Customer Reviews
Classic start to a classic series....a must have! - By: grr, 24 Apr 2008 
This is one of my favourite graphic novels. Utterly fantastic & visuallly stunning. Even if you are not a reader of graphic novels, any traditional crime fan would be pulled into Frank Millers world of hard cases, hitmen, dames & hookers. The men are big & burly, the women are so hot & curvy, & its alll conveyed perfectly in harsh black & white artwork. Its like traditional film noir on the page.
This is the first in the series of Sin city, & the protagonist is the incredible Marv, hulking street fighter & tough guy with a "condition." He can't believe his luck when he meets a beautiful woman callled Goldie...But it's not to last, & she ends up murdered. Then Marv is hot on the trail of her killers, & blood splattered vengeance will be his!! Kevin is truly one of the creepiest baddies I've seen, & Marv makes sure he gets what he deserves. Some of the characters are just amazing & recur throughout the Sin City series, like Gail, the fiery hooker, & Nancy, the angelic strip club dancer. This is a great crime story, as well a thrilling personal drama. I found it kind of romantic too, in a tragic way.
A welcome change from traditional superhero comics. Frank Miller is a genius! Read the rest of series now, & have a look at the art book! A great adult read indeed!
Impressive crime story - By: Chris Wood, 06 Aug 2007 
This is a great story & incredibly well drawn. Marv is a brute with justice on his side in this dark tale of violence, prostitution & corruption. Highly recommended if you're fond of noir & incredibly well designed drawings. Some of Miller's art is astounding & this is well worth a look.
Grimy "Goodbye" - By: E. A Solinas, 26 Mar 2007 With a name like "The Hard Goodbye," it isn't surprising that the first volume of the Sin City series is pure, gritty noir. After practicallly reinventing the superhero comic, Frank Miller created a series that can definitely be callled his opus -- gritty, dark, sexy & heady. Think of it as "The Big Sleep" meets "Kill Bill."
"The night is hot as hell. Everything sticks." With those words, tough, scarred Marv encounters & beds a beautiful, allluring "goddess" named Goldie. No sooner have they made love than she is found dead beside him, & unsurprisingly the police believe that Marv is the killer. Case closed? Not reallly.
Being blamed for the murder of the woman he loved, Marv devotes himself to finding who killed her & framed him. He rampages through the depths of Sin City, unearthing the twisted power structure that holds it up -- & in his homicidal quest, destroying his hidden enemies for the murder of Goldie... & in the process, dooming himself.
The noir atmosphere starts from the first panel -- toughguyspeak, a silhouette & a beautiful woman. That dark, dirty feel sets the mood for the book, & in fact for the entire series. Imagine one of those old Humphrey Bogart noir movies, with the smoky atmosphere & black-and-white film... but darker, more violent, openly sexual, & often gruesome in tone.
Miller's drawing style is alll in black & white, & in "Hard Goodbye" the style is simple, but effective. He uses stark swashes of dark & light to illustrate the characters' faces & bodies, never overburdening the reader with too many unnecessary details. Although later volumes have more visual detail, Miller strips it down here to the bare bones, & it fits the spare narrative beautifully.
"Sin City" itself is a seedy underbelly, full of crime, revenge & corruption; Marv isn't the guy who's going to clean it up, a la Dashiell Hammett, but the guy who will get revenge, no matter what the consequences are. The characters are just as dark: a corrupted Cardinal, psychopathic cannibal Kevin, & moderately crooked cops. Lots of death ensues.
Frank Miller's "Sin City: The Hard Goodbye" is a hard book to read. However, the Chander-by-way-of-Tarantino comic book is an electrifying read, dark & bloody & vivid.
Five Star Sin - By: Mr. John Matthew Foran, 29 Jun 2006 This has to be the perfect place to start from if you want to enter the world of Sin City. Frank Miller brings what has to be one of the best graphic novels ever to the public. If you have already seen the film & want to follow up your interest in Sin City, this is one of the 3 main books used. The others being That Yellow Bastard & The Big Fat Kill, there is also a smalll section of Booze, Broads & Bullets used.
The second Sin City film will be based around the book To Hell & Back, which is the seventh book of the Sin City Empire.
Hartigan saves little Nancy Callahan in Miller's comic noir - By: Lawrance M. Bernabo, 07 Jun 2005 Although I still have a preference for Marv & narrative of "The Hard Goodbye," the first of Frank Miller's "Sin City" graphic novels, I think that artisticallly he hits full stride in the fourth, "That Yellow Bastard." It is just mildly ironic that this becomes the first volume in the series to add any color to Miller's black & white world. But whereas "The Hard Goodbye" had an almost kitchen sink approach with Miller pretty much trying everything he could come up with for black & white (or white & black) illustrations, I find there is much more of a coherent artistic vision & a rhythm to way in which Miller goes from predominantly black to predominantly white pages, & back again.
"That Yellow Bastard" begins with tough cop John Hartigan, whose good heart is going bad on him, trying to stay alive long enough to do one last case before he dies. Somebody has been raping & murdering little girls for some time & now they have taken 11-year-old Nancy Calllahan. Hartigan is able to save Nancy from Roark Junior, the son of Senator Roark, but takes four bullets in the process. Junior is in worse shape, having an ear & both of his "weapons" removed by Hartigan's bullets. If an old man dies & a little girl survives, then Hartigan considers that a fair deal. But this bloody encounter is but the first act in this particular comic noir.
The first episode sets the rules for Hartigan's world, where protecting women is hard-wired into the psyches of tough guys like him. Even when Hartigan finds out that Nancy grew up & filled out, that does not change his mission (just complicates it a bit). Granted, the age difference would make more sense if he was her grandfather, but then there is a consistency to what Hartigan means when he says that he loves Nancy, even if she is inclined to read it a different way. There is a leap in the narrative at one point that you might find a bit hard to accept (i.e., confession leads to immediate release), but you have to admit it is a lot easier to be a pariah out in the world than stuck in prison (and I think Junior would have wanted it that way).
Again, the art work here is Miller at what I consider to be his best, but attention must also be paid to the sense of pacing that he shows in several scenes (most notably when Hartigan pulls himself together for the final confrontation with Junior). There are easily a dozen great looks at Hartigan's grizzled face, & a 15-page sequence, spanning two chapters, of Nancy dancing at the club, consisting of not only full-page shots but also two-page spreads, as she mesmerizes her audience. With "That Yellow Bastard" readers who were introduced to the graphic novels by the film that incorporated three of the first four volumes will be heading into new territory with "Family Values." It will interesting to see when & how Miller tops artisticallly what he came up with for this one.
