Sin City 1: Stadt ohne Gnade

It is hard to really justify spending $17 on a graphic novel that will only take a good hour to read. If it can be done, Sin City does it.

The book that started it all! Great collection of the early stories.

By far the best rendition of the darkest graphic novels.

The first chapter of the Sin City books is already full of Frank Miller goodness. He is the best black and white comic illustrator, and it shows in this edition. He brings out the mood of any scene with dashes of white on black, or vice versa.The story is pure noir. A guy is framed for murder and starts to hunt the real killer. It is no wonder that this book could be so well adapted into a movie, because it seems like a movie storyboard all along. One of the best comics of our time.

I’m not sure what it was – too high expectations perhaps – but I was not thrilled with this particular book. The protagonist was not someone I could root for, and his motivation for revenge was weak. I liked Miller’s gritty, no-nonsense dialogue and narration, but I wasn’t blown away by the illustrations. The black and white images work well with the noir theme, but they also make it sometimes difficult to follow the action. Nevertheless, watching the mystery aspect unfold kept me reading almost nonstop, and I will move on to the next book in the series.

Frank Miller writes the darkness that weighs on men's souls. He takes hard-boiled to another dimension, really. There is no hope in this world. Sin City is just a jungle where everyone is fighting to survive as long as possible.Here we have the first Sin City tale, The Hard Goodbye. Marv, a monster of a man that would make Frankenstein proud, spends a night with a beautiful woman named Goldie only to wake up and find her dead, with the cops practically at the door ready to charge him with her death. What follows is a mystery worthy of Chandler and Hammett, but in a world ten times darker than anything Marlowe had to face in his time.This is noir, and it shows in the artwork. Miller's use of negative space is a thing of beauty in Sin City. Strong black and bright white contrast the very grey world in which these stories take place. It might seem at times that Miller goes too far with his stories, but for this world he's created, it's just far enough.

Sin City: The Hard Goodbye by Frank MillerThird Edition Published in 2010 by Dark Horse Comics(Vol. 1): "This volume collects stories originally published in issues fifty-one through sixty-two of the Dark Horse Comic Book series Dark Horse Presents and in the Dark Horse Presents Fifth Anniversary Special, originally edited by Randy Stradley.”WHO: Marv, a big ugly brute…WHAT: wakes up in the morning after a night with Goldie, a beautiful woman who, unfortunately is now dead…WHERE: in a seedy motel room in Basin City (“Sin City”,) an underground venue populated with prostitutes, corrupt cops, thugs, addicts and drunks. WHEN: The time is now or in the very near future as…WHY: Marv goes out and tries to figure what exactly has happened and who is responsible.HOW: Relying on his animal nature, Marv seeks vigilante justice.+ The black ink panels are amazing in rendering light/shadow, texture, emotion and movement with both fines lines and blocks of black/white. The overall selection of “shots” to tell the story gives the reader a sense of the spaces and the subjects’ position within each scene.+ The women in the story wield their sex like a weapon. Though Frank Miller draws the women in a highly sexualized way and they are often the victims in the story, these are not women without intelligence or resources.+ The story probably doesn’t end the way you think it would/should; but it’s true to the world which Frank Miller has created.- Marv and/or Miller twice expresses a rather provocative, gratuitous sentiment (two different issues) wherein he doesn’t understand that there’s no correlation between a person’s looks and their sexual orientation :-/"She’s a dyke but God knows why. // With that body of hers she could have any man she wants”In Miller’s world of alleyways and strippers and such, for some reason this is the one thing that jumped out at me as “wrong”; and while not a deal-breaker for me in terms of continuing the story/series, it might be for others.OTHER: I purchased a print copy of Sin City: The Hard Goodbye (Vol. 1) (by Frank Miller.) I apologize, but I do not remember who I purchased it from! I receive no monies, goods or services in exchange for reviewing the product and/or mentioning any of the persons or companies that are or may be implied in this post.

"...and Sin City, she's a big, bad broad flat on her back begging for it..."I saw the movie first, but now I see the genius behind it! I love the writing in this story, and I love Marv! Frank Miller just owns this! Bravo!

Violent, graphic and ultimately entertaining. Sit back and enjoy, if you need a session of mindless action.

Reading overly violent comics helps me to remember that I am a grown-up now and I'm allowed to read stuff like this.

After reading The Watchmen, this somehow fails for me on an emotional, analytical, psychological level. Maybe I'll come back one day and reread it... not after The Watchmen. Hopefully it'll be better then.

Incredible art style: I had no idea you could do this much with pure black and white. Very dark, film noir style story. Only downside is that the characters are very flat: every female is a prostitute and every male is a horrible murderer.

I've seen the movie a lot but had never gotten around to reading the books. I was surprised to see how much dialogue seems to have come straight from the movie.

This is a stylish, brutal comic that draws on film noir for its look and some of its plot. Not for the faint of heart, but if you liked the movie, you'll probably enjoy this since the film is very faithful to the book. At times I wasn't that into Miller's artwork -- I don't really like how he draws women (they tend to look really boxy!) -- but it's very well-suited to the story.