Goddamn This War!

Goddamn This War! is not only a great title; it may also be the perfect title for this specific book (being the latest Fantagraphics released translation of a Jacques Tardi comic). Goddman could be seen as a companion piece with Tardi's other masterpiece about WWI, It Was the War of the Trenches. But Goddman is an entirely different animal. The first thing you might notice is that Tardi chose to use color for this story. Specifically, he chooses to use quite a bit of the color red. As you might expect, we see a lot of red blood spilling forth from horrific injuries. But he also uses a bright red to color the pants of the French troops in the early days of the war. This makes them look especially silly and as they march across an open plain in their clown suits it gives the whole thing an air of absurdity since we know the horrors to come.

Absurd is a note that Tardi frequently strikes throughout the book; he is also, at times, funny, informative or mournful (or some combination of each of these). But most prominently, Goddamn This War! is an angry comic. It rages at not only the horrors of World War I but at the cruelty of all wars, at the nations that engage in them, the generals who plan them, the religions that encourage them, the societies that support them and even the mothers that birth the soldiers doomed to die in them. It certainly calls to mind something like Catch-22, where war is viewed as a cruel and pointless joke being played on regular people; the punchline, being of course, that all this dying is on the behalf of glory seeking generals and the companies that manufacture bullets, tanks, planes and the like.

The protagonist, who is rarely actually seen on-panel, jealously observes leftist revolts and deserting soldiers. Indeed, he has no quarrel with the Germans themselves (while alone he observes a solitary German soldier and chooses not to shoot). His hate is directed more at the French officers who execute deserters, self-injurers and anyone suspected of not being loyal to the war effort. After the execution of a deserter, a French general is shown standing in front of a field of skulls. Tardi never depicts the Germans in this fashion. It is the grey bearded, pot bellied officers who are the enemy of France’s soldiers.

Most impressive is the verisimilitude on display. Tardi takes many detours throughout Goddamn; as the passing of each year is noted the narrator informs us of the new equipment and machinery being introduced and all the latest pointless struggles happening on every other front in the war. Impressively, these detours never feel like rote facts being dumped into a narrative. Rather, they serve to add flavor and depth to the story and genuinely feel as parts to the whole. The fact that this book can be educational without ever being dry, absurd without ever feeling unreal and angry without losing its humanity is a testament to Tardi's masterful skills as a storyteller.

Tardi draws in a loose, expressive style. Characters have exaggerated hands and facial features and are left minimally detailed as they retreat into the background. He lays out most pages with 3 horizontal panels of equal size and a point of view at eye level. This lets him develop a certain macabre rhythm that makes the war seem unending as it mechanically marches on, page after page. 

As the book continues, though, Tardi increasingly breaks that rhythm to jarring effect. Note the masterfully composed panel below. The German soldiers are less detailed and largely faceless as they approach from the background through a tunnel. The flamethrower reduces a French soldier to basically nothing; a squiggly mass representing flame with a helmet on top and a pair of boots below. Perfectly following the reading order, Tardi lays a dead French soldier in the foreground still wearing his gas mask.

The closing section of the book is possibly its most powerful. Using his 3 panel pages, Tardi devotes each panel to the life of a different person, discussing their upbringing or their plans for the future. And then, of course, detailing how they were inevitably killed. The rhythm of these panels and their images of death (and heartbreaking captions) drives home the horrible cost of that stupid conflict. Every one of the men shot, bayoneted, gassed or blown up had their own unique inner life, their own girlfriends back home and their own shops they would open up after the war or the farms they would tend to. But the barbaric countries waging their stupid war reduce them to so much shredded hamburger, statistics to be tallied after the fact. Its a cruel joke that would be hilarious if it weren't so sad or so horrible or so true.

Goddman this war, indeed.