The True Story of the Unknown Soldier by Jacques Tardi - a Review.

Jacques Tardi is a celebrated comic book illustrator and writer.  He has collaborated with novelists such as Jean-Patrick Manchette and Randy Lofficier.  Tardi gave shape and identity to the places, times, and characters described in the abstract text of these and many other writers.  He has produced memorable stories and characters of his own, such as the adventuress Adele Blanc-Sec, who contends with such bizarre creatures as living pterosaurs, surgically enhanced man-apes, and paranormal entities like The Eiffel Tower Demon.

However, this review will focus on two of Tardi’s earliest works in a two part volume titled The True Story of the Unknown Soldier.  The first story shares the same title as the volume.  The second story, The National Razor, completes the two chapter compilation.  Both stories are inspired by the events of the first two world wars and the cruelty of “the iconic French guillotine.”

The True Story of the Unknown Soldier begins with a nameless man - a writer - who wanders through a fantasy landscape of mansions and brothels all isolated by a large body of water.  The man suffers from an interminable headache as he encounters characters from his pulp novels.  Among this menagerie of his imagination are an Egyptian princess who met a grisly death, a grossly corpulent prostitute whom the man believes is his long lost love Rosalind, and his literary agent Louis-Joseph Bonnot, who transforms into a Tyrannosaurus Rex.

The man stumbles through the deep ocean that separates the satellite manses either by gondola, swimming, or being carried above it on a small airship piloted by a ghoulish figure wearing a gas mask and a thick black coat.  This strange creature turns out to be the central character form his novel “Flying Death.”

Finally, we discover that the source of the man’s headache is a bullet through his skull.  As it turns out, he was dying in a trench in World War I.  His dying words are, “My story ended in the mud on November 10, 1918…”

I wasn’t the author of that story, but it was worse than all the stories I had invented with my great imagination. 

The only words that pass as a eulogy are from his fellow soldiers, one of whom calls him “a real dumbshit.”  The protagonist concludes his narrative posthumously:

I rotted in a trench.  Then on November 11, 1920, I was buried under The Arc de Triomphe, officially in honor of my pitiful story.

The National Razor features a WW II veteran named Schumacher, who tries to keep a low profile as he returns to Paris and his apartment whose electricity has been turned off…

…or so it seems.

An old man rings Schumacher’s door.  After a long winded speech to which Schumacher only pays partial attention, the old man gives him an envelope.  Schumacher does not read the envelope, choosing to wander his way to a pub and dull his brain with absinthe.  He is propositioned by a prostitute who, after fellating Schumacher in an alley, leads him up to her apartment.  Schumacher wanders around the prostitute’s apartment and stumbles across a horribly misshapen, drooling, mumbling creature (hereafter named “Mouh”) who is tended to by the prostitute.  She mocks Schumacher, who immediately rapes her. 

After regaining his orientation, he discovers that the whore has been stabbed in the back with a knife and Mouh stabbed with a pair of scissors.  Schumacher runs out to the street and remembers the envelope given him by the old man.  An address is listed on the letter. With that, Schumacher travels down a vertiginous path of Parisian streets he is not familiar with.  Inexplicably he finds himself in front of his own building.

Re-entering his apartment, he confronts Mouh, the prostitute (dressed as a nurse), and the old man.  How are Mouh and the prostitute / nurse still alive?  Is this a frame up?  Schumacher finds himself disoriented again as the old man shoots Mouh and the prostitute / nurse.  He runs out into the street, believing himself to have been ensnared in a trap.  He is captured and beaten by the police.

Schumacher is tried and sentenced to the guillotine with the swiftness of an assembly line.  On the day of execution, he is met by a jeering crowd.  One man celebrates with champagne and a concubine.  The old man is visible to Schumacher as well. 

His beheading is not clean.  It takes two strokes from the blade.  The executioners are as casual about Schumacher’s death as the trench men in The True Story of the Unknown Soldier were about the killing of the nameless writer.

The nameless writer and Schumacher are psychologically and physically put through the wringer.  The world wars of the 20th century and the iconic guillotine from the 18th were charnel houses.  Between the two “innovations,” execution was made industrial and efficient.  The protagonists of both stories have stories worth volumes in their thin, wasted bodies.  Unfortunately, they have been designated as just another mass of anonymous meat to be ground and disposed.

Tardi’s unique illustration talents depict his heroes as gaunt and rail thin with tiny, piercing eyes, anus sized mouths, and chins as sharp as icepicks.  The women are generally voluptuous and curvaceous with languid expressions.  The remarkable outliers of Tardi’s masculine and feminine characterizations are the squat, salivating Mouh and the grossly proportioned prostitute the nameless writer identifies as “Rosalind.”

I first came about Tardi’s work through a friend who owned a copy The National Razor that was included in a compilation of French comics.  The art, writing, characters, settings, and general surreality of the work had me spellbound.  It has been years since I rediscovered Tardi, as I had grown tired of reading comics, particularly superhero comics.  In this volume Tardi’s work does not revolve around a muscle bound, gaudily colored Hercules who can pulverize mountains and meteors.  They are often about vulnerable men rendered in black and white who scuttle about in the shadows in fear of the law and the inescapable terminus that is death.

- JJB