’s Killer” to the book and was going to propose it to his publisher, Casterman, and then they beat me to the punch and put out exactly the book I had envisioned, throwing in a fourth story I was not familiar with, the John Lennon one. They even got a new cover out of Tardi for it. So it was pretty much kismet.
The Casterman book had some text pieces which you didn’t use…
They were too much “a European explaining the U.S. to other Europeans,” and they had too much of that French… impressionistic approach to essays that doesn’t travel real well, at least to my mind. There was this book by Bernard-Henri Lévy a few years ago that purported to explain America, and I’m sure it read fine in French but by the time it made it over here… Well, I didn’t read it, but I remember Garrison Keillor stomping all over it with hob-nailed boots, hilariously. Tardi’s book just seemed better off without them.
The fact is, there are some oddities in fact and tone in the comics stories themselves that… I wouldn’t say betray it, but reveal it as very much a book about the U.S. by someone who’s not an American. Even the premise of the lead story…
You mean the assertion that there are no 13th floors in New York buildings?
Exactly. It’s one of those urban (literally) myths that Tardi took off and ran with, but any New Yorker will go “What the…?” And the conspiracy-thriller ideas and urban-hell vision are clearly formed more by American movies rather than anything else. It just doesn’t have the authoritative ring of authenticity that Tardi’s books set in Europe do.
I talked to Spiegelman about the book when we were preparing it; as a New Yorker he is much more sensitive to those oddities, and he felt it needed to be put in context as one of those interesting works about America by non-Americans whose “errors” have to be accepted — acknowledged, but accepted. The example Art used was Kafka’s Amerika, with its scene of a ship sailing into New York harbor, with the Statue of Liberty brandishing her trademark, uh, sword… I like to think of Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America, too, which is set in the most densely packed city in the Western world, and Leone’s own widescreen visual quirks led him to show all these enormous, broad avenues and Manhattan grocery stores that are the size of skating rinks. (Not that it isn’t a totally awesome movie.)
But Tardi’s visual research is so impeccable — as one can tell, he traveled to New York and did so much photo research that he was able to use the photos as backgrounds for the epilogue to the story without missing a beat — that I think he ultimately pulls it off. It’s not one of my very favorite of Tardi’s books, but as with all the books I translate I grew to appreciate it much more as I worked on it. (The Arctic Marauder went from one of my least favorites to one of my favorites.) And it was fun to take French dialogue in an American setting and translate it into its “real” language, it’s almost like this is the original version and the French one is a translation. I get that effect with some of the Jason stories set in the U.S., too.
The black-and-red “Schindler’s List little girl with the red dress” technique is pretty unique.
Don’t say that, Tardi hates Schindler’s List. He did a hilarious drawing about it for a movie column written by a friend of his I should show here that kind of says it all:
Don’t forget, Schindler’s List was released the same year as Jurassic Park. American critics found this admirable; European critics found it dismally revelatory.
Anyway, Tardi had some bad experiences with color early in his career, both in terms of reproduction and having to hand off coloring to another colorist because of time constraints, and for most of the 1980s and early 1990s he really avoided it (except for the contractually-mandated Adèle books). But he always liked going beyond pure linework and experimenting with tones, including Craftint…
Like in “Hung’s Murderer.”
Exactly. He’s never done a whole book with that, but he played around with it for an alternate version of the ill-fated Fatale, too. I remember reading about him asking friends who traveled to America to see if they could find Roy Crane strips to bring back to him to study. He’d also used Letratone sheets for It Was the War of the Trenches (in the upcoming interview I did with him for the Journal he told me he loved the sensual aspect of cutting up and scratching away at those sheets) and had been using photographically-shot overlays for his Nestor Burma books. Recently, including in his upcoming book, he’s used digital tones. Add in the wild scratchboard effects for The Arctic Marauder and Tardi has messed around with pretty much every way of producing tones except maybe gray washes — and so much of Goddamn This War!, even though technically in color, falls into the monochrome that that could qualify.
Who is Benjamin Legrand, who wrote "Cockroach Killer"?
