Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #233388 in Books
• Published on: 2005-12-07
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 840 pages

Customer Reviews

Sin-ful
Call it "noir meets Kill Bill." Frank Miller stripped comic art to the bone in his "Sin City" series, which takes place in the fictional "Basin City," where corruption is the rule and life is cheap.

It's a gritty, dark, edgy series with several interwoven stories, and artwork that give no distraction from the rocky stories. And this collector's edition contains the first four volumes of the series, but with the bloody, gritty storytelling amped up with the greater quality of the publication.

It opens with "The Hard Goodbye," a bloody revenge tale about a scarred hulk named Marv. He meets a beautiful young blonde who sleeps with him, but she is dead the next morning. Revenge spurs Marv to hunt down and destroy the people who killed Goldie, including a silent cannibal and a corrupt cardinal, no matter what the price.

"A Dame To Kill For" is pure noir, set before the first book of the series. Dwight is a photographer with a shady past; his ex-girlfriend Ava reenters his life, announcing that she's scared of her ultrawealthy husband, Damien Lord, and seeking Dwight as a knight in tarnished armor. But Dwight doesn't know if he can trust her -- is Ava really in danger, or is she manipulating him as a pawn to get back at her husband? The truth just might destroy him...

Elsewhere in Sin City, the streets of Old Town are ruled by the ladies who walk them. And in "The Big Fat Kill," Dwight comes to their aid. A bunch of drunks invaded Old Town and get killed by the prostites... but then they find that one has a badge. Now Dwight must help the prostitutes -- to whom he owes a debt -- defend themselves against the rest of Sin City.

"That Yellow Bastard" introduces us to Hartigan, an ailing cop who receives a distress call from an 11-year-old, Nancy Callahan. He does rescue her, but at a price -- the rapist-murderer who attacked her is the son of a senator. Hartigan ends up in jail. And after eight years, he finds that teen stripper Nancy is now being stalked by the senator's son again...

Anyone who has seen the excellent "Sin City" movie will know what to expect -- a bloody, stark, lawless retro-noir story, with a lot of killing, sex and revenge. Wallace puts it well at the end of "Hell and Back": "That rotten town. Those it can't corrupt, it soils. Those it can't soil, it kills."

So what kind of boxed set is this? A collector's set, not the type you take off the shelf and flip through, but the kind you dust, admire, and occasionally brush your fingers over. But if you were to flip through it, you would find fine-quality paper, tight hardcover bindings, and Miller's artwork sitting in the middle of it, looking better than ever.

Normally I would think that a black-and-white comic, with only the odd splashes of colour, would be wasted on the paper here. But it actually adds definition to Miller's stark artwork, and makes it leap off the page. Whether black-and-white or with the odd bit of colour, it's very striking just to look at.

The first boxed set of Frank Miller's "Sin City" takes the noir comic and upgrades it to a collectible status. Dark, edgy and beautifully bound.