Blacksad is an detective story set in 1940's France, with a very film noir feel. The comic is written by Juan Diaz Canales and illustrated by Juanjo Guarnido, (who formally worked at Disney).
In my opinion, the art is the best thing about Blacksad. It is beautiful. The anthropomorphic characters are extremely expressionful, and illustrated perfectly in every drawing. The writing and story are also brilliant, with characters being very individual. My only issue with the comic, is something artist Jim Steranko talks about in the introduction.
"Rather than animals who look like people, the creators' approach is predicated on people who resemble animals. There's a major difference and it's not as remote as it seems. Who hasn't linked a shrill librarian to a bird or a construction worker to a bear or an old aunt to a cow? By animalising their characters, Guarnido and Diaz invite readers to enter an arena where the animals are somewhat less than funny - one that is relatively easy to accept because the premise is so charming and skillfully conceived." - Jim Steranko
The issue I have is that while the art and world are brilliantly done, there is alot of missed opportunities lying in the basis of the world. For example, the height of the characters. Blacksad, the main character who is a cat (and I mean like house cat not big cat) is a similar size to the Polar bear character. What I am trying to say is the characters have the height range of humans, not animals. Personally I think the scale of different animals would have been brilliant to see, and how they live together. Perhaps I think this is because I came too the same creative decision about size and chose the opposite, confident that it would be a far more interesting and make the world more diverse. Loosing this also looses some of the most fascinating qualities of animals, such as the sheer size of a bear or even an elephant and how impressive, powerful and daunting that can be. All this is lost, making these characters look weaker than the animal they are based on actually is.
The other issuse I have is the level on anthropomorphism is somewhat inconsistent. Such as Blacksad doesn't have a tail. Why? no idea. But some other characters do, such as the Artic fox. This I found was strange and made the world feel, poorly designed. There is also no talk of where the carnivores food comes from, soon as their normal diet are now living people. My final criticism is similar to the one above: the women. The women have female human bodies, hair and only really have snouts that resemble animals at all, which makes it very difficult to figure out what animal it is meant to be.
This said, Blacksad is still an extremely good comic that I really do highly recommend. I think that the reason I find these 'areas for improvement' or things I would change, is because it does bare many resemblances to the anthropomophic world we are creating, but there is so much I have and will choose to do differently. In Blacksad, it just feels unnecessary to the story that these characters are animals, as it serves no real purpose other than it looks good, which to me, feels like opportunities wasted. That said, it is still one of the best comics out there at the moment, if not for anything else the incredible art makes it worth the price.
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