Commercial Interlude: Blacksad

A Review of Blacksad (Vol. 1-3) by Juan Díaz Canales (writer) and Juanjo Guarnido (artist)

 


 

Would you pay 18000 Euros (approx US$ 23,500) for this?

[Cover to Blacksad Volume 3 Red Soul]

Well, someone did. Actually,  I lie. That 18,000 Euros was just the upper estimate on this album cover which finally sold for 37,303 Euros (approx.US$48K) before taxes. This kind of pricing can wear you down after a while. It lodges in your memory and when people keep repeating the mantra (“Blacksad…Blacksad …Blacksad!”) within listening distance of your computer screen you begin to ask yourself whether you’re missing out on some fabled piece of Euro pop culture, the kind that has cats in trench coats.

The three volume Blacksad omnibus has an introduction by Jim Steranko and he is effusive in his praise of Canales and Guarnido’s work, placing it in the tradition of “funny animals” and finding that this subspecies of the genre is “predicated on people who resemble animals”. He cites especially Guarnido’s “persuasive ability…in the emotional nuances and facial expressions of his characters, easily the equal of any Disney effort on record. The trick, of course, is making it look easy…”

He’s wrong in that last part of course. Blacksad looks anything but easy. The grimy city is meticulous in its details, the well appointed interiors obsessive in preserving this gaudy “reality”.

There are the expert rhythms of the gun play, the worn tenements which seem like a skillful nod to Will Eisner…

…the dappled shadows playing on figures at sunset, all of these individuals decked out in clothes and cars befitting their status.

Research, homage and passion. There’s very little doubt that these comics required a huge investment in terms of time and technique and its Prize for Artwork at Angoulême in 2004 is not surprising considering the continental taste for such things (the other nominees included Seth, Richard Corben and Taiyo Matsumoto).

Make no mistake, you won’t find anything close to the malicious brusqueness of  Darwyn Cooke’s adaptation of Parker or Steranko’s Red Tide here, much less the novels of Hammett and Chandler. That dark, dangerous and sweaty existence reeking of convoluted machinations is for the real aficionados. Canales and Guarnido are itinerants in this world and there version of this landscape is the kind of Day-Glo purgatory you get in more light-hearted television fare like the Spenser adaptations; a tourist’s view of the underworld more beholden to family oriented cartoons than classic film noir; that strain of false memory you find in films like Slumdog Millionaire which almost convinces you that slums of Mumbai are kind of acceptable and don’t actually reek of everything that is bad about poverty.

It’s all quite intentional of course, this appropriation of the brightness and nostalgia associated with 50s America. This sepia tinged bathos is used to highlight institutional corruption, racism, nuclear secrets and the Red Scare among other things. The anthropomorphics are capably deployed in the same vein resulting in a pleasantly predictable experience, a kind of funny animal fan service: the rat is both a snitch and a double-crosser; the faithful commissioner is a German Shepherd; the wily lieutenant is a fox; a  rhino and a bear serve as paid muscle; and the big boss is suitably enigmatic in his countenance (I presume he’s a lizard but not your garden variety gecko).  Canales and Guarnido get a bit more mileage out of their “funny animals” in their second story concerning small town racism where a number of white supremacists are represented by a bunch of white furred critters, all of them endangered (a polar bear, a white tiger and an arctic fox). Getting deeper into the meanings of these metaphors a la Maus (the concrete jungle, the bestial nature of man, the politics of fur color etc.) seems unwarranted and unnecessary. This is an exercise in bravura style closer to comics like Torpedo than many reviewers would have you believe (just more of a conscience and less breasts) .

Now some fur lovers will tell you that the anthropomorphizing here isn’t a gimmick but honestly, that’s about all there is to it. It’s a form of cartooning shorthand long cherished by comic readers and in the case of Blacksad an excuse to defer good plotting and characterization. I would be hard placed to find a single character in these three volumes who isn’t a cardboard caricature. This sort of explains why Blacksad is a cat. Draw him as a human and these books will be revealed for what they are – acts of regurgitation. As far as the long history of noir novels and films are concerned, Blacksad is a hardboiled eunuch, reeking of a need to appeal to an all ages audience despite some PG13 sex scenes and a few casual murders scattered here and there.  As for the regurgitate, we have the usual suspects: the murdered dame, the old flame, the hero being pulped by the hired help, the depraved mandarin sitting in his aerie casting a disdainful eyes over the insects crawling beneath him; the deck of noir tropes shuffled, reshuffled and coming out largely unchanged. This creative masturbation is totally in keeping with the book’s asexual and unfertile content. The second volume of Blacksad is equally tiresome in its sanctimonious examination of racism. Canales and Guarnido invoke Robert E. Lee, Southern values, sexual deviancy, the KKK, mob lynchings, Billy Holiday (I assume it’s her anyway) singing “Strange Fruit” at various points in this album, all of which is meant to add that hint of of cursory depth and creative frisson because the hero is, you know, black.

