The other day I read two of the stories of Adele Blanc Sec by Tardi. It is a comic book series telling the adventures of a woman private detective in the Paris of the Belle Epoque ( the 1900 years). The stories are a grotesque feuilleton dealing with dinosaurs and Egyptian mummies coming back to life in the jardin des plantes, with the help of a sect of Parisian notables who worship an Assyrian demon. It seems to be coming straight from the popular tabloids of those days, with their urban legends of jack the ripper and crocodiles in the sewers and the jews kidnapping little children. This glutinous package of tall tales gets a strange power from the way tardi draws his pictures. He makes heavy use of the colour sepia, which was the colour of photographs of those days, so that all the pictures seem like photos you would have found in a drawer of your grandmother’s wardrobe. This use of colour adds to the feeling of comfortable distance I feel about the whole period ( the 1900’s) : a feeling of a period which is far away in time, yet still within a human range ( the time of my grandparents). I guess that there is an emotional border we put to the past, beyond which it becomes the past of history books. In my case, it is the 1900’s, but maybe for my son, it will be the 1940’s.

Or maybe there is something special about the 1900s themselves, which will make people in the future look back to that period in the same way as we think of Homeric Greece or Vedic India: the times when the west reached its peak of power, and industrial civilization itself was as its rawest, fullest expression: the age of railways, telegraphs, chemical warfare, steamer ships, captains of industry, colonies and colonial expositions, the first skyscrapers and the airplanes. Tardi’s stories have a peculiar ring of truthfulness about them, as if that age seemed just right for baby dinosaurs to crack open their eggs in museums, and for police captains to roam the streets looking for victims to offer in sacrifice to an Assyrian demon: make that kind of story take place say in the 1950’s and it would seem childish and archaic, move it back to the 1850’s and it would feel in advance of its times. But their peculiar brand of craziness comes in as exactly the kind of counter energy that the bourgeois smugness of the 1900’s would naturally create as reaction: something loathsome yet whole, of a huge ancient power breaking forth to destroy modern civilization. Lovecraft’s monsters – he wrote in the 20’s but was very much a man of 1900 by temperament – also fit in perfectly well with that setting.