Jiro Taniguchi is an author I discovered very early on in my exploration of manga. His notoriety in France has virtually elevated him to the status of an essential author, even to the point of calling him "Japan's Hergé". His reputation in Japan, however, is much lower. We have a number of his works published here, but Blanco is one of the hardest mangas to get hold of. You'll have to seek out the depths of your local library to find copies of all four volumes. Blanco is a sympathetic story by the author. It falls into the category of manga he has drawn around animals.Indeed, Taniguchi has had quite a wide-ranging career, exploring almost every possible manga genre, even though he has excelled in the slice-of-life genre. What's interesting about Blanco is the mix of genres. There's an interesting military side to it, coupled with an interest in preserving species, especially wolves. It's a shame, though, that he tried to humanize the beast a little too much, resulting in some unnatural behavior that's a little out of context. Otherwise, the story is classic and the narration well-paced. There's very little boredom in this manga.

On the technical side, as I said earlier, Taniguchi has gained notoriety in the West, not least because his style is closer to that of Franco-Belgian comics. There's no dazzling cutting or innovative box-fitting, but let's just say that Taniguchi's line is clean and precise. It's clean! The action scenes are well cut out, and he doesn't hesitate to draw pretty panels on his double-page spreads. In other mangas, he had fun playing with shades of black and white, but this is less the case with Blanco.

In the end, Blanco is above all an effective manga. The manga lets us take full advantage of Taniguchi's talent as a draughtsman, and the story is sympathetic if not transcendent. We'd put it fairly high up in the author's bibliography. If you manage to get your hands on it and want to discover the author, it might be worth giving the title a chance...