“The air cools. The sounds change. The suits and brief-cases scurry to their fortresses and bolt their doors and balance their checkbooks and ignore the screams and try not to think about who really owns Sin City.”
—Sin
City Volume I: The Hard Goodbye
Sin
City, its creator has said, is not a place but a state of mind (Booker 161). Eager
to do comic books about crime, “about tough guys in mean cities,” in 1991 artist
Frank Miller created the first story of the Sin
City series, initially released in thirteen parts in Dark Horse Presents (Harvey 259). The story was retitled The Hard Goodbye, released as a graphic novel and followed by five more “yarns,”
sordid tales of urban violence set in a climate of complete moral corruption. Influenced
by Hammett, Chandler, Spillane, Jim Thompson and “long nights of living alone
in Manhattan and discovering the black-and-white movies,” Miller’s
illustrations drew their inspiration from outside the traditional confines of
the comic book subculture (MacDonald 42, Gabillet 104). Sin City featured gritty
black-and-white stylized graphics, over-the-top, hard-case crime retro
dialogue, hardcore ultraviolence; it became an exercise in the celebration of
film noir culture, one that is particularly extreme, violent and brutal, even
by the genre’s standards. Steeped in darkness both physical and psychological,
the style, characters, setting, themes, and tone of the graphic novel series,
particularly the first four volumes (The
Hard Goodbye, A Dame to Kill For,
The Big Fat Kill and That Yellow Bastard) are undeniably
indebted to film noir. At the same time,
Sin City self-consciously draws
attention to the conventions of noir either by reducing or amplifying them,
effectively critiquing its own narrative forms while remaining entirely within
the rules of the genre.
