A Scoundrel in the New World is a masterwork of European comics from superstar artist Juanjo Guarnido (Blacksad) and Alain Ayrole (Garulfo) that serves as a spectacular, unofficial sequel to the seventeenth-century Spanish picaresque literary novel The Swindler (El Buscón) by Francisco de Quevedo.
The story follows the rogue Don Pablos of Segovia, a low-born but incredibly cunning scoundrel who travels to the New World (the “Spanish West Indies”) to escape his miserable past and find fortune. The narrative is framed as Pablos being interrogated by colonial authorities in Cusco, where he recounts his odyssey from the gutters of Spain to the highest palaces of South America. His journey takes him through the Andes and the Amazon as he chases the mythical El Dorado, constantly shifting identities from beggar to nobleman in order to survive.
At an early age, Juan Díaz Canales became interested in comics and their creation, which progressed and broadened out to include animated films. At the age of 18, he entered a school for animation. In 1996 he founded, together with three other artists, a company called Tridente Animation. Through this, he has worked with European and American companies, providing plots and scripts for comics and animation films, as well as directing animated television series and animation movies.
During this period he met Juanjo Guarnido, with whom Canales decided to create comics based around a private investigator, Blacksad. After contacting several editors, Guarnido and Canales finally signed on with French publisher Dargaud, and in November 2000, Somewhere Within the Shadows was published. It was a great success with both critics and the public, and was awarded the Prix de la Découverte at the Sierre International Comics Festival and the "Avenir" Prize at the Lys-lez-Lannoy Festival, in Switzerland and France respectively. In March 2003 the second album Arctic-Nation, was released. It was once again a great success, winning the Angoulême Audience Award and the Festival Prize for Artwork in 2004. The third instalment of the Blacksad series, Red Soul, was published in 2005. In 2006 it was awarded the Angoulême Prize for a Series. The author lives in Madrid, Spain.
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