Add to those instances of inspired global cross-pollination the Spanish cartoonist Mart 's eye-popping The Cabbie, which spins off Martin Scorsese's 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 Gould's Dick Tracy.

And as Art Spiegelman (who was the first to publish Mart 's work in English, in RAW magazine) notes in his introduction, while "Gould's graphic black and white precision and his diagrammatic clarity live on in Mart 's work," he points out that "more interestingly, perhaps, so does Gould's 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 he's told includes his entire inheritance