He’s a writer buddy of Tardi’s, a crime writer and translator. (Tom Wolfe and Robert Ludlum, among others.) To be honest I know as much about him as anyone who can consult Wikipedia. From what I understand "Cockroach Killer" was Tardi’s concept and Legrand came in to execute it. Last year Legrand was hired to write the novelization of Besson’s Adèle Blanc-Sec movie, which I assume was Tardi going, “Well, if such a thing must be done, might as well give it to my pal, and he’ll do a good job.” As a footnote, Legrand wrote the new Druillet book Delirius II (after the writer of the original Delirius died). He also co-wrote the screenplay for Le Monde Truqué, the feature-length animated film Tardi designed that we mentioned a few weeks ago, and for a more tenuous Tardi connection, worked on the French Nestor Burma TV series. So he seems to be part of the comics orbit and Tardi’s specifically.
What’s next for Tardi at Fantagraphics? Still cranking?
Oh, yes. Well, of course there is the 28,000-word interview I did with him that’s going in the next Comics Journal. But yeah, we’re already in production on the ninth book, which will be Goddamn This War! (sort of a sequel to War of the Trenches) and we’ve announced the tenth, his third Manchette adaptation, for early 2013. Then we need to do Adieu Brindavoine, his first solo graphic album from 40 years, because it’s part of the Adèle continuity and we have to release it before the third Adèle. By then we’ll have published… maybe half of his comics oeuvre? And he’s still producing. His next graphic novel is over 300 pages long, slated for completion next year, and might very well turn out to be his masterpiece. See the Journal interview for details!
So I could easily plot out the next five years or ten Tardi books on a napkin right now. No rest for the weary!
The up-to-the-minute Online Commentaries & Diversion:
•Plug: Our newest Jacques Tardi release, New York Mon Amour is out and available at your favorite comic shops. One of our such shop, Forbidden Planet, is very excited to have it in stock. Joe says, "I’m so glad the Fanta crew has been making these titles available again to English language readers."
•Interview:WMFU host of Too Much Information, Benjamin Walker, questions Michael Kupperman about comics as a serious form of literature at his MIT Center for Civic Media conference talk. Kupperman: "You see high points. You have to build to that humor. Sometimes there's just enough for three panels—I like to keep it short, keep the audience wanting more. It's kind of—there can be a central idea I need to do it."
•Review: On The Comics Journal, Jeet Heer takes a close look at Spain Rodriguez's newest collection of stories. In Heer's words, Cruisin' with the Hound: The Life and Times of Fred Toote "is a splendid book, a startling view of a plebeian world that tends to be submerged by the North American tendency to pretend that class doesn’t exist. The book is also evidence of the strength of the autobiographical comics tradition, which has room not just for minute introspection but also for stories of lively brutality."
•Review:Comics Worth Reading sits down with the latest issue (#16) of Linda Medley's Castle Waiting series. Johanna Draper Carlson glowingly states, "it’s [Medley's] character work, the small bits of perfectly realized dialogue, that make this series so rewarding."
This week's comic shop shipment is slated to include the following new titles. Read on to see what comics-blog commentators and web-savvy comic shops are saying about them (more to be added as they appear), check out our previews at the links, and contact your local shop to confirm availability.
