Tracker

 

I am home sick with Captain Trips, so I took the opportunity to finally read this oddity I came across recently:

a funny-animal detective story by William Van Horn!

$2.00 for a black and white comic in 1988 sounds a little steep, no?  If you have heard of Blackthone Publishing before, it was probably for their licensed 3-D comics (Star Wars, GI Joe, etc), but they were a real publisher of original properties like this one.  The cover says "book one of four," but only two issues ever came out.  

It's a shame, because this is good stuff.  If you loved the Fantagraphics anthology Critters, then you should vibe with this book.  It's not laugh-out-loud funny, more of a pastiche of hard-boiled film noir private eye Raymond Chandler tropes, only with anthropomorphized cats and pigs and wolves.

I don't know if this character appeared somewhere else before or not, but this story opens with Tracker's glory days far behind him. He is swept up in a murder mystery complete with a femme fatale, but his attitude is a resigned "been there, done that" throughout.

Good action cartooning in places:

Adolf Kitler, yikes

Anyway, this was pretty good.  Not quite what I expected from Van Horn, author of some of the wackiest Duckburg comics ever printed, but if I ever see issue 2 I will be sure to grab it and post on it here.