YMMV / Blacksad

• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Karup is quite despicable in several ways, given his leadership of a KKK-type organization and his personal history of Domestic Abuse against his previous wife, but is he really a pedophile? It's never confirmed either way, although there are hints, but it's hard to tell if they actually are that or Red Herrings.
  • Abraham Greenberg; just a smug asshole with Evil Has a Bad Sense of Humor and Too Dumb to Live tendencies, or is he borderline suicidal, constantly antagonizing his obviously mentally unstable, nervous wreck of a friend with purpose of making him reach the breaking point and kill him in retaliation? Considering Abraham's absolutely random, chaotic and self-destructive lifestyle and some of his rants, one can't help but wonder if early death is something he'd consider the only logical and preferrable conclusion to such a lifestyle.
• Awesome Art: Guarnido's expertise as an animator really shows through; the characters are very expressive and full of personality, and the coloring looks fantastic.
• Complete Monster:
  • Somewhere Within the Shadows: Ivo Statoc is a powerful businessman who serves as the primary villain of this first album. Most of the other villains in the series get tragic backstories or redeeming traits, but Statoc is evil and depraved to the core. He made film star Natalia Wilford his mistress, but when he found out she cheated on him, he personally tortured her lover to death, killed Natalia in cold blood, had his way with her corpse afterwards, and threw money at it to make it go away. When one of his associates has had enough and tries to blackmail him with his crimes, Statoc arranges the man's death. Later, he taunts Blacksad by boasting that unlike his foe, he isn't limited by such silly things like ethics and moral scruples, and is so successful because of his cold-bloodedness. The only thing that really interests him is pure, unadulterated power.
  • Arctic Nation: Huk is The Starscream to Hans Karup, the leader of the racist Arctic Nation, of which Huk is the spokesman. Huk also inspires lynchings against "black" animals and praises the lynchings in public as a defense of the noble "white race." While seemingly loyal to Hans Karup, Huk schemes to overthrow him and steal his wife in the bargain. During his affair with Karup's wife Jezabel, Huk has the daughter of Karup's black maid kidnapped to frame Karup (who is suspected to be a pedophile), but murders her mother when he decides she might talk. He then tricks Karup's followers into lynching him, taunting Karup he'll see to Karup's wife and then tries to hang Blacksad's friend, a journalist who'd been spying on Huk. Manipulating a harmless old crow into helping him, Huk decides to murder the little girl as well and shoots his unwilling accomplice when he demands Huk save the girl from a burning building before leaving her to burn.
• Friendly Fandoms:
  • With Lackadaisy, a Prohibition-era comics where everyone is a fluffy cat. Both also have a black cat as one of the main characters.
  • Has minor one with Zootopia.
• Genius Bonus:
  • When explaining why his son couldn't possibly be a child's father in a phony blackmail case, one white tiger businessman in Arctic Nation points out that he's severely mentally retarded, which Blacksad attributes to inbreeding. Said son is a cheetah, and in real life, cheetahs are deeply inbred (due to a natural near-extinction event which reduced the population long ago). (Unfortunately, this renders Blacksad's "sometimes mixing isn't such a bad thing" racism metaphor a non-sequitur Broken Aesop, since that would indicate that even if he is married to someone within the same town's gene pool, it's not to another white animal.)
  • The main antagonist of "They All Fall Down", Solomon, is an industrialist politician who wants to modernize New York at any cost. He's shown as a peregrine falcon, which works not just with the vicious bird-of-prey image, but because the peregrine falcon is famously a predator that has achieved great success in adapting to hunt and survive in modern cityscapes like New York (as the towering skyscrapers mimic their natural cliff habitats).
• Harsher in Hindsight: The Arctic Nation is a little too reminiscent of the "Alt-Furry" movement: a very small, but very vocal minority of the Furry Fandom that embraces far-right ideologies.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Smirnov's police colleagues are mostly dogs but count among them one fox with an incredibly smug smile.
