This is wonderful graphical novel. Both story and art are exquisite - panels, pacing, perspective, framing.... pure joy to read and look at.

When you look into those frames showing our protagonist in center and whole bunch of characters and situations in the background ..... it cannot but bring Alex Raymond, Hal Foster or Milton Caniff to mind.

Highly recommended to anyone who enjoys the comics, art and great story combined :) ( )

Looked beautiful, kinda ended up thinking "so what?" The plots (essentially noir-ish mysteries) were the weakest part - they really made no sense, and the developments seemed entirely arbitrary. The story dealing with racism was particularly heavy-handed. Would have been very disappointed if I'd bought this on the basis of the art, but still may get the next volume out of the library. Kinda beautiful, but so what? ( )

Come for the story and stay for the amazing art work ( )

Series Info/Source: This is the first of three volumes in the Blacksad series. I got a copy of this as a Christmas gift from my husband.

Thoughts: I enjoyed this quite a bit. The drawing is amazing, using mainly muted tones and is amazingly detailed. I loved the variety of facial expressions all these different anthropomorphic characters have. The stories are engaging, very well done and easy to follow.

This volume includes three separate stories featuring Blacksad. Blacksad is a cat/man that is a private investigator in America during the 1950’s “red scare” era. All of the characters are done as animals but are very human in their actions. The type of animal chosen to represent a character is mainly based on the primary characteristic of that character. For example; bouncer is a gorilla, sneaky snitch is a rat…etc.

In general it was really well done but also very adult (there are numerous sex scenes). My one complaint is how the female characters are portrayed. While there is great variety in both animal type and visual appearance to the male characters in this book, all the females look very much the same. In fact every single female character is incredibly slender in a deer-like way, has huge prey-like eyes, a pert nose, and gigantic human breasts. The human breasts were a little weird for me since they are featured prominently in full glory but on women who are supposed to be deer, dogs, or other slender animals. This aspect left a bit of a bad taste in my mouth. You don’t see any male nudity really.

Despite the above, this was incredibly well done and a fascinating look at both history and an interesting way to handle an anthropomorphic graphic novel for adults.

My Summary (4/5): Overall I enjoyed this. I really loved the artwork color and detail. The stories are engaging and well done. The graphic novel has the perfect noir type of atmosphere and Blacksad is exactly the kickbutt PI you would expect from this era. The odd portrayal of the female characters throughout left me with a bad taste in my mouth though. I would definitely recommend checking this out but didn’t enjoy it enough to get the next couple books in the series. ( )

High quality graphic novel with excellent illustrations. I love that the characters are all animal-people. Great expressive faces by illustrator, Juanjo Guarnido. Black tomcat John Blacksad is a detective, and the three stories bound in this volume address societal issues, such as rich vs. poor (greed), racism, and facism/communism, all couched in a crime format. Really looking forward to reading the next two stories. 4.5 stars. ( )