Sketch Fridays #78 – Blacksad, created by Juan Díaz Canales and Juanjo Guarnido
Blacksad was a comic I pined for.
It wasn’t out of reach for cost or even low print runs. The fact was that, until relatively recently, it was a European comic––made by Spanish creators Juan Díaz Canales (writer) and Juanjo Guarnido (artist)––about anthropomorphic animals in a hard-boiled post-World War II New York City, tackling the issues of murder, extortion, racism, and drug use head-on. All while told in beautiful pen, ink, and watercolor pages that looked like a strange, alternate reality Disney animated film.
I saw the comic in low resolution images online in the early 2000s, and hungrily harvested the jpgs from web searches. It wasn’t until 2010 when an official English translation was published by Dark Horse Comics, collecting the first three stories in one bundle, which I preordered as soon as I heard about it. Receiving it––and reading it––was a bit like finding a buried treasure. Unlike the hollow greed associated with those stories, Blacksad was everything I hoped it would be.
Since then, two more stories have come out––and the stories have wonderful names dripping with noir flair such as “A Silent Hell” and “Somewhere in the Shadows”––and I pick them up as soon as they hit shelves because it’s a comic that, for me, ticks all the boxes.
The beauty of Blacksad is that it blends cartoony stylings with technical prowess and mature storytelling to create something truly unique. Art by Juanjo Guarnido, from Blacksad, “Somewhere in the Shadows” by Díaz Canales and Guarnido. Source: Dark Horse Comics.
It’s a comic of “despites”––despite being populated by anthropomorphized animals, Blacksad is a hard-boiled noir story. Despite being a hard-boiled noir story, it’s not afraid of taking place during the day, with low contrast lighting and saturated colors. Despite the cartoony designs, the book takes the characters very seriously and the technical ability of artist Juanjo Guarnido is astounding and masterful (Guarnido worked as an animator for Disney), giving nuanced life to these talking cats, weasels, and bears. Despite being a series of seemingly cliche noir stories, the characters have surprising depth and the narratives are motivated by serious and pertinent, modern themes. Because of all of that, I love it. (Honestly, for the closest cinematic version we have so far, check out Disney’s Zootopia; it’s like Blacksad but without the violence or nudity.)
Reading Blacksad in a sense gave me permission––along with Darwyn Cooke’s Parker series––to tell serious, sober stories with a cartoony style. One of the hesitations I had approaching Long John was that I worried people wouldn’t want to read a serious story with such stylized designs. Reading books like Blacksad, however, I learned that if people didn’t like it, that’s too bad for them because they’re missing out.
Sketch Fridays #77 – Batman Day 2020 (process video with commentary at the bottom of the post or click here)
It was Batman Day on the 19th or 21st, depending on what source you look at. And, for most of the comic art end of the internet that meant a legitimate reason to draw the Dark Knight.
Last year I had fun with a quick high contrast bust portrait of the caped crusader and people responded well to it.
This year i wanted to try something different, fueled partially by the idea of wanting to draw a piece that emphasized the detective aspect of the character. It was also fueled by the technology I’ve been using to try and draw more regularly; specifically, the app Procreate on the iPad Pro.
I really enjoy drawing silhouettes and how, if sorted correctly, can create a really powerful sense of depth and scale with very little detail at all. I hope you enjoy this year’s effort.
A Simon Roy-drawn Long John, commissioned by Kyrun Silva
I am not under any presumption that Long John is anything more than a story I am doing my best to tell. When talking to people, I never refer to the comic as “my baby” nor describing it as the great opus of my life. It’s just a comic.
However, I can’t deny that the comic and the character hold a particularly important place in my mind and–-at the risk of veering into absolute schmaltz––my heart.
Long John was the turning point for my creative career. Despite being a character and story idea I carried with me for over a decade before the comic started, when I decided to chart out on my own creative path––instead of working in a creative partnership yet again––I knew Long John would be the book that would be the best road to travel. Long John, the book and the character, represent my individuality, a freedom of expression checked only by the boundaries of my tastes and ability.
