Week Nine - Blacksad

Blacksad had been recommended to me long before taking this course and I was pleased to be able to finally read it. As a lover of animation I've always been a fan of anthropomorphized animal characters, but in a rather unfortunate way, some of the glimpses I first had of Blacksad turned me off. This was only due to my contempt for 'furries' and the weird fetishistic craze that now plagues animal characters with realistic human-like proportions. I hate furries. That said, I really loved Blacksad. The gritty detective drama has a timeless appeal for being tough and badass, which instantly sets apart the soft and adorable world of cute kittens, from the hard boiled world of Blacksad. I was incredibly pleased, by the fact that the gaurnido decided to use color in his illustrations instead of going full on noir with black and white. The use of color and light is what I feel immersed the reader in the environment. So many panels are dedicated to setting and atmosphere with little action that simply push you further into the story. I always felt that light is one of the most important pieces of a dramatic story and Blacksad is full of interesting light direction.

Getting back to the animals, I must say that Blacksad was much more up front about the animal characteristics than in the previous reading of Maus. This made no attempt at abstraction, such as Maus did, instead it makes several points of stating that these characters are indeed aware of their animal traits. While clearly the goal with animals in Maus was more subtle and metaphoric, I rather appreciated the way the characters in Blacksad reacted and made choices based on their animal natures. I was surprised by how often I was able to relate to some of the characters and say 'I know exactly this type of person' which got me thinking about how personalities can be equated simply through animal appearance or behavior. It probably wouldn't have been as relate-able had it not been for the superior emotional contortions of the characters' faces. Most of the comics I have been exposed to jump right to extreme portrayals of emotion and struggle to communicate empathetically with panels dealing with simple dialogue, but not Blacksad. The subtly of emotion and expression built into these character's faces was showcasing a skill most illustrators and animators dream about. I was truly blown away with how humanistic the expressions of the characters were without going full-on Disney in their abstraction and design.

While I've only read the first volume, the story seemed rather linear. I was anticipating more twists and turns, but maybe I'm passing too much judgement before reading the other volumes. In the end the straight-forwardness of the story was okay for me because the power of the execution is what made it so appealing. I suppose I'll keep reading.