It has risen to third place in the best-selling books these days in France after the new album by Asterix and after the novel that won the prestigious Goncourt prize. And the circulation of its first edition in the neighboring country is a figure that in Spain not even the planetary awards dream of: 280,000 copies. Without a doubt, the most attractive cat in world comics is back. It is Blacksad, the feline detective created 23 years ago by Juan Díaz Canales and Juanjo Guarnido and whose seventh album is now appearing simultaneously in numerous countries: the second part of Everything Falls (Norma editorial), with corruption, crimes and heartbreak in the Nueva York in the 1950s, a kingdom of tall art deco buildings and cyclopean suspension bridges.
A kingdom of skyscrapers and labyrinthine subways that, say Díaz Canales and Guarnido, has become the leitmotif of the two volumes of Everything Falls: "The contrast between heights and low depths, which well represents what life is like in "the big city. And it also has that feature of a black series which is to talk about the moral depths and heights of the human soul, thus continuing with the metaphorical level that we already established when creating a series starring animals."
Killer seagulls, messianic hawks, subway worker moles, peacock mayors, high society foxes and elegant theatrical llamas populate his new story in which New York is a full-fledged character and in which of course the protagonist is the magnetic, fast and upright detective cat. Guarnido, the cartoonist, points out that Blacksad "has a humanist aspect, he is a guy with ethics and personal integrity." But, Díaz Canales, author of the scripts, clarifies, Blacksad takes a position from an individualistic perspective.
"I don't like stories with pedagogy or morals. It makes me a little allergic. In our albums, social injustice is very present as they take place in a big city, where it becomes more evident. A New York, the world capital of finances and where there are many people who live precariously. They are reflections out loud, solving the problems eludes us," reasons the screenwriter.
And he emphasizes that in the black genre that interests them, the classic, "Dashiel Hammett, Raymond Chandler or James M. Cain already show the tremendous contradiction that exists in these heroes, who are therefore antiheroes, these private detectives who come from cowboys loners who face big problems. It is the contradiction between the individual and the collective. They have an unbreakable, non-bribable morality, they tend to embrace great causes... but not collectively."
As happens, he says, in Corto Maltés, the character of Hugo Pratt that he himself has resurrected together with the cartoonist Rubén Pellejero. "Hugo Pratt's stories remind me of the movie Casablanca, individualistic heroes with very firm morals but who do not embrace collective causes because it clashes with their individuality. We want to be full-fledged individuals, but for coexistence to work we must give up certain things" .
A very different noir, they acknowledge, from the one that prevails today, in which gore abounds and an exaltation of violence that, Díaz Canales says, does not interest him. "I don't like that vision of the world in which the most horrific elements of humans are isolated and converted into elements of value," he says. Quite the opposite of his agile cat, who, Guarnido remarks, "is a detective who doesn't carry a gun, when even Tintin does."
A detective that they created 23 years ago, in the year 2000, and that they have no intention of abandoning... although they imagine that one day others will continue it. "For us," says Díaz Canales, "Blacksad is our baby, a toy in the hands of two spoiled children who are allowed to use it and play with it. And we have no signs of exhaustion because in 23 years there have been seven Blacksads. It is a vehicle to express ideas, make the type of comic we like, evolve as authors, see where the character takes us. We maintain the sense of wonder of seeing what the series can give. We have no reason not to end, but to be happy every time we take it up again.
And Guarnido remembers when, as a twenty-something, he saw the Blacksad stories that Díaz Canales had sketched in black and white. "I told myself: this is the character that I should have invented, even the name is sonorous, how I would like to draw him. And in the end that is what we did. Then, we like to change things and make comics with other people of immense talent , but it is our central work, the one that structures our careers. We share with the public the affection for the character, when I draw him, I recognize him, I think of him as someone who exists. When I give him the final touch and see him, I say: There's my cat!"
And he admits that he imagines that one day the character will be inherited by other creators as has happened with Asterix or Corto Maltés. "I'm excited that not I survive through the character but the character itself." Díaz Canales says that "the characters surpass us, when the happy circumstance of publishing success occurs and a character becomes popular, you become aware that he is a son who has left home. And we have to be generous, he must be able to live his independent life. I, who have taken up a mythical character like Corto Maltés, am eternally grateful to Hugo Pratt for having had the generosity to say that when he died the character should continue. It was generosity and intelligence, he realized that even though he was a charismatic author The one who was going to go down in history was Hugo Maltés. We are all heirs of characters that other authors have left us, in fact in this album we have made use and abuse of Shakespeare - there is theater from start to finish in the diptych - in a blatant way and everyone appreciates it," he concludes.
