Tomorrow Elephant

The comic of the weekend was Blacksad, something I picked up in Paris. I’ve been slowly learning French, and reading les bandes dessinées with the help of a dictionary and the excellent Dashboard translator widget. Blacksad is a good yarn in the Dashiel Hammett vein, and covers all the basics of the hard-boiled detective story: a femme fatale, corrupt businessmen, violent goons and a morally upright but hard-fisted hero in the middle of it all. What makes Blacksad stand out among all the Philip Marlowe clones is the fact that he’s a cat. Admittedly antropomorphic, but cat nevertheless. He inhabits a brillliantly realised film noir-meets-Mowgli world where gorillas are washed-up boxers, lizards cold-blooded henchmen and rhinos and bears hired muscle. The gorgeous art accomplishes this so smoothly that it’s easy to forget that the characters are not human (sort of like the classic Omaha the Cat Dancer, only better): the animal features of the characters are used seamlessly with Blacksad’s tough-guy inner monologue to underline their human traits – or perhaps the animal traits in humans, I don’t know. In any case, I want more of this! An another visit to Paris is definitely in order once I submit…