Review by Frank Plowright
Two years after issuing Part One of their most ambitious Blacksad story to date, Juan Díaz Canales and Juanjo Guarnido conclude All Fall Down with this volume.
As has been the case in earlier stories, it’s apparent that the sins of the past are being unearthed in this alternative version of late 1940s New York. Private investigator John Blacksad, has already seen his friend arrested, someone he was hired to protect killed, police incompetence and on the final page the return to the city of his great lost love Alma. Readers have also been shown architect and builder Lewis Solomon, a man with a vision for the city’s future promoting his legacy monument, a twelve lane suspension bridge. He’s based on Robert Moses, the controversial planner of modern day New York, a man entirely able to ignore the hardship caused by his projects benefiting some people at the cost of others.
At times you’ve got to feel sorry by Canales. He produces sophisticated, tight noir crime, character-rich period dramas that in prose form would lead to acclaim as a crime novelist, yet he’s totally overshadowed by the wonder of Guarnido’s art. As the trend in comic art is to become ever more reductive, Guarnido takes the opposite route, supplying crowded streets to set a scene, luxuriating in backgrounds, and so often using a view from distance to display architecture. Despite the cast being exclusively humanoid animals, birds or reptiles, they have personalities, and look closely and you’ll discover little connecting visual moments to which little attention is drawn. An example is the recurrence of three street thugs for a couple of panels adjusting their behaviour when seeing Blacksad after he dealt with them in Part One. And anyone who wondered what the strange brown triangle was on the cover to the previous volume can discover the answer by placing the books together.
Alma provided the cliffhanger ending last time, and she’s joined on the cover by a character restricted to the single powerful scene in Part One, but key to so much that unravels here. Despite the bright colours, Blacksad’s world remains murky, with plenty to uncover. It’s a bold move to make a chance period of darkness key to everything unravelling, but the effects have already been efficiently set up, and the realisation of what will happen is beautifully staged over the scene’s opening few panels. Also magnificent is the ending. The opening to the first volume began with a performance of The Tempest, and in the final pages the tempest arrives to devastating effect.
The only slight fudge is Alma’s return having a greater narrative necessity in terms of a cliffhanger than anything she does here. She feels very much shoehorned in. It’s a quibble, though, when everything else is of the highest standard.
