A friend recommended this to me when I was put in charge of ordering the graphics at my library. I poked around, read some reviews (well reviewed by both Library Journal and Publisher's Weekly), and checked out some image scans from the book.
I decided that it would be a good fit for our library, but I couldn't wait for it to come in and get cataloged before reading it myself. I found it at one of the local public libraries and checked it out.
I could not put it down. I read the entire thing in one sitting. The story is noir detective fiction in a Cold War-era type time period, complete with McCarthy-style finger pointing and Black Panther power gangs. Stuff that's not normally my genre, but what really makes this book is the art and the characters. The dynamics of movement and the angles of each and every panel coupled with the expressiveness of the characters that manages to make their thoughts and motivations obvious without looking cartoonish makes this whole book eye candy. And the main character, John Blacksad, is one that readers can instantly sympathize with and really root for. At the end of this volume I found that I was disappointed that I had read it so quickly instead of savoring it, especially since the fourth issue, published in Europe in 2010, has not yet been released in the US.
Even if you are not a comics fan, this one is worth reading
