Synopses & Reviews
George Gerfaut, aimless young executive and desultory family man, witnesses a murder and finds himself sucked into a spiral of violence involving an exiled war criminal and two hired assassins. Adapting to the exigencies of his new life on the run with shocking ease, Gerfaut abandons his comfortable middle-class life for several months (including a sojourn in the countryside after an attempt to ride the rails turns spectacularly bad) until, joined with a new ally, he finally returns to settle all accounts... with brutal, bloody interest. Released in 2005, () is Tardi's adaptation of a popular 1976 novel by the French crime writer Jean-Patrick Manchette. (The novel had been previously adapted to film under the more literal title , and was released in English by the San Francisco-based publisher City Lights under the English version of the same title, .) Tardi's late-period, looser style infuses Manchette's dark story with a seething, malevolent energy; he doesn't shy away from the frequently grisly goings-on, while maintaining (particularly in the old-married-couple-style bickering of the two killers who are tracking Gerfaut) the mordant wit that characterizes his best work. This is the kind of graphic novel that Quentin Tarantino would love, and a double shot of Scotch for any fan of unrelenting, uncompromising crime fiction. Nominated for two 2010 Will Eisner Comic Industry Award (Best Adaptation from Another Work; Best U.S. Edition of International Material).
Review
"I opened this comic, got sucked in and blew through it in one sitting. Then I went back a few weeks later... and re-read it. I found that I liked it even better the second time around... Fans of great artwork and crime stories should give this book a shot." Chad Derdowski
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"Plenty of crime stories revolve around the bizarre preoccupations of [their] characters and just as many are centered around the plight of the common man thrust into extraordinary circumstances. But Tardi really brings it home, offering a messed up story about messed up people who do some truly messed up things." Mania
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"Recent months have seen an unusually high number of crime comics hitting the bookshelves, but this one's among the best of the batch." Gordon Flagg
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"West Coast Blues is a brilliant story, and Manchette was a phenomenal writer of the modern world, putting others to shame at times. Just that simple, really. This is a book that can't be reduced to familiar genre markers." Gordon Flagg Booklist
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"An adaptation of a 70s crime novel by Jean-Patrick Manchette (Le Petit Bleu de la Côte Ouest), and it is a reminder of how good they did paranoid crime thrillers in the 70s. It is also a reminder of how good Tardi has done comics for forty years. ...Tardi's remarkable energy and range as a visual storyteller... will have you gobbling this book up in one gigantic gulp and then going back to appreciate the details and the nuance." Brian Lindenmuth BSCreview
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"Perhaps what makes West Coast Blues so captivating is how well it highlights the similarities between film and comics, while simultaneously showcasing its own unique ability as a graphic novel to capture the noir aesthetic through word and image. ... Not unlike many noir films, West Coast Blues is replete with car chases, hit-men, drinking, guns, and the occasional salacious scene. All of this is set in Tardi's straightforward drawing style which is a good fit for the almost matter-of-fact, unsentimental manner in which violence, sex, and life in general are met with during the course of the book." Jared Gardner Guttergeek
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"Everything you would expect from a suspense thriller... Visually the comic book is also great. It's everything you would expect from Tardi... I don't believe that anybody else than him would have been able to visually translate Manchette's novel so well. It's like they worked together and that the comic book is the original material. Bottom line, this is another great comic book by Tardi. If you have never read anything by him you should." Sara Cole PopMatters
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"Overall, I liked West Coast Blues quite a bit, enough so that it makes me want to search out Manchette's novels that have been translated into English. If you enjoy hardboiled crime graphic novels, you should certainly give this one a try." Patrick Bérubé Comic Book Bin
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"The graphic novel, it turns out, is a form especially well-suited to the noir genre. Maybe this isn't surprising--comics have always run the gamut of moods from goofy to autobiographical to just plain smutty. But it still gives a shiver of pleasure to stumble upon a graphic novel that captures the hardboiled tone of classic noir as perfectly as , Jacques Tardi's adaptation of a 1976 crime novel by Jean-Patrick Manchette. ... The plot includes bursts of brutality, dark realizations, alluring women and grizzled observations from its antihero--all the best conventions of noir, in other words, preserved and reborn in a fresh new medium. File it next to Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler." Booklist
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"A masterfully constructed crime story with an unlikeable protagonist caught in an unlikely circumstance, this very French graphic novel is superior to anything I've seen in the genre from an American cartoonist." Molly Young We Love You So
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This will appeal to fans of classic French cinema such as Goddard and Truffaut films, where all the characters have grime on their souls and nobody among the victims, killers, crime-fighters, or bystanders is anyone you'd especially like to meet.As slim, smooth, and hard as its attractive, Adam Grano-designed album-style hardcover format, West Coast Bluesis as strong a crime comic as you're likely to see this year... Tardi's art [is] a master class in spotted blacks and lines like garrote wire... This sucker's good. -- Sean T. Collins
Review
West Coast Bluesis Fantagraphics' first offering in what one hopes will be am ambitious Tardi reprint project... It's an elegant, somewhat unorthodox set-up, at least with Tardi's narration, and indeed Tardi makes a number of creative, idiosyncratic choices in adapting the novel. ... The '70s milieu shouldn't put anyone off, and in fact that's one of the book's charms, with Tardi's clean line depicting classic old Mercedes and Citroens, and plenty of legwork and driving rather than digital assistance. Tardi has a really appealing style, clear and photorealistic in the details and yet messy with life. ... Tardi doesn't shy away from the violence of the story, but he doesn't revel in it, either, his pages all varying grids, many with tall, narrow panels that keep the pace brisk. -- Christopher Allen
