Word: tardy
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...American comic creator, and most French ones too. "I have two kinds of styles influences: an influence from French comics and an influence from art," he says. "I was very impressed during the 1970s with French comics that were very high contrast black and white drawings by artists like Tardi or Hugo Pratt, who came from Italy. And I was very influenced in art by the expressionist work of George Grosz. I was not very fond of superhero books. For me comics are not so different from literature or movies or theater or the other cultural things I took...
...Things heat up when Burma gets ambushed on a bridge but the attacker winds up a corpse in the river. The cast quickly expands to include several cops, a reporter, another P.I., the P.I.'s secretary, her lover, Burma's secretary, a shifty doctor and a well-connected shyster. Tardi manages to stay on top of all this, barely, through his skill as a clear storyteller. It feels like surfing. The mystery stays together and compels you forward, though it threatens to collapse in a boiling sea of confusion...
...Robert Crumb were ever to adapt Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade books, it would have something of the resonance this Tardi/Malet team has for this work. Malet's Nestor Burma, detective de choc, or ace detective, appears in multiple hardboiled volumes and has been adapted to film and television. Tardi, like Crumb, became a major comix creator during the 1970s, though unlike Crumb, he didn't have to go underground to do it. Art Spiegelman's forward to the book describes Tardi as "one of the single most influential comix artists to come out of the French adult comics revolution...
...imagined by Tardi, Nestor Burma has an ovular face with two dots for eyes and a permanent scowl. In profile, his face appears flat, like a blank wall, except for a bump of a nose and a pipe sticking out of a mouth that never opens, even when speaking. Tardi works in the classic French bandes dessinee style (a close match to the work of Japanese comix master Osamu Tezuka, incidentally) with near-photographic reproductions of backgrounds that the flat, "cartoonish" characters inhabit. The "Tintin" mysteries by Herge are the most famous example of this style, which Tardi updates with...
...With "The Bloody Streets of Paris," Jacques Tardi and Leo Malet do for comix what the French New Wave did for film: taking the trappings of American pulp fiction and retooling them with a cool, European update. Why the French take seriously what we throw away - detective pictures and comix among other things - remains anybody's guess. Just be glad that they do. Entertaining, adult pulp comix have become all too scarce...