Fantagraphics

A collection of insightful interviews with the creator of the most popular comic strip of all time. Everybody knows the iconic characters of Peanuts, but few are privy to the character of the man who created this beloved cast and the world they inhabit?Charles M. Schulz. To illuminate the life story and rich inner life of the renowned cartoonist, Fantagraphics presents four of the most comprehen­sive interviews ever conducted with Schulz, by film critic Leonard Maltin, novelist Laurie Colwin, Comics Journal editor and critic Gary Groth, and comic strip historian Rick Marschall. These conversations delve into the moral, aesthetic, and intellec­tual foundations of Schulz’s worldview and art. They reveal him to be a man who embodies elements of all of his characters?from the goofiness of Snoopy to the melancholy of Charlie Brown to the brashness of Lucy and more?but who also contains depths of personality far beyond the borders of his strip. Copiously illustrated with Peanuts strips and other comics and illustrations, What Cartooning Really Is humanizes Charles M. Schulz, the man who drew Snoopy. Prose with black & white illustrations.

World War I, that awful, gaping wound in the history of Europe, has long been an obsession of Jacques Tardi's. (His very first--rejected--comics story dealt with the subject, as does his most recent work, the two-volume Putain de Guerre.) But It Was the War of the Trenches is Tardi's defining, masterful statement on the subject, a graphic novel that can stand shoulder to shoulder with Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front and Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms. Tardi is not interested in the national politics, the strategies, or the battles. Like Remarque, he focuses on the day to day of the grunts in the trenches, and, with icy, controlled fury and disgust, with sardonic yet deeply sympathetic narration, he brings that existence alive as no one has before or since. Yet he also delves deeply into the underlying causes of the war, the madness, the cynical political exploitation of patriotism. And in a final, heartbreaking coda, Tardi grimly itemizes the ghastly human cost of the war, and lays out the future 20th century conflicts, all of which seem to spring from this global burst of insanity. Trenches features some of Tardi's most stunning artwork. Rendered in an inhabitually lush illustrative style, inspired both by abundant photographic documentation and classic American war comics, augmented by a sophisticated, gorgeous use of Craftint tones, trenches is somehow simultaneously atypical and a perfect encapsulation of Tardi's mature style. It is the indisputable centerpiece of Tardi's oeuvre. It Was the War of the Trenches has been an object of fascination for North American publishers: RAW published a chapter in the early 1980s, and Drawn and Quarterly magazine serialized a few more in the 1990s. But only a small fraction of Trenches has ever been made available to the English speaking public (in now out of print publications); the Fantagraphics edition, the third in an ongoing collection of the works of this great master, finally remedies this situation.