Vojna v jarkih (It was the War of the Trenches/C'était la guerre des tranchées) is the first attempt of the French comic artist Jacques Tardi at a historical graphic novel and rightfully regarded as his most important work. Produced in 1993, the novel combines two stories on the First World War – a roughly twenty-page reproduction of a story published in 1983 on a French foot soldier and an approximately one-hundred-page fragmentary narrative from the frontline as the original “War of the Trenches”. A master of historical detail, Jacques Tardi has dedicated a vast part of his rich opus to the period of transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century. With The War of the Trenches he reached an important milestone in the comics medium, by conveying in a plain, direct and shockingly vivid manner the experience of the First World War from the perspective of French soldiers stuck in a muddled and bloody nightmare of the frontline trenches and thus demonstrating once again that the graphic novel is an art form whose bearing, power of expression and width equals any work of contemporary literature, as well as other audio-visual narrative forms.