West Coast Blues »

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, and It Was the War of the Trenches. He lives in Paris with his wife, the singer Dominique Grange, and their cats.

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.

Publishers Weekly

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. The protagonist, George Gerfaut, is a dead-souled Parisian businessman who’s just about as irritated by his work as he is by his family. There’s little he seems to like but for booze, cigarettes and West Coast–style jazz. His foul demeanor seems to serve him in good stead, though, when he becomes an accidental witness to a murder and has to fend off a determined assault by a pair of hit men who happen to be lovers. Not only does his mood leave him with fewer compunctions about resorting to violence but it also ensures that when a bloody shootout at a gas station leaves him wounded, he’s not too broken up about not seeing his wife and children for a while. 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. (Oct.)