Hard Boiled

Product Information

Why is Miller and Darrow’s harrowing vision of sex and violence any worse than, say, the Hellfire Club women dressing up in dominatrix gear? By accepting all cookies, you agree to our use of cookies to deliver and maintain our services and site, improve the quality of Reddit, personalize Reddit content and advertising, and measure the effectiveness of advertising.

That bleak comedic edge might be what sets it apart – in the original letter pages of the individual issues (fake or not, all funny) they ran angry letters almost exclusively complaining about its violence and lack of morality. I will say, however, that simply looking at these pages as they are, it’s difficult to argue that this is a remarkably well-colored book. A crazy bloodbath dystopian horror story (really just a slim short story) most sane people would not want to read.Fav ourite page: (Above) Oddly enough I’m not sure exactly why this is my favourite page other than the look of it feels right. I’ve always thought that but it’s reassuring to see that he been operating at that level for almost three decades. It’s slapstick Looney Tunes violence gone ballistic (a man gets his arm ripped off and then stabbed WITH it).

The resulting explosion blows Carl into a Behemoth supermarket, where he finds that the flesh of his hands and face have been torn away, revealing robotic parts like those of the old woman. Daredevil owes much to Eisner, Spillane, O’Neil and others, as Miller trotted out his influences, Sure, all comics people do that; but, that is part of the reason why, though I enjoyed a good portion of his work, I didn’t worship the ground Miller walked, any more than Tarrantino.

Hard Boiled is a story about a guy named Carl Seltz, a normal family man that works as an insurance investigator. Kind of reminds me of the Garth Ennis (and Alan Moore, and others) Crossed series, which is like these guys saying, oh, you think your little hopeful story is dystopian? The misogyny is by far the worst in that series, as women are either femme fatales, whores, killers or all three rolled into one.

Truth is the story itself does seem a bit slim at first, but as previously mentioned the best Darrow story is slender and compact, and here Miller’s trimmed the fat considerably. With a mere 128 pages this covers a lot of the themes that the dystopian sci-fi genre loves so much: the downfall of humanity, the playing-God aspect of science, questions of power and hierarchy within a world where cyborgs are as integrated as their fleshier versions. The original ink work is so dense that the viewer is lost (which is not unpleasant as a curiosity in the deluxe edition) and totally dependent on the colours to come in as a guide, giving focus points to decode its proper pacing and direction. At the heart of Darrow’s art is a fundamental exploration of contrasts: big versus small, many versus one, fast versus slow. Nobody cares in our own culture about the escalation of violence – it takes something like this to make people notice.Then we think he’s some kind of crazed investigator, but then we learn the truth – he’s a cybernetic corporate assassin. His name is either Carl Seltz or Carl Burns [he has memory/identity problems and trouble sleeping], he is either a tax collector or an insurance investigator, has a wife and two kids and a nice house in suburban Burbank.