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Blacksad is a comic album series created by Spanish author Juan Díaz Canales (writer) and Juanjo Guarnido (artist), and published by French publisher Dargaud. Though both authors are Spanish, their main target audience for Blacksad is the French market and thus they publish all Blacksad volumes in French first; the Spanish edition usually follows about one month later . The first volume Quelque part entre les ombres (literally Somewhere between the Shadows, but simply called Blacksad in the US) was published in November 2000. The second volume, Arctic-Nation, was published in 2003 and the third, Âme Rouge (Red Soul), was published in 2005. (An English translation has been delayed as of May 2007 due to the bankruptcy of its North American publisher, iBooks. In 2009, Dark Horse Comics announced it will publish all three translated volumes as one collection ). The publication of this 184-page collection was set for March of 2010, apparently to coincide with the release of the 4th instalment of the series, L'Enfer, Le silence (literally Hell, Silence), which will be released in French in September.

Although it was the creators' 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, Czech, 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 Award, 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 animal (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 Shepherd, Bloodhound, Fox or Scottish Terrier.

John Blacksad has not been a contender in any CBUB matches.