One of the earliest full-length, standalone graphic novels to be published in Europe, and certainly one of the best and most original, Ici Meme was serialized in the adult French comics monthly (A suivre) in the early 1980s and then released in book form. A quarter of a century later, this dark, funny, consistently surprising masterpiece has finally been translated into English. An unexpected yet smoothly confident collaboration between the darkly cynical Jacques Tardi and the playful fantasist Jean-Claude Forest (of Barbarella fame), You Are There is set on a small island off the coast of France, where unscrupulous landowners have succeeded in overtaking the land from the last heir of a previously wealthy family. That heir, whose domain, in a Beckettian twist, is now reduced to the walls that border these patches of land he used to own, prowls the walls all day, eking out a living by collecting tolls at each gate. His seemingly hopeless struggle to recover his birthright becomes complicated as the government sees a way of using his plight for the sake of political expediency, and the romantic intervention of the daughter of one of the landowners (who has her own sordid history with the politician) engenders further difficulties, culminating in an apocalyptic, hallucinatory finale. Set in Tardi's preferred early 20th century milieu, You Are There is drawn in his crisp 1980s neo-"clear line" style, gorgeously detailed, elegantly stylized, with impossibly deep slabs of black. You Are There is a feast for both the eyes and the brain.

Paris, 1950s. Nestor Burma s past comes knocking when Belita, a young gypsy woman, leads him to the Salpetriere hospital where he discovers the recently deceased Abel Benoit, an old buddy from his anarchist days. While Burma has chosen to move onto the (more or less) straight and narrow as a private eye, his friend had stayed on the other side of the law as a counterfeiter and worse, until his own past caught up with him, lethally. So now it s up to Malet to avenge his friend, keep the girl safe, and hopefully unravel a mystery whose roots run far and deep back into the past...

Fog Over Tolbiac Bridge is the first of four major graphic novels adapted by Tardi from the legendary French crime writer Leo Malet s original Nestor Burma novels each set in Paris, and each taking place in, and defined by, a different arrondissement. Tardi s stylish use of mechanical gray tones provides the book with a lovely period feel, and the very specific autobiographical elements of the original novel (Malet himself frequented the anarchist/vegan hostel that serves as the backdrop for the flashback sequences of Burma s youth) combined with Tardi s usual obsessive visual research give it a uniquely personal, authentic quality.

Created in the 1980s, Fog Over Tolbiac Bridge was an historic attempt on Tardi s part to inject a level of literary heft and ambition into the comics field, which back then was still struggling for legitimacy. The result is a cracking good detective yarn and a milestone in comics history.