Sin City

Frank Miller's 'Sin City' is a pretty neat series, as far as neo-noir storytelling goes. Interestingly, its author is sort of a dick, and the stories in it are not very feel-good or even politically correct, and yet it has enjoyed enormous success. Being adapted into the 2005 film, as well as simply distributed and read in comic form, Sin City is a pretty iconic series.

I personally felt as if I was 'slogging' through certain parts, and just sort of going through the motions of reading the panels (especially the bits in A Dame To Kill For where Dwight would just not shut up), but some parts were genuinely rewarding in terms of their pacing and art - one of the most haunting take-aways from the whole series is the vision of a bandaged Dwight on the phone with Ava, promising his revenge. Absolutely chilling stuff.

The later (restrained) use of red, blue, and yellow in some of the stories is really effective, and sort of shocks the up-'til-then complacent reader to full attention for those bits. the entire Yellow Bastard storyline is pure sadistic insanity, rivaled only by the cellar scenes in The Hard Goodbye.

One of the things about Sin City that's really excellent is the way the storylines neatly dovetail into one another, picking up threads and themes from previous or future storylines at will. They connect to one another with a seeming prescience that makes me wonder how much Frank Miller planned it, and how much just sort of happened.

The last point of note I want to address here is the characterization - I personally wonder how much of the characters is Frank Miller talking, and how much of them is just…them. The reason I wonder this is because I have unfortunately been exposed to some of Miller's personal politics through the internet, and his characters in Sin City from twenty years ago tend to echo his words a bit here and there.

Regardless of that, one of my favorite characters in the series is Marv, if only for the fact that his politics are fairly tame and his principles are sterling silver. Dwight comes in at a close second, if only for the fact that he is one canny motherfucker.