written by Juan Diaz Canales
illustrated by Juanjo Guarrnido

Blacksad is one of those comics that astounds you with every turn of the page. Its beautiful illustrations pop off the page with vibrant color and detail, while the writing is so sharp and deep that you can’t help but feel you’re getting but a small glimpse into a much, much larger world. If someone told me that Blacksad was the product of preproduction work on a big-budget animated movie that got scrapped, I wouldn’t be surprised. That’s because the book looks like it’s the product of high production values and masters of their craft. But, in reality, this is just pen, ink, and paint, expertly applied by two exceptionally talented creators.

Before I continue to pile effusive praise onto this book, I should probably explain just what it is: Blacksad follows three adventures of John Blacksad, a detective in a mid-20th century America that is populated entirely by anthropomorphic animals. On the surface, this seems like an overly complicated premise—after all, why throw talking animal-people into a perfectly acceptable detective character? I’m not sure what specifically motivated writer Juan Diaz Canales and artist Juanjo Guarrnido to go this route, but using animals allows them to tell standard noir detective tales with far more expressiveness and excitement than they would have had otherwise. Comics are a medium in which people and ideas are reduced down to more easily communicable images and figures. And since noir as a genre tends toward characters and ideas that use animals as stand-ins (“You dirty rat!” “He’s a cold-blooded snake,” etc.), the switch seems so natural that you forget you’re reading about animals. The animal characters, too, seem to allow for more significance and resonance of the characters’ actions than they would if they were simply depicted as humans.
 
For instance, there’s a part in the book’s first adventure when a particular reptilian character finds a moment of humanity shortly before he dies; that moment is heightened because we know just from looking at him (not having known the character long at all) that this is the kind of thing that’s eluded him for all of his fictional existence. Later on, when confronted with yet another reptilian villain Blacksad faces, we look for that same humanity to show, and find it missing. These kinds of moments bring all kinds of questions to mind without ever explicitly discussing them: How much are we slaves to our own nature? Is goodness something inherent in a person because of who and what they are, or is it something that can be found by anyone regardless of their backgrounds? These are deep, exciting issues that the book plays with, all while simply telling exciting detective stories.
 
The plotting, characterization, and dialogue is sharp throughout the book’s three adventures (though there are occasional hiccups when you notice one or another awkward translation from the original Spanish). In addition to providing excellent sources of symbolic resonance, the animals also allow for the illustrations to take on a highly cartoony, expressive look. I suspect that this level of motion and expression wouldn’t have quite the punch if Blacksad were simply about humans. To make an already too long explanation short, the entire aesthetic is an inspired choice, making the book that much more memorable.
 
Simply put, Blacksad, published in English by Dark Horse Comics, is a book that belongs on any serious comic reader’s shelf.