Blacksad Volume 1: Somewhere Within the Shadows
The Blacksad series, Book 1
Juan Diaz Canales, illustrations by Juanjo Guarnido
Dark Horse Publishing
Fiction, Fantasy/Graphic Novel/Mystery
**** (Good)
DESCRIPTION: Black cat detective John Blacksad hasn't been the luckiest of guys; his affair with actress Natalia was one of the few high points in a dark and bitter life, for all that it ended long ago. Looking down at her murdered body, he isn't about to let the killer walk away. The trail leads John from the darkest rat-infested gutter to the highest echelons of power, but a cat with nothing left to lose is a cat who won't give up.
REVIEW: A noir story with an anthro cast of animals and near-humans, Blacksad is something I haven't quite seen the like of before, and I'm still not sure what I think of it on some levels. John Blacksad's the typical hard-boiled detective whose world consists not of black and white but rather cigarette ash gray and booze stain brown, beaten down by an unjust world yet still unable to let a wrong go unpunished when it strikes close to home. Surrounding him is a small cast of other genre staples: the police dog Smirnov (with an implied history of more-or-less cooperation, if not actual friendship), the damsel in distress (deceased, save in flashbacks), shady thugs (from pigs to rats to weasels, with rhinos and bears for when a curious cat needs a real smackdown), and an elusive, seemingly untouchable bad guy. Also typical of the genre is the sexism running through the tale; many of the women tend to be more human than animal (possibly for objectification purposes in the illustrations) and invariably weaker. Blacksad ends up on the wrong side of numerous fists (and nearly the wrong end of numerous bullets) as he wends his way toward the killer in a fairly tight plot with a dark climax. It's a decent story all in all, and the half-mark it nearly lost on the tiresome sexism was earned back for overall artistic originality, though I doubt I'll follow Blacksad further.
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