You Are There

One of the earliest full-length, standalone graphic novels to be\npublished in Europe, and certainly one of the best and most\noriginal, Ici M me was serialized in the adult French\ncomics monthly (A suivre) in the early 1980s and then\nreleased in book form. A quarter of a century later, this dark,\nfunny, consistently surprising masterpiece has finally been\ntranslated into English.

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An unexpected yet smoothly confident collaboration between the\ndarkly cynical Jacques Tardi and the playful fantasist Jean-Claude\nForest (of Barbarella fame), You Are There is set on a\nsmall island off the coast of France, where unscrupulous landowners\nhave succeeded in overtaking the land from the last heir of a\npreviously wealthy family. That heir, whose domain, in a Beckettian\ntwist, is now reduced to the walls that border these patches of\nland he used to own, prowls the walls all day, eking out a living\nby collecting tolls at each gate. His seemingly hopeless struggle\nto recover his birthright becomes complicated as the government\nsees a way of using his plight for the sake of political\nexpediency, and the romantic intervention of the daughter of one of\nthe landowners (who has her own sordid history with the politician)\nengenders further difficulties, culminating in an apocalyptic,\nhallucinatory finale.

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Set in Tardi \“s preferred early 20th century milieu, You Are\nThere is drawn in his crisp 1980s neo- Sclear line style,\ngorgeously detailed, elegantly stylized, with impossibly deep slabs\nof black. You Are There is a feast for both the eyes and\nthe brain.

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