by Manuelita Beck
Daily Lobo
If you've seen the movie "Sin City," then you probably know the most important thing about the graphic novels: You either love them, or you hate them.
The conversations I overheard while leaving the movie theater after "Sin City" were the same ones I've heard in comic shops and on message boards.
"It's pretentious."
"Nobody talks like that."
"It's too violent."
"It's demeaning to women."
Whatever it is, this graphic novel does it with style.
The first story arc, The Long Goodbye, follows Marv, a hardened convict on a mission to avenge Goldie's murder.
She was murdered as he slept next to her on the night they met. Deducing that a beauty like Goldie would only come on to a scarred man like himself if she needed protection, Marv decides to find out whom she was so rightfully afraid of.
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And he investigates as only Marv can - with a whole lot of violence.
The story will be familiar to fans of the movie - and the dialogue will ring eerily in their ears. Like the movie, the graphic novel has a distinctive taste.
Frank Miller's art lays out the action in bold black and white. He doesn't need flashy colors to tell the story. The contrast between the flat, heavy blacks and the thin, detailed black lines create a sense of movement and depth. Everything from dancing strippers to, well, murder looks beautiful.
Miller's dialogue is as distinguishing as the art. This is what the lowlifes inhabiting an R-rated film noir would talk like if the Hollywood Production Code wasn't censoring their words.
Is it overdone? Yeah, probably.
But that's almost certainly the point. Everything about Sin City is completely over the top. The violence, the language, the situations - this isn't a "real" place. It isn't even really an imagined place.
Sin City is a town where all the elements of a good crime story - crooked cops, criminal politicians, immoral religious leaders, strippers and murderers - are exaggerated to the maximum degree.
And maybe that's what makes so many people hate it. Sin City embodies the "high concept" style of storytelling. It's too inflated to be a comment on society or even on the bleakness of society's underbelly. But it's also not bleak enough to qualify as a nihilistic, depressing statement.
When it comes down to it, Sin City is about "the cool"- nifty action sequences and all their trappings.
This comic is tailor-made for an action movie, and that probably turns a lot of people off.
And maybe that's the best way to think of Sin City. It's closer to "Die Hard" than to "L.A. Confidential."
And man, it's a lot of fun.
The first Sin City story arc was published in Dark Horse Presents and the Dark Horse Presents Fifth Anniversary Special. It is collected in Frank Miller's Sin City: The Hard Goodbye, published by Dark Horse Comics.
