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A review by uosdwisrdewoh
For Justice: The Serge & Beate Klarsfeld Story by Pascal Bresson
4.0
This comic book adaptation of the memoirs of a fervent Nazi-hunting couple serves as both a great introduction to their lives and an involving read in its own right. After World War II, Serge, who lost his father to the Holocaust in the French occupation, and Beate, a fiercely independent German, married and rallied furiously to bring hidden Nazis to justice.
I feared that this would be a stiff adaptation, but the story is immediately griping, with Pascal Bresson’s interleaved flashbacks (set off magnificently in different hues through Sylvain Dorange’s artwork) throwing you right into the eventful lives and fierce activism of this fascinating couple.
At times the dense layering of names can overwhelm, leading the reader to flip back to previous pages more than in other comics, but this would be hard to avoid when adopting real-life memoirs that would naturally be more complicated and less neat than fiction. These events have been simplified, I’m sure, but the book retains a nice balance.
Mark Waid’s adaptation of the dialogue is also top notch, as far as I can tell even improving the conversational flow from the original French.
The final scene jumps to the present day, and is a bit of an exposition dump; it’s the comic equivalent of the blocks of on-screen text at the end of documentaries. It’s not the smoothest conclusion, but it allows most of the preceding scenes to focus on the more gripping sections of their early life while giving some closure on later developments that don’t lend themselves as readily to dramatic staging.
In the end, I was impressed by this and would love to dive into the prose memoirs from which this is adapted.
I feared that this would be a stiff adaptation, but the story is immediately griping, with Pascal Bresson’s interleaved flashbacks (set off magnificently in different hues through Sylvain Dorange’s artwork) throwing you right into the eventful lives and fierce activism of this fascinating couple.
At times the dense layering of names can overwhelm, leading the reader to flip back to previous pages more than in other comics, but this would be hard to avoid when adopting real-life memoirs that would naturally be more complicated and less neat than fiction. These events have been simplified, I’m sure, but the book retains a nice balance.
Mark Waid’s adaptation of the dialogue is also top notch, as far as I can tell even improving the conversational flow from the original French.
The final scene jumps to the present day, and is a bit of an exposition dump; it’s the comic equivalent of the blocks of on-screen text at the end of documentaries. It’s not the smoothest conclusion, but it allows most of the preceding scenes to focus on the more gripping sections of their early life while giving some closure on later developments that don’t lend themselves as readily to dramatic staging.
In the end, I was impressed by this and would love to dive into the prose memoirs from which this is adapted.