In a 2009 panel in Switzerland, moderated by Dan Nadel and featuring several PictureBox cartoonists, Yokoyama Yūichi declared that he wanted to draw a war comic. Or, more accurately, “I would like to draw a war for 1000-2000 pages. From the beginning, only scenes of fighting, and [at] the end, the last page, after 1000 pages, they’re still fighting.” In reply to a question from Lauren Weinstein, he emphasized, rather true to form, “I don’t want to describe any humanistic feeling.”

I thought about this pipedream as I read Elise and the New Partisans, the most recent outing in Fantagraphics’ library of translated works by Jacques Tardi, this one written by Tardi’s wife, singer-songwriter and activist Dominique Grange, and translated by Jenna Allen. Of course, a key difference between Yokoyama and Tardi is that, between Goddamn This War!, It was the War of the Trenches, I, René Tardi, Prisoner of War in Stalag IIB, and others, the latter has had, to put it lightly, quite a few opportunities to draw war. And yet it is at the moments when Tardi is asked to draw political demonstrations and resultant violence that his work in the comic under discussion truly comes alive. It’s hard, at this point, to talk about Tardi’s cartooning, insofar as it’s changed fairly little over the past decades, but his familiar contrast between the French-perennial style of figurative cartooning (black-button eyes, bulbous noses) and the weathered realism of his environments, all rendered in rich ink applied by a faintly-wobbly hand, certainly elevates the core drama of the book: gone is Yokoyama’s distancing, that aversion toward humanistic feeling – there is, more than anything, a bluntness, a feeling that these are people in the real world, that their blood, and sometimes death, is on someone else’s real, live hands. If there is any distancing from human feeling, it is not because it is not felt, but because those inflicting the suffering–the police, the military–are depriving those in pain of their humanity. 

Unfortunately, though such punctuations of real-world pain are what carries Elise and the New Partisans to a great degree, they are fairly few and far between. The titular Elise here is, for the most part, a less-than-thinly veiled stand-in for Dominique Grange; the ‘new partisans’ part of the title refers to Grange’s 1968 song of the same name. This subtle change, of course, serves a clear function, being a form of plausible deniability: autobiography is nothing if not an exercise in rhetorics, semiautobiography even more so; through Elise, Grange can tell her own story more or less verbatim while on occasion ‘curating’ it into the realm of fiction, whether through omission or through addition. 

More specifically, note the way the comic opens, on what is functionally a 13-page prelude centered around the Algerian citizens of France’s demonstrations during the Algerian War, and the way the French authorities used these as a ripe opportunity to violently abuse the impoverished minority, not without a racist slur or two or ten, under the guise of ‘law and order.’ The first-person narration from Elise frames this moment in time—1958 through 1962—as another stage of her political awakening; her narration is nigh-encyclopedic, rattling off statistics and quotes from French politicians alongside (not-unwarranted) connections to the expulsion of Jews during the Holocaust. Yet, notably, Elise’s visual figure is, for the moment, absent: she is a voice only, hovering above the very graphic imagery of French Algerians being rounded up, abused, and sometimes killed. 

This is more or less the perfect indicator of what is to come: our protagonist is both individual and collective, present and observing, human and extra-human. Elise herself appears for the first time on page 15, once the story has skipped ten years forward, to 1972. This first appearance is something of an inciting incident for the real-time portion of the book’s narrative: four years after 1968, she is now a seasoned radical, living with a group of fellow activists who evidently do not shy away from violence — the group is immediately caught in an explosion as the mixture for Molotov cocktails, Elise being the one who sustains the gravest injuries. From this point on, the book alternates between the ‘present day,’ Elise and her comrades escaping from one safe house to another with the authorities hot on their tails, and flashbacks depicting the starts of Elise’s career in music (the parallels between her and Grange evidenced by cameos from Grange’s real-life collaborators, such as Egyptian-French singer Guy Béart) and her political pivot following the 1968 protests.

By and large, there is little regard for Elise’s interiority here; in the section on her youth, she describes herself as an ally to all marginalized struggles past and present, not only Algeria but the historical conquest of the Andes and the contemporary oppression of Black Americans as well. In the story’s present day, then, she sets aside any emotional qualms or personal discomfort and fully surrenders herself to the righteous cause. The result is not altogether far from the mold of comic biography typically found in the catalogs of NBM and SelfMadeHero — distant, detached work that prizes clarity (of information, of viewpoint) over artistry. Characters speak amongst themselves in hefty-ballooned did you hear about ____? / No, what’s that?-type exposition; what the characters don’t say, the narration does. 

