New York Mon Amour, Tardi Jacques, Legrand Benjamin, Grange Dominique

Many years ago, Jacques Tardi was introduced to American audiences with Manhattan, a grim and grimy story of depression, madness and suicide in New York City whose appearance in the premiere issue of RAW magazine was instrumental in defining both that magazine s virtuoso aesthetic and its dark sensibility. Three decades later, New York Mon Amour collects Manhattan and three other tales of the Big Apple rendered by Tardi with just as much panache and you-are-there detail as Paris or the trenches of World War I in his other books in one spectacular volume.

Aside from Manhattan, the centerpiece of the book is the graphicnovel Cockroach Killer, written by Benjamin Legrand. This violent, surreal conspiracy thriller, starring a hapless exterminator namedWalter, features a striking two-color black-and-red technique uniquein Tardi s oeuvre, and remains one of the cartoonist s most startling, confounding works. New York Mon Amour is rounded off with two shortstories written by Dominique Grange: It s So Hard (starring JohnLennon but not that John Lennon and never before published inEnglish) and The Killing of Hung (a story of revenge andredemption).