Blacksad

AUTHOR: Díaz Canales, Juan

ARTIST: Juanjo Guarnido (illustrator)

PUBLISHERS: Editions Dargaud (French); Dark Horse Comics (English)

FIRST SERIAL PUBLICATION:Blacksad, 2000-2010 (partial English translation, 2003-2010)

FIRST BOOK PUBLICATION: 2010 (English translation of first three books)

Publication History

The first Blacksad book, Quelque part entre les ombres (Somewhere Within the Shadows) was published in France by Editions Dargaud in 2000, after its creators had also presented it to the publishing houses of Casterman and Delcourt. Ten years earlier, writer Juan Díaz Canales and artist Juanjo Guarnido had met at the Spanish animation studio Lapiz Azul and had decided to create a comic book based on a series of short stories by Díaz Canales. The first book was an immediate success, which allowed the creators to develop the story as a series. Three more books have been published since then: a second one, Arctic-Nation (Arctic Nation in English), in 2003; a third one, Âme rouge (Red Soul), in 2005; and a fourth volume, L’Enfer, le silence (The Hell, The Silence), in 2010.

U.S. publisher ibooks published English-language editions of the first two books in 2003 (Somewhere Within the Shadows) and 2004 (Arctic Nation), along with a collection of sketches and artwork by Guarnido in 2005 (The Sketch Files). After ibooks filed for bankruptcy in 2006, Dark Horse Comics published a collected edition of the first three books in 2010.

Plot

In Somewhere Within the Shadows, Natalia Wilford, a young but celebrated actor, is found murdered. Since she is a former client of private investigator John Blacksad, and also his first lover, he decides to find out who killed her and to avenge her death. Blacksad, a big black cat, discovers that Wilford’s most recent lover, lion and scriptwriter Leon Kronski, has disappeared, and he sets off to find him. Kronski has died as well and has already been hastily buried. When two thugs beat him up for discovering Kronski’s grave, Blacksad feels his instinct is validated: Whoever is responsible must be powerful.

Purely by chance, Blacksad finds out that Ivo Statoc, a toad and one of the richest men in town, had been spurned as a lover by Wilford, who preferred Kronski’s fur to Statoc’s cold skin. Statoc had been enraged with jealousy and ordered both Wilford and her companion killed. Blacksad confronts Statoc, but to his surprise, Statoc congratulates him on his perseverance and tries to enlist him in his operation. Blacksad, however, remains true to his cause.

Arctic Nation opens with the disappearance of a young black girl, Kyle (or “Kayleigh” in certain editions), in a neighborhood that is rife with racial unrest. Blacksad is hired to investigate the case, and together with his sidekick, Weekly, he finds out that local police chief Hans Karup, a polar bear who is involved in a white-power gang called Arctic-Nation, has tried to put the blame on a local black gang.

Karup is rumored to have pedophilic tendencies, and when a bloody dress is found in his car, his own gang executes him. The chief instigator of this violent punishment, a snow fox called Huk, had his own reasons to remove Karup from the scene, as he is Karup’s wife’s (Jezabel’s) lover. In a dramatic turn of events, the hall where Karup’s execution took place burns down, but not before a magpie called Cotton leads Blacksad to Kyle’s hiding place.

Cotton reveals that, with the help of Huk, Jezabel staged Kyle’s disappearance in order to frame her husband. However, the final truth runs even deeper: Jezabel turns out to be Karup’s own daughter, who together with her sister, Dinah, who is Kyle’s mother, had plotted to avenge their black mother, who was abandoned by Karup when she was pregnant.

Book 3, Red Soul, focuses on U.S. and global post-World War II politics. When his latest assignment, being a bodyguard to a wealthy turtle, is less than exciting, Blacksad attends a lecture by Otto Liebber, one of his old teachers. Liebber is an atomic physicist and the inventor of the hydrogen bomb, but he is also a member of a left-wing organization called the Twelve Apostles, a group that included rich benefactor Samuel Gotfield and his fiancé, Alma Mayer; painter Sergei Litvak; and chemist Laszlo Herzl.

After a party, during which Alma and Blacksad become attracted to one another, another member of the group, who happens to look like Liebber, is murdered. Shortly afterward, Liebber hardly escapes a car bombing and goes into hiding. Blacksad finds out that Herzl, a survivor of the Nazi concentration camps, was in fact hunting Liebber, who used to work for the Third Reich.

In the meantime, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Senator Gallo have put the pressure on Gotfield to reveal Liebber’s hiding place, and they kill Litvak in the process. Liebber confides in Blacksad that he has been trying to atone and bring balance to the political spectrum by smuggling the formulas for the hydrogen bomb to the Soviet Union with the help of Gotfield and Litvak, who hides the formulas in one of his works. Gallo tries to frame Blacksad for Litvak’s death, but he settles for a deal when Blacksad threatens to reveal his hidden plans—to create an elite “Noah’s ark” in case of a nuclear holocaust. In the end, Liebber returns to Germany, his suicide is staged, and Blacksad fails to show up at Niagara Falls, where Alma was waiting for him.