84-page black & white/duotone 8.25" x 10.75" hardcover • $19.99 ISBN: 978-1-60699-524-2
"Four short stories by the French Tardi set in New York City. The biggest thing about Tardi is his range, even within the confines of a single story. He can effortlessly move from silly, mannered humor to explosive, gruesome violence. Tarantino, if he had become a cartoonist, would have wished that he could be this guy." – Ao Meng, Novi Magazine
"Among this week’s crop of new releases is another in Fantagraphics’ excellent and continuing series of extremely welcome English language editions of the diverse body of work by the great Jacques Tardi, surely one of the top exponents of the comic form.... I’m so glad the Fanta crew has been making these titles available again to English language readers." – Joe Gordon, Forbidden Planet International
"I mentioned New York Mon Amourlast week, but how can you possibly cite Jacques Tardi too many times? All I know is that four NYC stories are included, in black, white & red; $19.99." – Joe McCulloch, The Comics Journal
"If I had $30, I’d make the difficult choice between two top-notch offerings from Fantagraphics this week. One: New York Mon Amour, a collection of Manhattan-themed stories by the one and only Jacques Tardi, including the Kalfkaesque “Cockroach Killer.” The other would be the third volume in the ongoing Mickey Mouse collection, High Noon at Inferno Gulch. I’m an unabashed Floyd Gottfredson fan, so the Mickey book would probably win out. But I’d be sure to save my coins for next week so I can get the Tardi book then." – Chris Mautner, Robot 6
200-page full-color 7.5" x 10.5" softcover • $26.99 ISBN: 978-1-60699-532-7
"Assuming I don’t blow all my splurge dough on the Tardi book, there’s a number of solid options here [including] Out of the Shadows, a collection of Mort Meskin’s early non-DC work..." – Chris Mautner, Robot 6
"Also dropping is Out of the Shadows, a 200-page collection of Golden Age comics by Mort Meskin, edited and designed by Steven Brower; $26.99." – Joe McCulloch, The Comics Journal
"The Mort Meskin book is a must-have simply because of the way Meskin has muscled his way into the conversation about great and influential mainstream craftsmen -- I think maybe through a door left ajar a few places by Art Spiegelman, although I honestly couldn't tell you the exact provenance of his rediscovery." – Tom Spurgeon, The Comics Reporter
280-page black & white/color 10.5" x 8.75" hardcover • $29.99 ISBN: 978-1-60699-531-0
"These volumes have been a revelation, showing a generation who had only seen the dull, squeaky clean corporate Mickey exactly why he was the darling of the 1930s. Pure rollicking high-adventure, they’re also filled with background material and essays by cartoon scholars such as editor David Gerstein. A must for any cartoon fan collection." – Sean Gaffney, Manga Bookshelf
"...Fantagraphics’ hilarious little mascot returns for more Floyd Gottfredson-headed antics in Walt Disney’s Mickey Mouse Vol. 3: High Noon at Inferno Gulch, boasting 60 or so pages of supplements toward a 280-page total; $29.99. " – Joe McCulloch, The Comics Journal
The most-current Online Commentaries & Diversions:
•Interview:MTV Geek questions Noah Van Sciver about his new graphic novel, The Hypo, and why he chose to focus on the man before the president. ". . . it’s important to see who [Lincoln] became, or I should say how he became is more spectacular when you think about who he was, and where he came from, because I don’t even know if that’s possible anymore, to come from nothing and then become a president, you know?"
•Review: Drew on ComicAttack.net reviews kid-friendly The Adventures of Venus by Gilbert Hernandez. "It’s not quite Betty and Veronica, but it’s not quite Calvin and Hobbes; it’s that special place in between that catches that transition from childhood into adolescence, which doesn’t get captured on the comic book page much, and is a rare treat that Hernandez delivers here to such perfection."
•Interview (audio):ABC News Radio's Sherry Preston interviews Daniel Clowes (at the 30 minute mark) as his work is on display at the Oakland Museum of California. "I was more interested in kinda funny comics and comics about real life situations. And I thought it made no sense that there weren't comics about every subject you can imagine." You'll love the following story.
•Commentary: TURN IT OUT in clothes inspired by Daniel Clowes' Ghost World and America's two favorite juveniles on Trent.
•Plug:Follow the White Rabbit eloquently mentions Jacques Tardi's New York Mon Amour. A rough translation might say, "Altogether, a perfect Edition for the lovers of this French author that already amazed us at 'The cry of the people,' 'The war of trenches' or 'The extraordinary adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec'."
•Commentary: Chris Mautner of Robot 6 gives a nice mention to Michael Kupperman's Tales Designed to Thrizzle #8. "A pretty solid issue overall, the best and funniest part being the opening segment, a parody of coloring books, this time involving trains that … well, it’s not fit for polite conversation, really."
•Review: Greg Burgas of Comic Book Resources breaks down one beautiful page by Archie Goodwin and Alex Toth from Blazing Combat. "This story shows off [Toth's] strengths very nicely, because it’s one of the bleaker stories in the volume (none of them are happy; I mean “bleak” in that the landscape is stripped of vegetation and is dotted with destroyed building, giving this story its post-Apocalyptic tenor) and Toth does very well with that."
