The Hard Goodbye Author: Visit Amazon's Frank Miller Page | Language: English | ISBN:
1593072937 | Format: EPUB
The Hard Goodbye Description
Amazon.com Review
Sin City launched the long-running, critically acclaimed series of comics novels by Frank Miller. Having worked on some of the most important comic books in the 1980s, including Marvel Comics's
Daredevil and the influential Batman graphic novel
The Dark Knight Returns, Miller was already a heavy-weight cartoonist, but he hit his stride with
Sin City. It gave him the freedom that doesn't come when working on someone else's characters. While the art isn't as polished as in later books, it is in many ways the quintessential Sin City story: tough-guy Marv finds the girl of his dreams, an incredible beauty named Goldie. But when Goldie is murdered on their first night together, Marv scours the bars and back alleys of Sin City to find her killer in hopes of avenging her death.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Review
www aintitcoolnews.com: " Dare I say the most perfect depictions of noir in illustrated literature form? yes indeedy..." The Guardian Guide, April 23-29 2005: " Graphic novels rarely get this graphic-in content or style."
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
- Series: Sin City (Book 1)
- Paperback: 208 pages
- Publisher: Dark Horse; 2nd edition (2005)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 1593072937
- ISBN-13: 978-1593072933
- Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6 x 0.7 inches
- Shipping Weight: 15.7 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
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.
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.
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