Hard Boiled by Frank Millar and Geof Darrow

Hard Boiled by Frank Millar and Geoff Darrow

Do you have any films that you saw once and you were so blown away that you had to go back and see it again and again, just to take everything in?  For me it was Terminator 2, The Matrix and Inception. I actually saw T2 ten times at the cinema alone, needless to say I later went on to marry the girlfriend who came with me to each showing too.  You might be thinking, this is meant to be a comics blog not movie chat. You'd be right, but recently I had the same sort of glorious experience with a comic and that was Frank Miller and Geof Darrows, Hard Boiled.

As ever this was a title I missed the first time around as it was during my wilderness years from comics.  It was listening to the lads on The Awesome Comics Podcast that put me on to this one. Tony in particular raved about it so, as ever, I duly added it to my Comixology wish list.  A couple of weeks later I noticed that there was a cracking Dark Horse Comixology sale, they were virtually giving it away. It came down to that, or buying Smash, the Special from Rebellion bringing some characters of yesteryear back to life.  Hard Boiled won my internal argument, and I'm really glad it did.

Hard Boiled was first published in 1990, two years into my absence from comics, and was published, by Dark Horse, originally in three volumes between 1990 and 1992.  Millar and Darrow both won Eisner awards as writer and artist for their work and you can see why.

To avoid spoilers, if you like me haven't read Hard Boiled before, I'm not going to go into too much detail about the story.  There are definite elements of Blade Runner here, a cyberpunk world full of madness and depravity. Frank Millers story, cannot be overlooked but, for me, it is definitely overshadowed by Darrows artwork.  In Hard Boiled he gives us Heironymus Bosch does sci-fi.

The story is set in a Los Angeles of a dystopian near-future which is pretty filthy and depraved.  The first time we see the hero, Nixon a tax collector, he is standing with his back to a graffiti covered wall, drenched in blood, covered in shards of glass, carrying a huge gun and calling out an unseen enemy to come and get some more.  Right away it's the detail in Darrows art that strikes you, the tiny shards of broken glass on the floor, the perfectly replicated beer bottle labels.  This is just the tip of the iceberg, every successive page has an image that you can pour over and revel in.

Buy this book, or grab it off the shelf and re read it, I promise that you wont be dissapointed!