•Plug:The Daily Beast features an excerpt from Joe Sacco and Chris Hedges' new book Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt. In this article, they "detail the effects of coal mining in West Virginia, a state destroyed by mountaintop removal."
•Interview: Peering from under a swell hat, Noah Brand from The Good Men Project interviews TCJ contributer and cartoonist Tim Kreider on the art of writing. "Cartooning also seems to allow me to express a much sillier, stupider, more puerile part of my personality than writing. I get all stiff and serious and writerly when I sit down to write prose."
•Commentary:Rick Klaw lists Strange and Stranger: The World of Steve Ditko by Blake Bell as part of the comic book essentials. "Bell shines light on many diverse corners of the comics industry in an attempt to understand the reclusive Ditko."
Many years ago, Jacques Tardi was introduced to American audiences with “Manhattan,” a grim and grimy story of depression, madness and suicide in New York City whose appearance in the premiere issue of RAW magazine was instrumental in defining both that magazine’s virtuoso aesthetic and its dark sensibility. Three decades later, New York Mon Amour collects “Manhattan” and three other tales of the Big Apple — rendered by Tardi with just as much panache and you-are-there detail as Paris or the trenches of World War I in his other books — in one spectacular volume.
Aside from “Manhattan,” the centerpiece of the book is the graphic novel “Cockroach Killer,” written by Benjamin Legrand. This violent, surreal conspiracy thriller, starring a hapless exterminator named Walter, features a striking two-color black-and-red technique unique in Tardi’s oeuvre, and remains one of the cartoonist’s most startling, confounding works. New York Mon Amour is rounded off with two short stories written by Dominique Grange: “It’s So Hard” (starring John Lennon — but not that John Lennon — and never before published in English) and “The Killing of Hung” (a story of revenge and redemption).
New York Mon Amour is a crucial and unique addition to Fantagraphics’ acclaimed Tardi collection.
84-page black & white/duotone 8.25" x 10.75" hardcover • $19.99 ISBN: 978-1-60699-524-2
Ships in: June 2012 (subject to change) — Pre-Order Now
Many years ago, Jacques Tardi was introduced to American audiences with “Manhattan,” a grim and grimy story of depression, madness and suicide in New York City whose appearance in the premiere issue of RAW magazine was instrumental in defining both that magazine’s virtuoso aesthetic and its dark sensibility. Three decades later, New York Mon Amour collects “Manhattan” and three other tales of the Big Apple — rendered by Tardi with just as much panache and you-are-there detail as Paris or the trenches of World War I in his other books — in one spectacular volume.
Aside from “Manhattan,” the centerpiece of the book is the graphic novel “Cockroach Killer,” written by Benjamin Legrand. This violent, surreal conspiracy thriller, starring a hapless exterminator named Walter, features a striking two-color black-and-red technique unique in Tardi’s oeuvre, and remains one of the cartoonist’s most startling, confounding works. New York Mon Amour is rounded off with two short stories written by Dominique Grange: “It’s So Hard” (starring John Lennon — but not that John Lennon — and never before published in English) and “The Killing of Hung” (a story of revenge and redemption).
New York Mon Amour is a crucial and unique addition to Fantagraphics’ acclaimed Tardi collection.
• Review: At Boing Boing, as part of their "Mind Blowing Movies" series of guest posts, Amy Crehore examines the Ghost World film: "I knew it was going to be good, but I had no idea that the movie Ghost World (2001) would bathe me in such an uncanny sense of deja vu from start to finish. The characters are so real and familiar that they could have been based on my friends and me."
• Commentary:Ashok Karra has a short but thought-provoking analysis of elements of the Ghost World graphic novel: "A ghost world could be three things. Two of them are types of haunting: either by the past (nostalgia for childhood) or the present (the glow of the television). The third possibility is that you pass through as a ghost."
• Plug: At Flavorwire, Emily Temple includes Ghost World on the list of "30 Books Everyone Should Read Before Turning 30," saying "Clowes writes some of the most essentially realistic teenagers we’ve ever come across, which is important when you are (or have ever been) a realistic teenager yourself."
