Blacksad (vol 1-3)
Written by Juan Diaz Canales
Art by Guarnido

[There is supposedly 5 volumes, only 3 were scanlated from french editions. One of the greatest and most beautiful crime-noir comics ever published!! The artwork is simply gorgeous!! A must-read for everyone, even the casual comic reader. This comic reminds me of S. Andrew Swann's Forests of the night, in which the hero is a hard-boiled half-tiger, half-human detective.]

Here is what some of legends in the comic industry have to say about Blacksad:

"Brilliant art and an unusual display of anthropomorphic realism" - Will Eisner

"The art is totally fantastic. The story is like following the most gripping movie directed by the most inspired director. It's everything a sensational graphic novel should be-and more. I case i didnt make myself clear- I think Blacksad is as good as it gets"-Stan Lee

Meet John Blacksad, a cat in the shadows. Imagine New York as a city of criminal rats, jazz-playing gorillas and rhino thugs. Enter a mystery where the suspects have tails. Find out why comics' biggest names are wild about one of the freshest graphic novels in years. Enter the world of Blacksad. Natalia Wilford is a famous actress. To the world, she had everything anybody could wat: beauty, fame, glamour and lovers who would do anything for her. When she is found murdered in her home, it touches the man who had not seen her since their bitter breakup many years ago...private eye John Blacksad. He vows to find Natalia's murderer. When the police are told to call off their investigation of the crime, Blacksad charges forward alone, risking his license, his reputation and even his life!

From Publishers Weekly

The second volume of Canales and Guarnido's hybrid of hard-boiled detective and anthropomorphic-animal comics is a visual masterpiece. The entire work is constructed around a single joke, but a brilliant one. PI John Blacksad gets involved with an investigation having to do with a white power group, the Arctics, that's been murdering blacks; a kidnapping; and a dark secret of illegitimate birth. It's a standard-issue detective-novel plot, if nicely handled—but the twist is that all the characters are animal-headed humanoids, and the tension revolves around not the color of their skin, but the color of their fur. Blacksad is a black cat; a racist politician is a polar bear; there's a black power gang led by a black horse; etc. (The climactic plot twist involves a white character turning out to have a small patch of black fur.) Like any good gumshoe tale, the story's crammed with sex and violent gunplay, and Guarnido manages to set even his wackiest-looking characters within gritty, realistic backgrounds and lighting. His art is exquisitely sensitive to the nuances of facial expression and body language—not an easy feat with characters who are drawn as weasels, crows or mice. The story's point, though, is the vicious absurdity of racism, and Canales and Guarnido express it by making their tone absolutely straight.

From SplashPanel:

Blacksad is probably one of , if not the very best anthropomorphic graphic novels currently on the stands, if ever published. I know this might sound like hyperbole, but in this case it would be a fact. Not trying to pigeon hole it or anything I’ll even go a little further and say that it’s one of the best crime noir series I’ve read in a good long while. Make no mistake, just because animals are used here instead of humans does not mean you can give this to your little brother to read. This isn’t Donald Duck we’re talking about here.

The story is set in what seems to be a place very much like LA during the 1950s. So the buildings, cars and clothes all fit within that time period. The book starts off with a murder case (how else would a book set in the 1950s start?) and John Blacksad, a private eye has been called in by the Police because he knew the murdered woman in question. They give him the regular qliched line about him not getting involved and leave it to the professionals, which of course he doesn’t really bother listening to and he begins his search for the person who murdered his ex-movie actress girlfriend. That’s the setup, the middle part continues in a very familiar fashion (at least to those who have seen this sort of movie before), however it ends in a way you wouldn’t really expect.

The characters all have unique voices It’s clever, it’s funny and oddly, it’s very very human, which I guess is Canales’s greatest achievement in this book.

(read more at: http://splashpanel.com/archives/blacksad-somewhere-within-the-shadows-volume-1/)

Buy this comic from Amazon.

Download vol. 1-3:
http://rapidshare.com/files/167407775/Blacksad.rar (50mb)