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35 of 36 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A compelling and unforgettable tale of knight errantry, April 20, 2005
Anyone who has seen and enjoyed the recent Frank Miller/Robert Rodriguez film SIN CITY should definitely explore the graphic novels upon which the film is based. THE HARD GOODBYE was the first of Miller's series of novels, and the one upon which the Marv sequence in the film is based. As Miller tells it in interviews, he had been toying with the idea of creating some short 48-page comics dealing with a noirish urban area he called Sin City, and had been coming up with a lot of ideas, such as the geography, some of the back story, and a number of character. But he was struggling to come up with a story. One day, he says, he had a flash: "Conan the Barbarian in a trench coat." And thus was Marv created. The trench coat isn't a trivial matter with Marv. Throughout the book he repeatedly expresses interest in coats, especially coats he can liberate from bad guys he is about to kill. And once Marv's story took off, it wasn't a 48-page tale any longer.
Some write or talk about the Sin City books as if Miller has reinvented the world of noir. This simply isn't true, and no one who has actually followed the host of books and movies to follow in the wake of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler would find anything new in Miller's vision. What little that is new is the extreme to which he takes some of the more garish elements of the hardboiled school, but those elements were all well established before Miller ever turned his attention to the tradition. In particular, he is deeply indebted to Raymond Chandler's take on Dashiell Hammett's creation. If you read Chandler's books, you quickly realize that he views his detective Philip Marlowe as a latter day knight errant, defending the helpless and rescuing damsels in distress, albeit with a thick veneer of world weariness and cynicism. Marlowe has a tough guy exterior, but it hides a heart of mush and a profound moral code to which he remains true. The only thing that Miller brings to the mix is a graphic vividness, and a stretching of the elements of the hardboiled tale to the point of caricature. But Marv's determination to avenge Goldie's death is remarkably similar to Marlowe's dogged faithfulness to those to whom he feels loyal.
THE HARD GOODBYE is part and parcel an exaggerated, almost garish recreation of Raymond Chandler's version of the hardboiled crime story. Miller's heroes are a bit less law-abiding, but at heart they are guys with a profound dedication to idealized women. Marv is insane, suffering from some unspecified mental illness to which he alludes but which he never describes. The pills he takes keeps him barely on this side of over over-the-edge. He is violent, hideously ugly, virtually indestructible, and profoundly dangerous. Miller might describe him as Conan in a trench coat, but he also can remind some as a poor man's Incredible Hulk. But where women are concerned, he is a softy. One theme that runs through Miller's books is that the good guys are all protectors of women, and the bad guys their exploiters. Most of Miller's bad guys rape, torture, assault, or otherwise exploit or kill women. His heroes are determined to stand between the bad guys and the women. One criticism of the books is that they are written from the male point of view. They are male fantasies. And the fantasies are not all that simple. The men are for the most part ugly or even grotesque, while all the women are outrageously gorgeous in a sex shop sort of way. The bad guys can be in many instances even more grotesque. It is all highly stylized, but it is a stylization that remains constant throughout. Miller's heroes are not good men, and in fact the only thing that divides many of them are their treatment of women: the bad guys rape or murder women; the good guys stop the bad guys.
I like Miller as an illustrator for the most part, but my one complaint is that many of the illustrations are not as strong as the best. He is often inspired, and many of the images are unforgettable, but he sometimes can be merely average. What I really like about Miller are his stories and his dialogue. Sometimes people attempting to write in a hardboiled style can fall into unintentional parody. Remarkably, Miller avoids that, despite the extravagant garishness of his characters and his imagery. He often hits the right notes with his words. Like many of the best comic book writers, Miller is better with stories and words than with images, and that's as it should be. The imagery is a vehicle for the tale to be told, not the other way around.
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89 of 100 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Sin City is Absolute Heaven for Noir Fans, May 3, 2000
No one in his right mind would argue with Frank Miller's pedigree as a comic artist. Miller single-handedly reinvented the superhero genre with his seminal "Batman: The Dark Night Returns" in 1986, then took on a flagging Daredevil title and made it the most gripping reading available in the comic book racks. Even the X-Clone fans had to applaud Miller for breathing life into a dying medium. And then he created "Sin City," making everything which came before seem amateurish in comparison. "Sin City" is the story of a down-on-his-luck,dumb schlub named Marv who wanders into a tangled situation he cannot begin to understand. Naturally, his life heads straight down the toilet immediately after making love to an incredibly beautiful woman. Marv's single-minded pursuit of vengeance consumes the remainder of the series in true film noir fashion. I could go on and on about the classic noir elements Miller blends into the tale, the obvious glee he takes in crafting this work, or the extraordinary nature of the villain he has constructed to be Marv's foil. Forget all that and look at the art. It explodes off the page in glorious black and white. Miller's use of light and shadow and the cinematic nature of his composition is the most remarkable thing I have seen in the medium. The best way I can describe the illustrations in this series is to say it looks like a storyboard Orson Welles would have put together for "Touch of Evil." Let's face it: "Sin City" is no "Othello." ("Titus Andronicus," maybe, "Othello," no.) But Miller's not looking to create great literature here, as Chris Claremont often attempts in his overwrought "X-Men." Instead, he's treating his fans to a tightly-wound, suspenseful romp through a visceral urban swamp. This is a book you'll read straight through to the shocking end, and I heartily recommend it to anyone tired of the Todd McFarlane clones and their spandex jive.
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16 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Comics Noir 101 w/ Frank Miller, March 18, 2001
Marv, our protagonist, is a force of nature. Brutish, ugly, a man who has had a hard life and it shows. His one night of passion with a beautiful woman is destroyed by her murder. He decides to set things right. That's the story in a nutshell. Combine it with Miller's designs and you start to enter a new territory of graphic novel. The stunning visuals offset the rather bizarre story and you have a feast for the eyes. The novel has a visceral impact, you can't quite forgive the strange plot but you can't stop looking.
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