This is the kind of creative endeavor that makes you want to call Frank Miller a cartooning god (well, not quite). Miller suckled at Steranko’s teat as far as the imagery of Sin City is concerned and he is utterly immersed in the no nonsense misogyny and prurience which drips from the genre. There’s no artifice in his comics, no shroud for his uninhibited passion for violence and overcooked dialogue, no mistaking his joyous delight at the Mickey Mouse transgressions of leather-clad whores with whips. This creative philosophy has found its way into almost everything he’s written since.  His hilarious portrayal of Wonder Woman in All Star Batman and Robin (drawn by Jim Lee) is in some ways a more forgiving experience than the overwhelming tedium of Canales and Guarnido’s buxom lilies and cookie cutter “liberal” values.

 

[Concept art for proposed Wonder Woman mini-series (2005) drawn by Bill Sienkiewicz and written by Frank Miller; from the collection of Steven M.]

There’s no question that both of these comics are filled with enough crap to choke your toilet and bidet but at least Miller’s crap makes you cackle once in a while. We’ve all heard the refrain that modern day super women look more like street walkers but Miller doesn’t make Wonder Woman look like a whore, as far as Miller is concerned Wonder Woman is a whore, a BDSM goddess straight out of Sin City and the meanest, dick-stomping bitch in the universe. And Jim Lee almost reaches Miller’s state of hardboiled superhero nirvana turning traditional fight scenes into family friendly strip shows (Breasts! Crotch Shots!). Only edible in very small portions to be sure but this kind of stupid honesty is marginally more entertaining than the saccharine slop we find in Blacksad. At worst, it’s almost a novel idea which is more than I can say for Blacksad with its laundry list of recycled sluice water: racists fucking beautiful black people…

…woman cringing as she takes a shower because she feels dirty after using sex as a weapon…

… hero screwing sexy heroine before she disappears at the end of the book, and don’t forget to send in the Nazis…

– all of this perfectly judged to ensure your reading experience comes out smelling  like a starched white shirt. It’s this strain of stereotypical morality, this dogged adherence to soporific storytelling conventions and this attraction to one dimensional portrayals of evil which have ensured Blacksad’s appeal to the masses.

22 thoughts on “Commercial Interlude: Blacksad

  1. That was bracing. I don’t remember the last time you kicked something that hard.

    I would buy a Wonder Woman series by Bill Sienkiewicz and Frank Miller. Out and out BDSM would be…not truer to Marston’s vision, exactly, but at least as close as anything else we’ve seen since he shuffled off to the Paradise Island in the sky.

  2. I only made it through the first Blacksad. I totally agree with your assessment of it.

    Unfortunately, the kind of prettified pandering it represents is very widespread in European mainstream comics.

  3. Cough, cough…

    Volume 4 was just released in France.

    And thanks you for providing a great counter weighting review on this series as i heard an over the top positive review of it this very morning on a French radio.

  4. It’s a little unfair to hold Steranko’s bland ravings against the strip itself, but, whatever…

    If you’re going to use anthropomorphism, fine, but dealing racism and xenophobia into the mix pushes the cartoonist into the danger zone of uncontrolled metaphors…even Spiegelman, in ‘Maus’, acknowledged it got out of control.

    (Aside: interesting you mention Sienkiewicz– he was outraged by the depiction of Poles in ‘Maus’ as pigs.)

    Interesting– your verdict seems to be that ‘Blacksad’ is trash, but not trashy enough trash– not having the courage of its trashiness, as Sin City does.

    It goes to the biggest sin of commercial pop culture: not badness, but mediocrity.

    I’d rather far read a bad comic like Sin City than a mediocre one like Blacksad.

    (That being said, I did reference Blacksad in my architecture posts, and the panels Suat posted are gloriously New Yorky…)

  5. @Alex Buchet
    Yes, Seine-et-Marne :p

    For the radio review was done by Jean-Christophe Ogier with all that goes with it.

  6. Oh dear, poor Mr. Ogier. Thanks for the link KrebMarkt. Heard that the fourth volume of Blacksad was due out. The article does seem a bit like publisher’s advertising copy. Maybe that’s all it was meant to be. Expect more of the same once the movie gets released.

    I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for a Miller/Sienkie Wonder Woman. Miller seems to have blown his wad with his recent stuff.

