The mysterious appeal of Blacksad

Good noir comics are hard to find. Good noir comics featuring a feline protagonist are even rarer. The French/Spanish comic series Blacksad by writer Juan Diaz Canales and artist Juanjo Guarnido doesn’t exactly help matters. While detective John Blacksad is indeed a black cat in a completely anthropomorphized world, it’s just not a good comicinstead, it’s a great one.Originally released as albums by French publisher Dargaud, the Blacksad series currently consists of four volumes, three of which (Somewhere Within the Shadows, Arctic Nation, and Red Soul) have been collected as the English-language volume Blacksad from Dark Horse.Whatever you think you expect from a mystery series with animals, Blacksad is sure to shock and surprise you. Each of the three stories draws from actual history to create a time and place that’s eerily recognizable, and yet given a fantastical twist by the characters found within their pages. Goanna assassins and owl nuclear physicists are just a few of the players that Canales and Guarnido expertly move across Blacksad’s stage.Plus, everything is illustrated in Guarnido’s beautiful and unique style, which combines clean lines and lush watercolors for a remarkably dirty worldviewperfect for Canales’s postmodern noir writing style.Don’t let the fact that the characters are animals fool youthis is very much a book for adults, with all the trappings of typical hard-boiled fiction (sex, lies, and violence). For mature readers looking for a mind-bending experience, though, Blacksad certainly delivers. Buy the book and pass it on to friends who still think of comics as solely the realm of superheroes. There are few heroes of any sort to be found in Blacksad‘s darkly beautiful pages, but there is a sort of justice which will appeal to fans of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, James Cain, and other noir authors.For a couple years, there have been rumors that Blacksad will be making its way to the big screen, possibly with Alexandre Aja (The Hills Have Eyes, Piranha 3D) at the helm. The project appears to have been stalled for now, but Dark Horse’s lavish presentation of the first three volumes is a suitably cinematic experience that you can read over and over until the film is released.