My motivation to push forward with my own work came from a very strange intersection of seemingly disparate artists. But what really got me to consider what I wanted to do with my comics going forward was in 2009 after reading a blog post somewhere that talked about about a story by Canadian artist, Simon Roy, called Jan’s Atomic Heart. I remember thinking that it looked pretty neat and was shocked to find a copy of it at my local comic shop a few weeks later.
Simon Roy’s Jan’s Atomic Heart, published by New Reliable Press, was an incredible lesson in independent comicking for me. It has since been republished by Image Comics.
Jan’s Atomic Heart became one of those books that broke everything open for me. It was a book I pushed on friends, telling them they had to read it because it was doing things I had never thought of before––from art to story. I doubt I convinced very many people––my passion often gets the better of me––but where they may have only seen a neat, small, profound little story, I saw possibility and opportunity. That book began to redefine what comics meant in my brain.
A few years later, Image Comics announced thatthe gregarious ’90s comic book series, Prophet, was being rebooted after at least a decade of silence. I would have brushed it off had I not seen that, of all people, Simon Roy was one of the creative minds working on its development along with the head writer for the series, Brandon Graham (and, later, Giannis Milonogiannis was added to the team which basically brought a bunch of threads together for me). Needless to say, I needed no further convincing.
The reboot of Image Comics’ Prophet series–-featuring the work of Simon Roy and Giannis Milonogiannis––became a master class in independent comicking for me. Art by Simon Roy.
Not only were my favorite and most inspiring creators at the time working on the same book, the series itself was sublime, showing me not only new ways to approach storytelling, but also collaboration. Because of that, Prophet became somewhat of a creative bible for me, a touchstone I could come back to whenever I needed inspiration. Roy’s opening arc, like he had with Jan’s Atomic Heart, further smashed everything I thought comics were and helpedbroadenmyability to see what my comics could be. Even though you may not see any overlap were you to put Prophet and Long John side by side, it is undeniable that the latter would not exist without the former.
All of that to say that Simon Roy remains a face on my personal comicking Mt. Rushmore. I drove out to San Francisco to have him sign my copy of the original Jan’s Atomic Heart when he came through with Brandon Graham, and I was a nervous wreck. The first piece of original comic art I ever bought was a page from his run on Prophet.
And then, at the beginning of September, I turned 40.
My good friend and fellow creator, Kyrun Silva of Taurus Comics, had been harassing me for a month or so about how slow it was taking for my birthday to arrive and that he couldn’t wait to unburden himself of the gift he had for me. Knowing his reputation as being incredibly supportive while, at the same time, being a bit of a prankster, I was hesitantly optimistic about his insinuations.
On the left, a commission of Long John from Giannis Milonogiannis; on the right, an original page of Simon Roy art from Prophet #23.
On the day, we met out front of my home, masked and socially distanced to better protect each other and our families, an he handed me an envelope.
In my driveway, I pulled from the envelope a drawing of Long John with a Simon Roy signature beneath it.
Combined with the drawing of Long John I commissioned last year from Milonogiannis, I now had my two favorite living artists’ interpretations of Long John, the character with whom I took my first step into creative independence. But it was finding Jan’s Atomic Heart in 2009 and having it absolutely blow open my ideas about comic book storytelling that not only made independent comicking possible for me, but somehow also gave me the signal that I could do it.
All I could say upon seeing the drawing was, “Wow.” I felt bad, because my heart was freaking out, but it was held hostage by a brain short circuited in the moment, and all I could do was say a single-syllable over and over and over again. I was holding more than an incredibly considerate gift. I held in my hands a confluence of my entire creative journey as a comicker––my inspirations and my efforts hitting critical mass in a single image as ink on paper. I don’t know what possessed Kyrun to commission this for me––I am still in disbelief––but I don’t know if he knows how much it means to me, especially since the only response I had for him was, “Wow.”
As my birthday approached, I often heard the phrase, “You only turn 40 once!” from my friends and family. This incredible gift and moment and drawing assured that sentiment, and I’m sincerely grateful for it.
