Frank Miller's Sin City

Frank Miller’s Sin City – the best comic book series I’ve read so far. Yesterday I finished the final issue. I haven’t read them in order (I started with Family Values and I finished with The Big Fat Kill), yet it doesn’t matter much, since they stories are not linked temporarily one to another. About a year ago I saw the film and I absolutely loved it. It was superb, but I’ll talk about it in another paragraph.

The comics are undoubtedly original. And they’re a surprisingly n easy read. In many comics the lines are very cramped, and the drawings are filled with speaking balloons – thing that is rather uncomfortable, because the drawings are an essential part of sequential art (otherwise they would not differ at all from regular books). There were Sin City issues that had quite an amount of text, yet it never covered too much of the drawings, they were given attention as well.

A thing I adored in Sin City (both the comics and the movie) was the way colours were used to emphasize certain traits of characters or certain elements of the surroundings. Colour was used seldom in the comics (though there was a full-coloured issue), yet the drawings kept a lot of vitality. The spirit of the film-noir was very well preserved through the narrative especially. Of course, it’s much more violent, much darker and much more grotesque. One might even consider Sin City to be a parody of the noir, though I’d rather take it as an update. Sam Spade isn’t a thing of today no more. Violent Marv and Hartigan are the new lawmakers – for in order to fight evil, one must be personally acquainted to it. Today evil is not synonymous to a golden falcon dyed in black or a couple that tries to flee from a hostile Casablanca. Now we’re dealing with perverted sons of senators, vile men of the cloth and mobsters that think they can do just about anything. And salvation does not come from the highly virtuous citizens, but from the scoundrels that have been ticked off, from men that have nothing to lose and from sociopaths. This is the world of Sin City – a parody not of the old noir, but of the world of today. Drawing a parallel between the good old days of the 40’s and 50’s (in the case of Americans) and the modern world, Frank Miller manages to emphasize the filth and corruption of today’s world. A warning in black and white, a warning we ought to pay heed to.

The film is absolutely fantastic, almost flawless. The cast is wonderful – Mickey Rourke, Bruce Willis and Benicio del Toro are just a few of the great actors that play in it. The director is Robert Rodriguez also known for Desperado and Spy Kids, having help from his friend Quentin Tarantino (Sin City resembles Pulp Fiction more than a bit!) and Frank Miller himself (!). I can find no reason whatsoever not to recommend it to everyone. Ok, perhaps it’s a bit too violent for the taste of some, but we have to accept the fact that violence is the main problem of our modern world, and simply ignoring it will not make it go away. Also I heard that Sin City II will one day be filmed, and I sincerely hope that it’ll happen. There are plenty of other good stories in the comics, plus I’m sure Frank Miller has another yarn or two up his sleeve.