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Zusammenfassung For his first solo graphic album! serialized in Pilote magazine in 1973!Jacques Tardi created a reluctant protagonist evolving in a steampunkishpre-World-War-One milieu of wild inventions and crazy scientists... no! notAdele Blanc-Sec. (She would follow three years later.) Lucien Brindavoine!professional layabout and occasional photographer! is drawn into a wildadventure that takes him to Istanbul! where he ends up in Iron City! in themiddle of a titanic struggle for the financial empire headed by the crippledOtto Lindenberg! populated by such eccentric characters as the heroic OswaldCarpleasure! the menacing aeroplane pilot Olga Vogelsang! and Lindenberg'sdwarfish handyman Klotz. Brindavoine is drawn in a looser style than Tardi fansare used to! featuring huge! illustrative panels and a rich but limited colorpalette that makes this one of the most visually distinctive books in Tardi'scareer. The book is rounded off with Flowers in Their Rifles! a far lesslight-hearted short story of Brindavoine as a soldier fighting in World War One!intended as the first chapter of a saga that was cut short by Tardi's split withthe publisher. Tardi would later explore World War One far more fully in It Wasthe War of the Trenches and other booksand as with The Arctic Marauder! he wouldintegrate Brindavoine into the Adele Blanc-Sec continuity. (Much of the thirdAdele collection coming from Fantagraphics in 2014 focuses on the now crippledBrindavoine's miserable post-war existence! until he stumbles across Adele! whowe left sleeping in her chemical bath at the end of Volume Two.) The AstonishingAdvenures of Lucien Brindavoine is the 11th release in Fantagraphics ongoingeffort to bring the work of Tardi! the greatest living European cartoonist! toEnglish-speaking audiences.
