After fifteen years, Jacques Tardi concludes his series “Adèle Blanc-Sec”.

DIt all started 100 meters from here: in the Galérie de Paléontologie of the Natural History Museum of Paris, the famous exhibition hall with the dinosaur skeletons in the Jardin des Plantes. A pterodactyl hatched there on November 4, 1911, bringing chaos to the French capital. Right in the middle is Adèle Blanc-Sec, a dime novelist who, as a private investigator, sets out to find the person responsible. This isn’t the innocent pterodactyl, but a group of mad scientists whose numbers have grown over the thirteen years of events. Everything obeys the laws of those serialized novels that Adèle writes herself. That means: conspiracies, supernatural things, monsters. What one likes to read about in Paris at the end of the Belle Époque.

And still likes to read today: in the ten-volume comic cycle “Adèle Blanc-Sec”, one of the formative series of this profession. In addition, one of the few that still focuses on a woman, and one that contradicts all comic clichés: no radiant beauty, no amorous interests, no sensitivities either. Adéle stands her ground and shames all the men around her. When she finally clarified everything, in May 1924, one world war and a thousand entanglements later, she is back in the Galérie de Paléontologie and everything is fine; she even grants a first kiss (of a mummy). But in the laboratories of the Jardin des Plantes, the next threat is already breaking out: a tiny creature with the scientific name Milnesium tardigradum.

The great chronicler of Paris

This name will have given the cute tardigrade the role of Adèle’s last nemesis. Because the author of their adventures is called Jacques Tardi. He is now 76 years old and a living legend. The comic artist hardly ever leaves his house near the Père-Lachaise cemetery in Paris, but this evening he is sitting in the Jardin des Plantes, whose natural history museum he loves so much that he made it the starting and ending point of that comic cycle, which has now come to an end after 46 years: with the release of the tenth album about Adèle Blanc-Sec, “Le Bébé des Buttes-Chaumont”.

To kick off the series, Tardis publishers invited Casterman to the Eiffel Tower on May 4, 1976, another prominent location in the comic that has much more to do with the city of Paris than its convoluted plot. Tardi is considered the great graphic chronicler of their history since the Commune of 1871 (about which he made a four-volume comic). Now, for the finale of Tardi’s life’s work – how else to call “Adèle Blanc-Sec” despite dozens of other books, after almost half a century of work? – we went to the book launch in the Jardin des Plantes: in the auditorium of the Natural History Museum, the Amphithéâtre Verniquet, named after the architect who built it in 1787, three hundred meters from the main building, on the edge of the park. The building is a rather unknown part of Paris. How fitting that we get to know it thanks to the comic, even if it doesn’t appear in it.

Tardi has Dominique Grange with him, his wife, herself a legend of the 1968 protest movement as a singer (Tardi also drew a comic about her: “Elise”), and when the couple performed in the packed amphitheater, a new song was played by the now 82-year-old . “Immortelle Adéle” is the title, but a drawing by Tardi is projected, which reads: “Don’t wait for the sequel. There aren’t any.” Every previous volume had ended openly and announced that all questions would be clarified by the next one. This time, however, it actually says “Fin” and an explicit warning to all “forgers” who might be tempted to resume the series. Tardi also scoffs at such examples as “Blake and Mortimer” or “Spirou”, which are continued by young authors: It is so much more attractive to come up with something of your own.

The plot of “Adèle” was the result of spontaneous ideas for 46 years; even the genre-typical titles of the younger albums (“The drowned man with two heads”, “The secret of the deep” or “The devilish labyrinth”) owe their existence to a choice that Tardi left to his children, with whom he gave a list at the end of the 1980s presented options. Since then he has been working off their favourites.

Why it took forty-six years

In the amphitheater you can find out why it took so long this time. Tardi first got in the way of his father’s life story, which he absolutely wanted to tell (for the three volumes “I, René Tardi, Prisoner of War in Stalag II B” he received, among other things, the most important award for historical biography, the Einhard Prize of the city of Seligenstadt ), then the pandemic slowed him down. But not through isolation, because he loves that, but through the theme of a willful spread of disease prepared in the ninth volume – Tardi didn’t even want to appear as a fictitious conspiracy theorist. The Islamist attacks of 2015 also made him think, because there were still six cloned living bombs to be detonated in his final volume. Now the distance seemed big enough to him. And so there are plenty of bang effects in “Le Bébé de Buttes-Chaumont”.

How does that and the wild imagination of the whole thing get along with the gentleman down on the stage? Tardi may seem mild, but he’s a staunch anarchist. He scornfully refused the Legion of Honor award, he is committed to the left. And if he can wreak havoc in bourgeois Paris, he’s happy to do it – if only on paper. But for a comic artist, that’s the stuff dreams are made of.