Review: Run Like Crazy Run Like Hell

A few things to know about Run Like Crazy Run Like Hell by Jacques Tardi:

1. It's set in the early '70s, but it was published in French in 2011, and just published in English by Fantagraphics this month. 
2. Although using panels from the inside to decorate the front cover, back cover and frontispiece is great graphic design, do your best not to read any of them, or else they may give too much away. 
3. Tardi's style for drawing people may look cartoony, but they're grounded in reality, and this is a hard-boiled, messed-up noir story.

Jean-Patrick Manchette was France's Raymond Chandler. In '72 he wrote Run Like Crazy Run Like Hell. As a result, this adaptation contains effortless little (and sometimes regrettable) markers of the period that might be hard to recreate deliberately. Manchette's lean works are full of trenchant criticism of France's society, and his stories follow characters that most of his readers had forgotten about: the poor, the disenfranchised and the crazy.

Tardi, following Manchette's lead, takes the characters at face value. We follow along inside the mind of a practiced killer, or a neurotic and disaffected woman, without apology or self-consciousness. Once you get used to the drawing style, the characters are as blunt and stark as in any crime movie.

(That drawing style is Tardi's version of the French ligne claire ("clear line") style, which puts simply-drawn figures in detailed backgrounds, using realistic props. The line has a uniform weight, and there's generally no hatching or shading, just flat black areas. Hergé pioneered and perfected the style with Tintin.)

Sometimes, the narration's terseness left me confused: A couple of the scene transitions were hard for me to notice, since there's no inflection between one third-person narrator and another.

Without giving away anything about the plot, I'll just say that things really get nuts. Before long, the story picks up the momentum of a runaway train. You can read the whole story in one feverish night (like I did). The violence is sudden, brutal and cathartic.

At the end, you're left with characters who are compromised, with outsiders still on the outside, and with a really weird take on innocence.

Cartoonists killed in France

If you've been listening to the news, then you know that twelve people at the satirical French magazine Charlie Hebdo were killed today. They included five cartoonists, including the magazine's editor. At least eleven others were wounded.

The cartoonists were Charb (editor Stéphane Charbonnier), Cabu (Jean Cabut), Georges Wolinski, Tignous (Bernard Verlhac), and Honoré (Philippe Honoré).

Wolinski received the Grand Prix of Angoulême in 2005. There's a great article about him, and about cartooning in France, here. I didn't know about him. According to a quick Google search, his cartoons seem to be mostly just really racy.

The always-edgy magazine took pride in knocking over revered figures of all stripes, but its treatment of Islam is probably the most controversial. In 2012, the magazine courted outrage among Muslims by publishing cartoons of Muhammad, causing France to close embassies and schools in over 20 countries out of fear of reprisals (and causing the editor to be guarded by a police officer, who was also killed today). The cartoons were derisive, insulting and in at least one case obscene. And even if they hadn't been, just depicting the face of Muhammad is not done by observant Muslims.

But injunctions like that are to Charlie Hebdo like a red rag to a bull -- particularly where Islam is concerned. France (the white part, that is) has a long and problematic relationship with Islam and Muslims (see "The Battle of Algiers" and the entire 20th century).

The shooting has done little to stir sympathy for anyone offended by the cartoons. Both the French and American governments have condemned the shooting as an act of terrorism and as a doomed attempt to stifle free speech. Thousands of people have chanted or posted "Je suis Charlie!" ("I am Charlie!") in solidarity.

There's a big conversation we could have about the role of cartoonists in liberal democracies. Is a cartoonist meant to knock down anything that someone else puts on a pedestal, out of spite for pedestals? Or does there need to be more to it than that? If a cartoonist doesn't take a swing when she sees an opening, even or especially when it would cause an outcry, is she allowing herself to be censored?

Without excusing the slaughter in any way, I think that Charlie Hebdo (and before them, the Dutch magazine Jyllands-Posten) acted in a childish and oppositional way. Someone said "Don't draw Muhammad," and so they drew the most disgusting cartoons of Muhammad they could think of. Yeah, it's their right, but it's happening in a larger context of French people saying Muslims suck, and that French Muslims aren't altogether French. You don't have to hurl insults in someone's face to establish your freedom of expression. And publishing the cartoons didn't exactly advance the conversation between moderates and extremists -- in France or anywhere else.

But that's academic now. Now, things have gone tragic. Now, twelve people are dead -- including four cartoonists. The world is poorer without them.