Blacksad

by Juan Díaz Canales, Juanjo Guarnido (Illustrator)

Overview

Private investigator John Blacksad is up to his feline ears in mystery, digging into the backstories behind murders, child abductions, and nuclear secrets. Guarnido's sumptuously painted pages and rich cinematic style bring the world of 1950s America to vibrant life, with Canales weaving in fascinating tales of conspiracy, racial tension, and the "red scare" Communist witch hunts of the time. Guarnido reinvents anthropomorphism in these pages, and industry colleagues no less than Will Eisner, Jim Steranko, and Tim Sale are fans!

Whether John Blacksad is falling for dangerous women or getting beaten to within an inch of his life, his stories are, simply put, unforgettable.

* Dark Horse is very proud to present the first three Blacksad stories in a beautiful hardcover collection, completely relettered to the artist's specifications and with the latest album, Red Soul, in English for the very first time.

* This internationally acclaimed series has won nearly a dozen prestigious awards — including the Angoulême Comics Festival prizes for Best Series and Best Artwork-and is a three-time Eisner Award nominee.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781595823939
Publisher:	Dark Horse Comics
Publication date:	06/22/2010
Series:	Blacksad
Pages:	184
Sales rank:	106,242
Product dimensions:	8.60(w) x 10.90(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Born in Madrid in 1972, Juan Díaz Canales began his career at 18 for the Spanish animation studio Lápiz Azul, where he and Juanjo Guarnido first met. After Guarnido moved to Paris, the two traded ideas about the project that became Blacksad, a series of graphic albums written by Díaz Canales as a 1950s noir. The writer now juggles scripting for comics and animation as well as directing for television. While Blacksad was Canales’s first published comics work, he has collaborated with several artists, most recently with Antonio Lapone on the Eisner-nominated Gentlemind, co-written with Díaz Canales’s wife Teresa Valero.    
 
Juanjo Guarnido was born in Granada, Spain, in 1967. After meeting Juan Díaz Canales at the Lápiz Azul animation studio, Guarnido moved to Paris in 1993 to join the Walt Disney Studios satellite in Montreuil, where he worked as an animator. While there, Guarnido began drawing his first graphic album, working long-distance with Díaz Canales toward the 2000 publication of Blacksad: Somewhere within the Shadows.  The overwhelming success of the title has allowed Guarnido to take on other projects, like Sorcelleries with writer Teresa Valero and the recent best-selling Les Indes Fourbes with writer Alain Ayroles.

Editorial Reviews

First making waves a decade ago, Blacksad, created in Spain, published in France, has since garnered well-deserved critical success and status as an international bestseller. Writer Díaz and illustrator Guarnido take the detective noir genre and breathe new life into it with a trio of anthropomorphic animal gumshoe dramas centering around John Blacksad, a methodical PI who conducts his investigations in early 1950s America, a post-WWII society deals with upheavals involving racism and the "Red Scare." Within this atmosphere of ready-to-explode tension, the creators weave what can only be called narrative magic. This current edition collects the three graphic novels that have been released to date, the first being a standard (though beautifully executed) murder mystery, the second centering on the machinations of a white supremacist organization and those whose lives it has thrown into a very personal bedlam (perhaps the most affecting of the lot), and the third addressing the perceived threat of communism within the United States. All of this material is riveting, and Guarnido's artwork is atmospheric and full of indelibly captured characters--he's a true master of the form. Blacksad is a comics classic, and American readers are fortunate to have these first three in one volume. (June)

Publishers Weekly

A European classic reappears in English, and a rich gift it is. This noir thriller set in 1950s America stars a cast of anthropomorphic animals, with the dirty-handed hero an impeccably trenchcoated black cat. John Blacksad is a sort of private investigator, and these three stories visit territory both familiar and unusual. Our hero's lost love is inexplicably murdered, a misinterpreted killing rocks a white supremacist movement, and a coterie of radical intelligentsia crosses agendas with a version of Commie-hunter Joe McCarthy. The second story, especially, offers complex and subtle plotting that earned an Angoulême award. But story aside, Blacksad soars on the art. If anyone could convince you that animal-headed beings could be real, these artists do. The evocative character renditions, draftsmanship, and painted colors simply take the breath away, from the polar bear police chief turned bad to the hog bartender, cockerel "Senator Gallo" (McCarthy), and bad guy reptilians. VERDICT A prime ambassador for the adult comic, Blacksad reinvents funny animals to a whole new purpose: suspenseful, sophisticated, and beautifully visualized drama with violence and sensual sex quite appropriate to plot and readership. Highly recommended for adult collections.—M.C.

Library Journal