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Tardi is one of the biggest literary stars of French comics'taking the 'clear line" style into a moody expressionist direction. -- Heidi MacDonald
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"Maybe it's because blood and brain matter look somewhat more disturbing in the chunky, primitive black and white favored by famed French cartoonist Tardi, but there's something particularly creepy about his adaptation of the late Manchette's crime novel that wouldn't have been well served by color. ... Manchette's plot is pure pulp, with a driving engine for a plot and a Lee Marvin-like inclination toward swift and unreflective action. Tardi's art delivers the action with admirable punch and attitude to spare." Publishers Weekly
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West Coast Bluesis just the right mixture of action, suspense, and surprise to keep just about any reader"s attention. ... It"s hard to ignore the strength of Tardi"s art in making West Coast Blues such a strong graphic novel. ...West Coast Bluesis a sharp, beautiful book. ... For people looking for a noir thriller, you"ve come to the right place. -- Greg McElhatton
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A well-crafted piece of genre entertainment. I dug it. -- Sandy Bilus
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It"s the first quotidian crime story that I"ve ever read, and Tardi"s commitment to the depiction of the everyday and the way nightmares crashed into daily life are what made this book work so well. -- Rob Clough
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[G]ets under your skin and remains impossible to resist from start to finish... Darkly amusing and undeniably entertaining, West Coast Blueskeeps the mystery and interest alive by carefully doling out pieces of the story and introducing intriguing characters with loads of personality... Tardi does an excellent job of adapting what must be a massively entertaining book into a graphic novel form for all who seek a slightly different but no less thrilling mystery/adventure story to enjoy. -- Avril Brown
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West Coast Bluesis a tight, economical and forceful thriller shorn of the self-consciousness that frequently comes when American comics mosey into the same territory... It's a wicked little book. -- Tom Spurgeon
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It's nice to see some Tardi, and it's especially nice to see the kind of Tardi present in West Coast Blues: nasty but just, chaotically controlled, hopeful yet hopeless. This graphic novel is a turbo-charged pace car for the likes of Vertigo Noir (which I like, as you'll recall), telling the boys to keep up if they can.... [Is] West Coast Bluesan existential crime graphic novel? Maybe, but it's a very good one. -- Timothy Callahan
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For unadorned genre material, nothing this year beats West Coast Blues, French wunderkind Jacques Tardi's excellent, unflinching adaptation of a brutal hardboiled crime novel by Jean-Patrick Marchette. -- Steven Grant
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[A] cracking good crime comic, not really noir but definitely a tale of bad people doing bad things to each other. It's also, oddly enough, very wryly humorous, in a way we don't often see in crime comics here in the States. -- Greg Burgas
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A savage noir thriller reuniting a master crime novelist and a superlative French cartoonist--the beginning of an ambitious publishing project introducing one of Europe"s most beloved cartoonists to American audiences. -- "Graphic Novel Picks for Fall 2009, Adult Fiction"
Review
Slyly funny without being jokey; thrilling without ever seeming manipulative; cool, distant and ironic in its narrative voice; immediate in its depiction of violence. What do Tardi's illustrations add? Mostly a crowded sense of daily life, an ironic, sense-sharpening departure from the dark, shadowy atmospherics that sometimes nudge noir toward mere style. -- Peter Rozovsky
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From the opening panel until the final words, Tardi's adaptation of Manchette's crime novel sizzles with a dazzling graphic intensity... Showcasing Tardi's singular artistic talents, the brilliant West Coast Bluesemerges as one of the best crime graphic novels ever produced. -- Rick Klaw
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Tardi's adaptation of Machette's 'Franco-noir' novel is one of the year's best crime fiction reads, at least in comics. ' Tardi's B&W art is wonderfully rendered. Another great example of 'comics for grown-ups.' -- Mark London Williams
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" shows a terrific sense of pace, place, and casual violence, all related with a firm grip on a beautifully spontaneous style that reeks of utterly justified self-confidence. To put it simply, this shit kicks ass." Howard Chaykin, comic book artist and writer
Synopsis
Released in 2005, West Coast Blues (Le Petit bleu de la cote ouest) is Tardi s adaptation of a popular 1976 novel by the French crime writer Jean-Patrick Manchette. (The novel had been previously adapted to film under the more literal title Trois hommes a abattre, and was released in English by the San Francisco-based publisher City Lights under the English version of the same title, 3 to Kill.) Tardi s late-period, looser style infuses Manchette s dark story with a seething, malevolent energy; he doesn t shy away from the frequently grisly goings-on, while maintaining (particularly in the old-married-couple-style bickering of the two killers who are tracking Gerfaut) the mordant wit that characterizes his best work. This is the kind of graphic novel that Quentin Tarantino would love, and a double shot of Scotch for any fan of unrelenting, uncompromising crime fiction. Nominated for two 2010 Will Eisner Comic Industry Award (Best Adaptation from Another Work; Best U.S. Edition of International Material). "
Synopsis
Nominated for two 2010 Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards: a savage noir thriller reuniting a master crime novelist and a superlative French cartoonist--the beginning of an ambitious publishing project introducing one of Europe's most beloved cartoonists to American audiences.
About the Author
The Marseilles-born Jean-Patrick Manchette (1942-1995) authored ten short, tough-minded, highly acclaimed crime novels, as well as a multitude of other books, screen- and teleplays, magazine columns, and translations of American crime and science fiction novels. A lifelong comics fan, he also wrote the hardboiled graphic novel Griffu for Jacques Tardi in 1978, and in the late 1980s, was selected to translate the French edition of Watchmen.With over 30 graphic novels under his belt (a half-dozen of which have been translated into English), Jacques Tardi is considered the leading European cartoonist of the generation that came of age in the 1970s. His books published in America by Fantagraphics include West Coast Blues, You are There, It Was the War of the Trenches, and The Arctic Marauder. He lives in Paris with his wife, the singer Dominique Grange, and their cats.