Spectacular faux-woodcut vistas make Tardi's groundbreaking "icepunk" story a retro classic.
One of Jacque Tardi's earliest and most distinctive graphic novels: A satirical, Jules Vernes-esque retro-sci-fi yarn executed on scratchboard in a stunningly detailed faux-woodcut style perfectly chosen to render the Edwardian-era mechanical marvels on display. Created in 1972, The Arctic Marauder is a downright prescient example of proto-steampunk science fiction ? or perhaps more accurately, and to coin a spinoff genre, "icepunk."
In 1899, L'Anjou, a ship navigating the Arctic Ocean from Murmansk, Russia, to Le Havre, France comes across a stunning sight: A ghostly, abandoned vessel perched high atop an iceberg. But exploring this strange apparition is the last thing the sailors will ever do, as their own ship is soon dispatched to Davy Jones' locker via a mysterious explosion.
Enter JƩrƓme Plumier, whose search for his missing uncle, the inventor Louis-Ferdinand Chapoutier, brings him into contact with the sinister, frigid forces behind this ? and soon he too is headed towards the North Pole, where he will content with mad scientists, monsters of the deep, and futuristic submarines and flying machines. Told with brio in hilarious slabs of vintage purple prose, The Arctic Marauder works both as ripping good adventure story and parody of same, and, predating as it does the later and not dissimilar Adele Blanc-Sec series, is a keystone in Tardi's oeuvre in his fantastical mode.
āStarred Review. This... phenomenal one-shot a baroque masterpiece... Precisely calibrated, perfectly laid out, and incredibly graphic, this is as good as adventure comics get.ā āPublishers Weekly
āA wickedly sly take on classic turn-of-the-century pulp adventures that nevertheless manages to both tweak and evoke those stories. It is, in short, a blast to read.... Marauder looks quite unlike any comic youāve read before.ā āChris Mautner, Robot 6
Jacques Tardi is a pioneering European cartoonist. His Adele Blanc-Sec series was adapted into a feature by Luc Besson, and he was behind the recent animated film April and the Extraordinary World. His comics are award winning (including the U.S.'s Eisners). He lives in Paris with his wife, the singer Dominique Grange, and their cats.
64 page black and white hardcover
Fantagraphics, 2011