    So did you like Blacksad, Alex? I know you probably looked at it but you seem to have held it at arm’s length with a pair of rubber gloves.

  7. “I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for a Miller/Sienkie Wonder Woman.”

    Well, I said I’d buy it if it existed. I won’t cry any tears if it never comes to be, though….

  8. Suat: I like the art, but the story doesn’t do anything for me. (I’m speaking not so much as a comics fan, but as a crime fiction fan.)

    In the same register– anthropomorphic noir — I much prefer Sokal’s “Canardo” stories.

  9. Domingos, I’m not looking for a fight here– but, sincerely, much as I respect your writings I can’t trust your sense of aesthetics.

    You’ve been too prolific in throwing out judgements like ‘hack’ and ‘kitschy’ with no regard to the meanings of these terms, merely to stir up trouble.

    We had an epic 3-month-long fight about this on the TCJ forums, when you casually called René Goscinny a “hack”.

    That was pretty much the last you appeared on that message board…

  10. I’ll ponder it…any ethical lapse in the case would come from moral laziness; sloth is one of the 7 deadly sins, and it applies to artists as well…

    Basically, ‘Blacksad’ could be better than it is; easily, given the obvious talent of its artists.

  11. I was having a discussion with an original art collector and thought I would put down the price fetched by another ?less recognizable but presumably more pretty “Blacksad” painting. Just for completeness:

    COMIC STRIPS / 1394 29 Mar 2008 11:00 / Hôtel Dassault LOT 178 JUANJO GUARNIDO BLACKSAD Gouache de couleur sur carton pour l’affiche « Ten Faces in the Wind », réalisée par Momie Folie en 200…Estimation: 18000 € Sold for 84,232 €

    That’s about US$114,000 for a piece of comic art produced within the last ten years.

  12. Domingos:
    “I don’t mean _Blacksad_, I mean Ogier”

    Wow, my mistake,Domingos, and I apologise– especially as I agree with you!

    There’s something particularly repulsive in Ogier’s flattery, a condescending sneer at those who are stupid enough to take his dithyrambs at face value.

    And I, too, find his “caricature” unbearable!

  13. Well, this was an interesting read. Maybe the first negative review I’ve seen on Blacksad.

    Personally, I like the title. It’s certainly pretty and I don’t even mind that it’s simple. Of course, I like crime noire in general and I admit to being a fan of films from the forties and fifties which this almost always reminds me of.

    And frankly, some of the material that passes for entertaining work is not readable at all, so give the guys some credit for being able to string a sentence together, okay?

    It’s not Omaha the Cat Dancer, but it’s a light entertaining read for the most part.

    But Miller’s work does leave me cold, I’ll admit and his characters just seem cruel and curiously flat when I know he must be capable of working much better stuff into his graphic albums. I mean, I thought that Hard Boiled, for example, was his way of commenting about his trip through the comic book arena and was in an odd way sort of autobiographical. I mean, here’s a guy who believes he is a badass who shoots up the world and creates havoc being told that he’s, in reality, an insurance salesman with a great wife and 2 kids in the suburbs. Twisted and fun, with great art.

    Then comes Sin City with a Catholic Priest Priest who eats people, a “Hero” with amnesia, a city run by Hookers, the list goes on and on and on… cliche after cliche after cliche… and this is genius?

    Really?

    And I know he had a bad time in the movie industry with the scripting thing and what happened with Lawnmower Man 2 and 3, but if he’s that cynical, maybe he needs to consider therapy and stop taking it out on people who are actually spending money on the crap he puts out.

    Listen, I don’t know what sales are like around where you guys are, but Dark Knight sold really well here.

    Dark Knight II on the other hand? Well let’s just say that the remainders wound up in the half price book stores the day after the last issue came out.

    Dar Knight III IS selling, but Miller has little to do with that and I think some people are just buying it because they don’t give a good shit about the 15th time DC has tried to revamp their entire lineup. It’s deja-vu all over again, folks.

    And speaking of, I’d buy Blacksad ANY day over the crap that Marvel and DC are currently putting out.

    Don’t get me wrong, for the most part, the comic marketplace is as varied as it has ever been, but there are still few that are well written and I can’t think of ONE by Marvel or DC.

    So yes, I’ll take Blacksad and be happy with pretty art and an average entertaining story over whatever huge crisis crossover is happening in the Marvel or DC world right now.

    But to each his own…

  14. This all seems like grading on the Curve of Putrescence. It reminds me of those medical textbooks which indicate that Disease X gives rise to “offensive” stool; to which one specialist remarked that as far as he was concerned, all stool was offensive. My problem is simply with those assessments which regard Blacksad as fragrant as opposed to your garden variety offensive stool.

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