Alexandre Aja at the SDCC 2010 interview about his horror thriller "Piranha 3D", revealed that he’s currently developing two franchises – one for a Japanese manga, called Cobra the Space Pirate, and one for a Spanish graphic novel, called Blacksad.
Blacksad is a comic series created by Spanish authors Juan Díaz Canales (writer) and Juanjo Guarnido (artist), and published by French publisher Dargaud.
This was Diaz and Guarnido´s first comics endeavour, the first volume was an immense success, selling more than 200,000 copies in France alone. The series has been translated from the original French and Spanish into Bulgarian, Chinese, Croatian, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Serbian, Swedish, and Turkish.
Guarnido and Diaz Canales have received several prizes for the impressive, lavish visualisation and the books as a whole, among these three nominations for the Eisner Awards, and an Angoulême Prize for Artwork.
The story is set in a film noir environment, in the USA of the late 1950s. All the characters are anthropomorphic animals (female characters are often much more anthropomorphized, though it varies depending on the animal.), their specific species reflecting their personality and their part in the story. For example, nearly all the policemen are canid, usually German Shepherds, Bloodhounds, Foxes or Scottish Terriers.
The main character is John Blacksad, a fairly typical detective story private investigator apart from being a black cat. Part of his stories are flashbacks. He usually wears a dark green suit, a red-and-gold striped tie and a trenchcoat. He uses the alias of John H. Blackmore on several fake IDs (debt collector, FBI agent, and customs officer). He is a WW2 veteran, making him an above-average marksman and hand-to-hand combatant
The strip is made with a rather dirty-realist outlook, a dark cinematic style and fairly clean, realistic lines. Coupled with the truly lavish and time-consuming drawing, done in watercolor, the strip appears very realistic indeed despite using animals. The quality of the drawing has improved noticeably throughout the series, with sharper, higher-quality colour and fewer grainy lines in later issues.