Matt Lowder Reviews SIN CITY: THE HARD GOODBYE

guest review by Matt Lowder . . . . .

SIN CITY: THE HARD GOODBYE 30th Anniversary Deluxe Edition by Frank Miller, author/illustrator (Dark Horse, November 2021) 224 pages Matt's Rating: Four out of a possible Five Stars.

Unstable brute Marv clumsily murders to avenge a prostitute and gets the electric chair.

The Dark Knight Returns. 300. Daredevil. Sin City. 

Frank Miller is a legend. No one is disputing this. But do the breakthrough books of 30 years ago still entertain? Mostly yes.

These days some authors are lucky enough to subvert our character expectations. But a couple people, Alan Moore and Frank Miller among others, subverted the industry. After Watchman, The Dark Knight Returns, V for Vendetta, Sin City, Maus, Gaiman's Sandman, and Ennis's Preacher, and others I'm missing, the eighties through the nineties saw some tectonic shifts and upgrades to what the typical comic book medium could offer. Harder stories. Darker, more mature content. Brutality. Sexuality. Complexity. And political agenda.

I would say SIN CITY was influential and significant, but obviously, time is a factor. When you read this, and what else you've read before, colors our opinion. Today, the sort of content in SIN CITY is par for the course in urban crime comics. But I completely respect the fact that in 1991, there was not a lot of this and it probably blew people's hair back. This subject matter, the vulgarity, the nudity, the eating of people, the shade cast on the church and congressfolk, the hard-boiled noir cadence and vocabulary, the simple revenge-mystery.... all was original back in the day. Elevated mostly by...

The art!! I actually think it's artistic impact -- the style, how it looks, being such a high contrast black and white -- was it's real power. It is so memorable, and so unforgettable, even more than it's story. There's no grays, no shading, no color. And the panel boxes are mostly huge! Most of the pages are between 1-4 panels. "Negative space" and "contrast" and "frame balance" taught in college art courses should have this book as a required text. SIN CITY IS ART that HAPPENS to be a comic... that's just my wild opinion.

The writing is as hard-boiled and grunty-Vince McMann-Wrestler as all get-out. Cynical as hell, too. Lots of topless objectification. And if you've seen the movie adapted in 2005 by Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller, you'll know that they did a very good job of adapting the majority of this book word-for-word, shot-for-shot. It was extraordinarily faithful. An achievement in its own right. (I actually prefer the film.)

In the end, a bloody, nasty revisit was nice 17 years since I first read it, but I was much less impressed by it's writing. It's still historically significant visually. 4 Stars out of a possible 5.