Blacksad

Anyone ever heard of or read Blacksad? It's a French comic that was picked up by Darkhorse to get translated into English. I like the 50's noir look and was thinking of buying it. How do you anons feel about it?

It's widely considered a very good read but I've never had the pleasure.

It's been seen around here, occasionally. Was even a thread that storytimed it. I have one of the comics myself, and in general they're good.
Art is good, story is decent and the characters are consistent and fun. It's some excellent noir in general.

I'd bite the bullet and buy the whole series, but it seems Dark Horse only physically released the 1st, 4th, and 5th volumes for some reason. I can't find physical versions of the second or third ones physically anywhere, they're even absent from Dark Horse' listings.

So why is the nigger depressed?

it's on storytime right now. Don't know how complete it is.
>>>/storytime/1650

It's French ? I thought the artist was… Italian or something ?
The art's insane though, if you're into comic-art you definitely need to get the artbook. The stories are absolutely mindblowing too. Brilliant and deep.
Definite masterpieces, every single volume of it.

It's originally published in French but the artist isn't French. I think he might be Italian like you said.


It's a pretty good little series. Dark and comfy at the same time. Though I'm not sure how to feel about Blacksad himself. Is he supposed to be a black man or is his fur just black? They do make parallels to actual groups like the Black Panthers. Being composed of animals with black fur. But there's also animals meant to be clearly black. Blacksad himself doesn't match up with them though.

Blacksad's always given me the impression of being an allegory of a black man with burnt scars. Like he was in a big fire that "whitened" his skin or something; he jokes about it with some white supremacists at some point for example.

See I can't picture him as anything other than a white guy with black hair. The general look for a detective character. Meanwhile it's made more complicated by the fact his sister looks more hispanic than anything to me. While his nephew is very clearly supposed to be a little white kid. Maybe I'm just over thinking it.

Yeah, it's probably not supposed to be taken so literally, or at least so "humanly". I suppose it's allegories and shit like that, a bit like La Fontaine fables and all. Animals are just there to symbolize personalities, not to specifically encompass some human shapes.

I suppose. But the KKK/Black Panthers appearances make it a little jarring.

Another possibility is simply the fact that, since the writer is a Euro, to us, American-centric history is a bit more… "fictional" ? At the very least story-looking than things we've gone through. They seem more distant, perhaps, like they didn't exist "for us" somehow. Which is why the use of such actual institutions in the comic might not necessarily seem so "obvious" to us.

You lost me here…

I almost dropped the comics right then and there

Oh man, that sounds pretty bad. I was just thinking of buying the first hardcover of the series from darkhorse.

First volume contains 1-3

just a case of the blues , nothing serious

If it looks like this, it will have first three stories.

Yeah, that's the one. So would that be the one along with Amarillo and A Silent Hell to get from DH?

It has: Somewhere in the Shadows (Vol 1), Arctic Nation (Vol 2), and Red Soul (Vol 3). Amarillo (Vol 4) and Silent Hell (Vol 5) are sold in their own individual tomes.

Oh good. I'll keep an eye out for those then. They look really good.

Hey, I 'm trying to remember the name of this 80's B&W indie comic about a lizard private eye.
It had rally detailed artwork, might have been Blackthorne publishing.

I haven't kept up for a while, what happened so far?

When did you quit reading?

This is pretty ordinary for not only comics, but the art world in general. No one questions the reality of the fact that McCarthy was completely correct when it came to communist infiltration of the United States, and that the communists did successfully infiltrate not only the government, but the entire university system, so that they can demand children and young adults ascribe to their enforced ideology. The USSR openly admitted that this was their plan to bring down democratic capitalism. It worked. That certainly seems like more of an interesting story than "McCarthy was just paranoid!"

Most artists are only interested in maintaining the accepted narrative, not discovering the truth behind it and using their medium to inform people. Especially visual artists. They work visually and emotionally, so they're not very capable at investigation and facts and truth and reality, their entire world is imagination, delusion, fever dreams brought to visual life. That has its value, informative it is not.

If you discard art that falls into these traps, you'll be discarding a lot of art.

Though I wouldn't blame you. I'd do the same. This is why I haven't read Blacksad. Good art doesn't mean good comic.

Two or three stories are really lackluster. The Red Scare-esque story and the story with the KKK. The KKK one only being bad because it confuses exactly where the parallels to our world and theirs begins and ends. So the KKK in Blacksad are animals that have completely white fur. So any animal with white fur is seen there. But then they bring in Black Panthers. Who all seem to be animals with black fur. Naturally this draws a few questions. Are the the animals of each group supposed to be all black and white respectively? Or do they represent no race in particular. Being just animals with fur color racism. If not, is Blacksad supposed to be black if he was a person? Things like that are what really drag the story down when you're too busy trying to understand how deep the metaphor goes.

Then there's the possibly bad story. A story involving prisoners, drug addiction, voodoo, etc. Reading that story, I just couldn't give a crap anymore and stopped reading. Just wasn't anything interesting. It also ties back into the inconsistent race narrative. With a musician dog being quite clearly a black person as a dog. But he doesn't have black fur.

Really my biggest issue with Blacksad is that whatever metaphor or representation they're going for with the animals is all out of whack.

Juan Díaz Canales (writer) and Juan José "Juanjo" Guarnido (artist) are both Spanish. But they created "Blacksad" for the French market where they already worked.


I follow Guarnido's Facebook antics and I can confirm that Blacksad is made by cucks for cucks. Besides, the writing quality dropped spectacularly at the fourth volume ("L'enfer, le silence"), and the fifth volume was also very badly drawn in comparison to the first three.

The art is great but most of the stories are awkward political metaphor stuff, except the first one and amarillo(which had a weird tone and kinda went all over the place with too much stuff going on)

The art is beatiful. The stories are okay-ish, I haven't read the fifth volume. The first volume is the best imo.

Agreed. It wasn't well though out at all. What about animals like weekly? He has traits of both Italian and Irish stereotype, but brown and white fur. Another bothersome thing is that apparently characters of different "animal species" can have children. Well, at least it wasn't completely black and white (no pun intended), and black panther-like group was shown to be even more overtly aggressive than KKK analogue.
Blacksad should just stick with strictly noir stories. Too often things turn to shit as soon as politics are involved, and creators capable of making it actually work are very rare.

Agreed. The series is best when it doesn't involve politics. Which seems to only be for 2 books. And when you use characters that aren't human, you don't make them allegories for different real races. You make them personalities put to animals. A person wants to see this anthropomorphic character as a certain race? Fine. But don't have that in the actual story unless you're gonna limit certain races to certain animals.

how cucked we talking here?
all right wing people are retards and laughably portrayed or is it full blown gay acceptance or no real human characters with flaws?

Yeah, my bad, guess I confused spanish and italian. To be fair they're both as hairy.
Also assuming that an author's political stupidity is enough to make their work bad is dumb, user

I guess it depends how close to you are those discriptions. I am not an american so the political stuff of the comic doesn't really bothers me. I don't read it having political or historical accuracy as a priority.

Actually, that's a very good point. Maybe the fact that the authors and most readers are euros might mean that, indeed, we just keep it into the story, and not necessarily as "commentary" all that much. Whereas Americans must treat it as a direct message or some shit.
To be fair, Americans do tend to take everything extremely personally, so maybe the problem isn't the "commentary", it's them :^j