Blacksad by Juan Díaz Canales, Juanjo Guarnido
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
How two Spanish gents got such great hold of American detective noir as this is hard to figure out, but great hold they do. Blacksad is the protagonist of a trio of “episodes,” each of them a American 50s tale of darkness, despair, violence, and honor, a perfect private detective of the Chandler mold.
It’s an anthropomorphic comic, noteworthy not for some elaborate worldbuilding that explains how dogs and cats and storks live in a common society like ours, but with the animal forms simply serving as a visual shortcut to the inner essence of the man or woman beneath. When you see a turtle, or a mink, or a surly black cat, or a large polar bear, it tells you a lot, right up front, about the character.
This is helped quite a bit by Guarnido’s beautiful art, which is a combo of detail, fluid motion, and just enough cartoonyness to remain clear and clean. (Guarnido won an Eisner this year for Best Painter / Multimedia Artist for this work.)
As important as the art, here, are the actual stories, and they’re very well done. The three tales are a scosh uneven — the first an archetypical noir murder mystery, the second a child kidnapping tied to race politics (with fur color nicely standing in for skin color), and the third (and somewhat least) tale looking at the Cold War and red-baiting era. But though not all three are as good as the others, they are all of high quality.
Highly recommended both to noir/detective fans and to anthropomorphics lovers.