num_pages: 64
description: Sergio Leones retooling of classic westerns for his spaghetti westerns Stieg Larssons striking take on the serial killer/mystery thriller in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo And for that matter ABBAs fiendishly catchy appropriation of American pop music. Sometimes it takes Europeans to make gold of tuckered-out American tropes.Add to those instances of inspired global cross-pollination the Spanish cartoonist Marts eye-popping The Cabbie which spins off Martin Scorseses sordid urban-justice drama Taxi Driver with a graphic style that unapologetically appropriates and even refines the brutal slabs of black squashed perspectives and grotesque approach to human physiognomy (and its ability to withstand punishment) that define Chester Goulds Dick Tracy.And as Art Spiegelman (who was the first to publish Marts work in English in RAW magazine) notes in his introduction while Goulds graphic black and white precision and his diagrammatic clarity live on in Marts work he points out that more interestingly perhaps so does Goulds depravity. Indeed if anything The Cabbie is even more savage than the legendarily brutal Dick Tracy with its pimps whores petty thieves corrupt businessmen all swirling around the ingenuously violent Cabbie whose self-administered upstanding citizen status entitles him  in his view  to even more shocking acts of violence  especially on his quest for the stolen coffin of his father which hes told includes his entire inheritance!
language: English
title: The Cabbie: Book One
publisher: Fantagraphics