In L’Enfer, le silence, Blacksad is in New Orleans. Record producer Faust LaChapelle asks him to track down genius jazz and blues pianist Sebastian “Little Hands” Fletcher, who has disappeared and left his pregnant wife. LaChapelle’s son, Thomas, asks Blacksad to refuse the assignment, stating that his father’s illness has already cost him too much money. Thomas feels betrayed by his absent father and his wife, who is divorcing him, and finds solace in playing protector to Fletcher’s wife, who tells Blacksad and Thomas that Fletcher was all worked up about a song, “Pizzen Blues,” before he disappeared. Fletcher, in the meantime, has been planning to sing this song during an impromptu performance, since, as Blacksad learns from one of his earlier bandmates, it tells the story of the many deaths and disfigurements that occurred in his hometown as a result of Dr. Dupré’s Life Everlasting, a lethal drug sold as a cure for asthma.

Blacksad learns that Dr. Dupré is, in fact, Faust LaChapelle, who has been trying to hide the truth all this time and is dying of a lethal bronchial disease himself. After his performance, Fletcher dies of a shot of heroin laced with strychnine sulfate, at about the same time as Faust dies of his illness. Thomas, Fletcher’s widow, and her child are left to start anew.

Volumes

•Blacksad: Quelque part entre les ombres (2000; Blacksad: Somewhere Within the Shadows, 2003). Private investigator Blacksad disproves the point that money can buy anything by punishing a rich spurned lover who had killed his former girlfriend.

•Blacksad: Arctic-Nation (2003; Blacksad: Arctic Nation, 2004). A heated mix of racial hatred, private history, and sexual intrigue is unraveled before Blacksad’s eyes. Crimes that have been committed in the past come back to haunt the perpetrator (Karup), but the truth is always stranger than it initially seems.

•Blacksad: Âme rouge (2005; Blacksad: Red Soul, 2010). Set to the backdrop of the Cold War, this volume pits Blacksad against a former teacher, a physicist attempting to smuggle formulas for the hydrogen bomb into the Soviet Union. Blacksad and Alma Mayer begin to have feelings for each other.

•Blacksad: L’Enfer, le silence (2010). Blacksad is hired by record producer Faust LaChapelle to find jazzman Sebastian Fletcher, who has disappeared. Blacksad discovers that LaChapelle has a connection to his disappearance.

Characters

•John Blacksad, the protagonist, is a large black tomcat who works as a private investigator. Even though he prefers to use his wits to solve his cases, he resorts to violence if necessary and is known to have murdered at least one man in cold blood. Blacksad strongly believes in justice over gain and in morals over the law.

•Smirnov, a police commissioner, is a German shepherd. Smirnov feels trapped within the limits of the law and feeds information to Blacksad to help him solve cases. In Red Soul, the two become friends.

•Weekly, a brown least weasel, is Blacksad’s sidekick. He works as a gossip reporter for a tabloid newspaper called What’s News. Weekly got his nickname because he bathes only once a week.

•Ivo Statoc, the antagonist in Somewhere Within the Shadows, is a rich and powerful businessman who believes he can buy anything. This attitude allows Blacksad to assert his moral integrity.

•Hans Karup, one of the antagonists in Arctic Nation, is a polar bear, a chief of police, and a member of a white-power organization. Blacksad and Karup instantly dislike each other.

•Jezabel, the wife (and daughter) of Karup, is the embodiment of pure revenge, as she is solely focused on bringing about her father’s downfall with the help of her lover and her sister, Dinah.

•Samuel Gotfield, is a billionaire dalmatian of feeble nature and communist who betrays his friends at the first signs of pressure.

•Otto Liebber, a nuclear physicist and an owl in Red Soul, was Blacksad’s mentor, but he turns out to be a former Nazi and a spy for the Soviet Union. Liebber is driven by an urge to set right the wrongs he has brought about.

•Alma Mayer, a cat and a writer, is Blacksad’s love interest in Red Soul. She embodies the tragic impossibility of love in Blacksad’s life.

•Faust LaChapelle, a billy goat, is a record producer and former snake oil salesman. His main role is to illustrate how truth always prevails.

•Sebastian Fletcher is a dog and a talented pianist; a heroin addict, he is troubled by what he knows about what has been done to his friends and cannot live with that knowledge.

Artistic Style

The contributing factor to Blacksad’s initial success (of the first issue, 300,000 copies were sold in France alone) was Guarnido’s artistic style. Before Blacksad, Guarnido worked for the Walt Disney Studios in Montreuil, where he was the lead animator for the Sabor the leopard in Tarzan (1999). His mastery of animal physiognomy and movement is unique: Guarnido’s characters actually move the way animals do and he also knows the secret to making them seem believable as humanoids. They are not just four-legged creatures or people with animal heads but a perfect mixture of the two.

This effect is strengthened by the level of realism Guarnido puts in his settings and sceneries. He makes great effort to accurately document the look and feel of a typical American city in the early 1950’s, and this results in detailed apartments, state rooms, streets, and alleyways, all of which seem to breathe, as if they were part of the cast themselves. Guarnido’s accuracy does not result in players in front of a cardboard setting—his characters belong to the city, and it fully surrounds them.

