It always pleases me to say, particularly to furry audiences, that a hiatus was taken for less exciting and dramatic reasons than those they may have cooked up. In this case, I’m glad to return to posting an occasional media review here and there after five years of being between smartphones, plus the additional snag of quite the dry spell in terms of worthy things to write of. (Thanks for holding back on Jackbox, guys.)

Making use of snazzy resources, both analog and digital – remember your local libraries, folks – takes you a long way. It certainly brought these two disparate cat stories back to my attention.

As is now usual, I want to thank Lex Nakashima for ordering this from Amazon.fr and loaning it to me for this review.

Spanish writer Juan Díaz Canales and artist Juanjo Guarnido met while working at an animation studio in Madrid in the early 1990s. After both moved to Paris, they met again and agreed to collaborate for the French comics market on this anthropomorphic crime noir/hardboiled detective series set in America in the 1950s, featuring feline private investigator John Blacksad.

The first album, Somewhere Among the Shadows was published by Dargaud in November 2000. The multiple prize-winning comics series has been published in 23 languages. So far there have been five 56-page cartoon-art novels, set in Hollywood, Chicago, amidst the Red paranoia/nuclear bomb-shelter craze, New Orleans and now the Midwest.

Paris, Dargaud, November 2013, hardcover €13.99 (56 pages), Kindle €9.99.

Furry comics that made the top 100 best-seller’s list for April 2014 include:

• My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic #18 at 86, and
• Guardians of the Galaxy #14 at 23.

See also: July 2014

This is very short notice, but the Big Wow ComicFest at the San Jose Convention Center in San Jose, CA this weekend, May 19-20, will have Juanjo Guardino, the artist of the Blacksad comic albums, as one of its featured guests, for his first appearance in the U.S.

A dozen prints and portfolios of his art, as-yet-unseen in the U.S., many including his Blacksad and other anthropomorphic characters, will be on sale.

Anime/manga fans will be interested in another of the Big Wow’s featured guests: Toshio Maeda, creator of the XXXXX-rated Urotsukid?ji and other X-rated titles like La Blue Girl. Not anthro, unless you count the sex-crazed human/demon hybrids in Urotsukidoji, but still of some interest...

Wow! I just realized that Blacksad vol. 4, ‘L'enfer, le silence’ (‘Hell, Silence’ or ‘Hell is Silence’), set in New Orleans in the 1950s, was published almost a year ago in France (17 September), and nobody on Flayrah has reported it yet!?

It's not in English yet, but still... You can order it on Amazon.fr.

For those who are such fans of the French Blacksad series by Canales and Guarnido that they cannot wait for vol. 3 to be translated into English, vol. 3. Red Soul (Ame Rouge) was published in France on November 18. It is most easily ordered from America by Amazon.fr, but the BDPARADISE site has the most pictures including the first 9 pages

After three years, the second "Blacksad" album by Juan Diaz Canales (writer) & Juanjo Guarnido (artist) has been published by Dargaud (March 22). "Arctic-Nation" is a Furry kidnapping/murder mystery involving a white supremacist (polar bears, arctic foxes, etc.) hate movement. All in French, but check out the art samples on the bd.net website. Let's hope it is not another three years before volume 3 (announced as "Red Soul") is finished.