It’s one thing for this element of purity to nullify the validity of the ‘other side,’ the side Elise is overtly opposing – if you’re reading a book about a French activist in 1968, it’s more or less a given that, at least in real time, they will dismiss outright the ingrained right-wing ideology of the powers that be. But Elise and the New Partisans finds itself party to a second sin alongside that – in order to present the protagonist’s overall side as a de facto monolith of rectitude, it shies away from lasting internal frictions, ultimately denying itself of actual interpersonal drama. Consider, for example, this would-be pivotal moment: about halfway through the book, Elise goes to work at a packaging plant in Nice, in order to experience firsthand the plight of the proletariat and fight for the workers from within. The factory-floor boss is particularly strict with his employees, encouraging them to overwork themselves in the interest of profit, and as a result an employee gets his hand crushed in the machinery. Later, when Elise’s Paris comrades come to visit her, they chastise her for mingling with her colleagues instead of rushing headfirst into political agitation; Elise defends herself by explaining that assimilation is a stage of action, necessary in order to gain her cohort’s trust, all the while noticing the major differences between them and her: while they’re calling her a member of the bourgeoisie, she’s the one doing fieldwork and suffering the physical consequences for it. For a different writer, this might’ve been a moment of great poignancy: an opportunity to remark on performative politics versus consequential praxis, perhaps, affecting the way that Elise regards her theoretical comrades versus her actual equals. As it stands, the scene starts and ends within two pages, and is never remarked upon again.

There are several such beats that make the reader wish the writer put as much care into the detail of her personal experience as she does into the dry facts. Early on in her flashbacks, Elise talks about her high-school philosophy teacher who contributed extensively to her nascent political consciousness, and among other anecdotes she recalls the teacher encouraging her students to read journalist and activist Henri Alleg’s The Question, written while the author was in prison for his activism for the Algerian cause, a book the footnotes tells any unknowing readers was banned a month after its publication; especially given the heated current-day discourse over banned books, one wonders whether such a radical teacher, who so openly discusses the taboo with her students, did not suffer the consequences of the otherwise-ostensible repression. Yet this goes entirely unmentioned; the teacher is done away with as soon as she has served her purpose in the eyes of the narrative. Then there is, of course, the matter of Elise’s disappearance: she is on the run under a false name for months on end, seeking refuge with one comrade after the other, yet she seems to settle back into her erstwhile life and routine with remarkable ease. Again and again she pays a personal toll that she refuses to broach or elaborate on, even though it is infinitely more interesting than the primer-to-leftism the book purports (and largely fails) to be.

This lack of care for interiority becomes particularly glaring toward the end of the book, as the focus of Elise’s life becomes less revolution and more, well, life. She settles down and finds work as a comics translator, and she and her husband—Simon, a friend from her activist days—become founding editors at a new magazine. But Simon, we are told, becomes addicted to heroin and cocaine, an addiction that quickly derails his life and ultimately kills him. These facts—facts at least within the world of the story, as I have been unable to ascertain whether Simon, by that name or any other, was based on a real figure—are related to us entirely coldly, with no pathos whatsoever; this man, whose life had been intertwined with the protagonist’s in one way or another for twenty years, is in death little more than a caption box. Even more strangely, this information is weaved in-between Elise’s growing friendship with one of her comic magazine’s contributors — Jacques Tardi, the real-life husband. There’s a nigh-gleeful abandon here — one man exits, another enters. The circle of life!

The final page, a splash page heaped with narrarion, displays Elise amidst a crowd of demonstrators, fists in the air, voices raised in song. Their song? “Don’t Erase Our Traces,” a 2008 song by—you guessed it—Dominique Grange. As fittingly self-congratulatory ending as any, as Elise narrates that she “wanted to help pass on to our future children the memory of our righteous battles and offer them new revolutionary songs for tomorrow.” As Grange tethers her stand-in, one last time, to her real-life self, she equates her continued productivity with the success of her struggle: even after all these years, she remains pure enough to write. 

Years ago, as I was first becoming aware of my nascent political ideals, I lamented, for a while, our being human, which is to say, the inevitability that we will eventually have to come to a point where we must either compromise our ideals or uphold them while feeling, at least for a moment, really shitty about doing so. I wished for some political transcendence, some fulfillment-beyond-fulfillment that would allow us total resignation to, total acceptance of, the so-called ‘costs’ of conviction.

In Elise and the New Partisans, Dominique Grange and Jacques Tardi paint a picture strikingly similar to that which I so deeply longed for in my teens. Yet it is precisely through that depiction of the dream that they reach its breaking point. If Iris: A Novel for Viewers is a more cynical, sobered look at the global leftist uprising of 1968, crafted in real time, Dominique Grange’s vision, published more than fifty years later, is distinctly more idealized (and naïve), erecting a false image—a spectacle, if you are so inclined—of its own to protect itself from the spectacle externally foisted. A triumphant spectacle, to be sure, but one is forced to wonder: is that all that triumph is? Just self-satisfaction by another name?