• Plug/Preview: At The Beat, Jessica Lee posts a 5-page sneak peek of New York Mon Amour by Jacques Tardi et al., saying "This newest Tardi release... is slated for a July release, just in time for Independence Day, where we can all revel in the patriotic depictions of New York that Tardi has provided — oh wait. True to his new realism style, 'Manhattan' retains the same kind of gritty aesthetic as his illustrations of WWI trench warfare as well as Parisian life."
• Review: "The 11 horror stories in [The Furry Trap] showcase Simmons’s possession of a dark and capable imagination, one that has discomfort down to an exact science.... Simmons is at his best in stories like 'Mutant' and 'Demonwood,' where rash decisions and chance encounters lead to nightmarish consequences ... Simmons’s brand of deep unease permeates all of [these stories], even in the opening story, 'In a Land of Magic,' which features a scene of sexual and physical violence that could lead to sleepless nights. The book is also filled with illustrations and short comics that just add to the pile of evidence that Simmons has a wide-ranging talent, with an artistic sense that brings to life his most ghoulish creations. These stories are, hopefully, harbingers of even stronger and more sinister work in the future..." – Publishers Weekly
• Review: "The action [in God and Science] ebbs and flows, but the story remains engaging and exciting. I had to read it all in one afternoon because I just couldn't put it down. I was enjoying it too much to stop reading.... [There]'s another great thing about this comic — there's some subtle philosophical questions nudged in that the characters (and reader) have to answer themselves.... I can't recommend this title enough. I can easily say that I want more Ti-Girls, or at least comic characters like them." – Sheena McNeil, Sequential Tart
• Review: "Prince Valiant Vol. 5 — As the war years draw to a close, the strip finds Valiant settling down — at least a little bit — by finally winning his true heart’s love, Aleta. There’s still enough brigands and evildoers to keep Val busy, but a lot of Vol. 5 is spent with the couple developing their relationship, and Harold Foster deepening and developing Aleta’s character in the process. ...[I]t remains a thrilling, boisterous work." – Chris Mautner, Robot 6
• Review: "Dungeon Quest Book Three — Joe Daly’s faithful D&D fantasy by way of Harold and Kumar proceeds apace, with lots of bloody skirmishes with fierce animals and fiercer bandits and an abundance of jokes about penises, pot, hand-jobs and the like.... His incredibly detailed forest backgrounds are really quite exquisite, and the full panel sequences of his band of adventurers simply trekking along a forest path or walking through a stream were my favorite parts of the book." – Chris Mautner, Robot 6
• Commentary: It's been interesting seeing the evolution of the "hey, they should bring Love and Rockets to the screen" article in the age of the serialized cable drama. Arthur Smith at The Paley Center for Media is the latest to add his voice to the chorus
• Plug: "Got this beautiful Popeye compilation book (Fantagraphics) a couple of days ago. Haven't had a chance to even crack it open, but my son is now running around going 'Arf, arf.' It's a hit." – Ruben Bolling
• Tribute: At The New York Times, Tim Kreider remembers the great Ray Bradbury: "Prescience is not the measure of a science-fiction author’s success — we don’t value the work of H. G. Wells because he foresaw the atomic bomb or Arthur C. Clarke for inventing the communications satellite — but it is worth pausing, on the occasion of Ray Bradbury’s death, to notice how uncannily accurate was his vision of the numb, cruel future we now inhabit."
Wouldn't you like to see a full-length steampunk animated feature designed by Jacques Tardi? Yeah, so would we. Here's a teaser trailer for just such a thing currently in development, from the studio that brought you PERSEPOLIS, called LE MONDE TRUQUÉ (co-written by Tardi's COCKROACH KILLER writer Benjamin Legrand, for good measure). In English, yet. Enjoy!
Things have been hectic around here and they're only going to get hecticer. Here are the advances and sample copies that have arrived at the office since the last sneak-peek update a few weeks ago, some of which have already been spotted out in public making their debuts during our current convention gauntlet and all of which should be available between now and July.