A third aspect of Gaurnido’s style is the large amount of dynamism he injects into his pages. No two pages in Blacksad have a similar layout, and the classic nine-panel grid is absent completely. Guarnido carefully chooses the one single panel that is correct for the scene he is drawing, but within the panel he also sets up his “camera” to gain maximum effect.

The final important feature in Guarnido’s art is his use of color. In most of his panels, he employs fairly realistic coloring, though in his more recent pages he has started to use expressive shadow-and-light contrasts. For dramatic effect, Guarnido bathes certain key scenes in different dominant hues, ranging from red to blue. This is predominantly the case for flashbacks and narrated scenes, in which one of the characters tells something to another.

Themes

Blacksad echoes some of the main themes associated with the hard-boiled detective genre. To begin with, it is an urban comic; even when the story takes place in a suburb, Blacksad remains a city detective. The city, however, is more than a backdrop: It is a personification of the behavior of its inhabitants, who treat one another like “animals” for their own gain.

Blacksad distances himself from this behavior, however. He believes strongly in moral correctness and ensures that the wicked are punished. A crime may be committed in the most artful way, but it will always come back to harm the perpetrator. Justice is more important than money, even to the extent that Blacksad might refuse payment for his services. It is quite interesting, in this light, that the plight of and possibilities for the purely innocent characters have changed over the years. In the final scene of Arctic Nation, Blacksad looks with despair at the young girl Kyle, uncertain of what the future has in store for her. At the end of L’Enfer, le silence, however, he seems to believe in an optimistic future for Thomas and his newfound family.

In Blacksad’s own life, love is at best an episodic affair. Blacksad’s love interests die, are too remote to even be considered a possibility, or are lost for him because of dramatic consequences of the story.

Blacksad may be a detective by trade, but he does not excel at his job: Most of the big breaks in his investigations result from happenstance, such as from things he overhears, information that is told to him by one of the parties involved, or scenes into which he happens to stumble. Blacksad is not in control of the situation but, rather, sails along until he can make his stand.

A final important theme, which is the background of all the others, is the United States during the 1950’s in all its glory and garishness. The United States is the land of opportunity and of great art, music, writing, and science; but at the same time, it is a place where racism, corruption, and political bigotry are allowed to flourish, with tragic consequences for all involved.

Impact

By using anthropomorphic animals as characters, the creators of Blacksad have found an interesting way to reintroduce classic detective themes and motifs into current-day comics. If the animals were to be replaced with human beings, only a fairly standard, albeit cleverly written, hard-boiled detective story would remain. Díaz Canales has often cited classic detective stories, by the likes of Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler, and comics, such as the Alack Sinner series (by Carlos Sampayo and José Muñoz, which began in 1975), as influences on his work. By adding the aspect of the animal characters to the examples these predecessors set, Díaz Canales and Guarnido have helped to reinvent or reinvigorate the genre.

Interestingly, the series has changed, even within the span of only four books. The first book, Somewhere Within the Shadows, was a fairly straightforward, classic detective story. The two following stories, Arctic Nation and Red Soul, were dense, intricate stories with a sizable cast and several intertwining plotlines that require the reader’s full attention. In the fourth episode, L’Enfer, le silence, Díaz Canales and Guarnido have opted for a relatively simple story, but they tell it in a convoluted way, using many intertwining flashbacks, narrated sequences, and fragments that mirror one another, as if the book were a piece of postwar New Orleans jazz music.

Even though Blacksad has had a fairly slow-paced production cycle, even for a European comic (only four titles in ten years), the series has had almost unanimously positive critical acclaim from the start. Similarly, with each new book, the series proves itself to be widely appreciated; though new titles are not staged as multimedia events, as is the case with bestsellers such as XIII (first published in 1984), Largo Winch (first published in novel form in the 1970’s), or Lanfeust (first published in 1994), Blacksad remains a steady seller with a loyal audience.

Further Reading

Eisner, Will. The Spirit (1940-1952).

Hergé. The Adventures of Tintin (1929-1976).

Spiegelman, Art. Maus: A Survivor’s Tale (1986).

Bibliography

Díaz Canales, Juan. “Blacksad.” Review of Blacksad by Martha Cornog. Library Journal 135, no. 15 (September 15, 2010): 49.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. “Blacksad 2: Arctic-Nation (Book).” Review of Blacksad. Publishers Weekly 251, no. 24 (June 14, 2010): 46.

Horsten, Toon. “The Cat’s out of the Bag.” Forbidden Planet International, December 10, 2010. http://forbiddenplanet.co.uk/blog/2010/the-cats-out-of-the-bag-juan-diaz-canales-talks-about-blacksad-4-part-2.

Ng, Suat Tong. “Commercial Interlude: Blacksad.” The Hooded Utilitarian, September 27, 2010. http://www.tcj.com/hoodedutilitarian/2010/09/commercial-interlude-blacksad.

Preiss, Byron, and Howard Zimmerman. Year’s Best Graphic Novels, Comics, Manga: From “Blankets” to “Demo” to “Blacksad.” New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2005.