  • The Arctic Nation being a KKK-inspired hate group who uses a snowflake as a symbol can come across as funny to modern readers due to the popularity of "snowflake" as an insult in far-right circles.
• LGBT Fanbase: John Blacksad is quite the Stupid Sexy Flanders. Some gay readers have discovered the series after first encountering its LGBT Fanbase. In fact, the characters themselves get shipped a lot, particularly Blacksad and Smirnov.
• Moe: The children in this series, Kylie especially. So cute that it hurts.
• Narm: Blacksad ripping open Jezebel's blouse to reveal the black patch on her chest was meant to be a dramatic reveal, but it seemingly came out of nowhere and the pure shock on her face made the initial moment into this.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • The trip that Blacksad has when he nearly drowns in A Silent Hell, where he sees anthropomorphic animals dissected in what looks like a slaughterhouse.
  • Logan nearly burning the face off of a union worker in They All Fall Down - Part One for daring to stand up against the don of the local mafia family. Even when he's forced to let go, he does so with a sadistic glee, leaving the poor man to clutch his smoldering face. Later, he nearly stabs Kenneth to death at a subway station. Blacksad is quick enough to stop him, but not quick enough to stop another hitman from pushing Kenneth into an oncoming train. Not a single drop of blood is shown, but the bystanders' reactions say it all.
• Dill's nurse's body lying with cables around her neck. She spent most of They All Fall Down - Part Two knowing that this is what will happen if she can't keep Dill alive and having breakdowns over it.
• No Problem with Licensed Games: Blacksad: Under The Skin is a strong adventure game with excellent voice acting, simple but good puzzles, and spot-on portrayals of the characters. It’s only real flaws are its fondness for quick-time events and sometimes long loading times.
• One-Scene Wonder:
  • The lynx with the chest tattoo of mermaids who saves Blacksad from drowning in the fourth volume. He is not named and appears in only one page, but has already become quite popular. The endpaper illustration shows him rescuing a noticeably younger Blacksad, confirming like his dialogue they indeed previously met.
  • Smirnov's fox lieutenant, although he appears later in "Red Soul" and "They All Fall Down", is mostly remembered for his sly attitude when he covers Blacksad's murder.
  Blacksad: Problems?
  Fox: Pfft, the usual.
• Popular with Furries: Gee, what were the odds? Being a professional, high-quality comic book with anthropomorphic animals, it's no surprise that Blacksad has a substantial fanbase among the Furry Fandom, albeit one that's overshadowed by more popular IPs.
• Strangled by the Red String: In "Red Soul", Blacksad meets Alma a few times, has sex with her once and then is suddenly planning to run away with her.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Part 2 of They All Fall Down frequently gets lambasted for the lack of involvement or arcs in regard to Rachel Zucco or Alma Mayer, with the former practically remaining nonexistent to readers until the very end in a plot twist, and the latter only making small appearances in the comic with a largely unresolved plotline with Blacksad in regards to their romance between them.
• Unintentional Uncanny Valley: There are a number of readers which dislike that the female characters (or at least those meant to be conventionally attractive) tend to be designed with a more human-like appearance compared to males, which generally lean towards more animal-like or an even balance, as it results in designs which look almost human, but with weird skin patterns and noses, and seem out of place compared to the more animalistic designs that make up the vast majority.
• Values Dissonance: It's pretty easy to tell the series is set, but not written, in America, when readers of Red Soul are expected to treat US nuclear secrets being leaked as a good thing for the world. Which also makes John at the very least party to high treason, if he's not exactly guilty himself.
• The Woobie:
  • Big Bill, he is happy go lucky despite everything thrown at him and every attempt to bring justice or reunite with his friends lead to heartbreak, it doesn't help the last we see of him is his traumatized expression as he killed Ted to save Blacksad.
  • Jerkass Woobie: Jezebel. Sure she was blinded by revenge and led to Kylie being an orphan but given how much she had to go through for that it's hard to not feel bad about her.

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