Sin City – Greg Goldstein's Comic Art Gallery

Frank Miller — Deadly Tar

July 20, 2021 Greg Goldstein Original Art and The Artists

Sin City: The Big Fat Kill #4, February 1995

We continue with our month long celebration of the “Independents” — independent creators and projects that continue to impact the comic book medium.

Drowning in tar pits seems like a pretty rough way to go.

Then again, this is Frank Miller, and in the hardboiled world of Sin City, that form of murder might be preferable to some alternatives.

(In fairness, our “hero” Dwight ultimately makes it out alive. Sorry if that’s a spoiler, but the Big Fat Kill is from 1995. 25 years seems like a fair amount of time to catch up on these things.)

Big Fat Kill (BFK) is the fourth of Miller’s Sin City sagas, and one of the three stories featured in the first Sin City film. I can’t recall if the tar pit scene made it into the movie or not. Guess it’s a good excuse to watch it again.

As for actually drowning in tar pits? According to my anecdotal research and sources, It’s harder than you might think.

But it makes for one very cool original art page, and, in this case, that’s what counts.

*Clive Owen as Dwight McCarthy in the first Sin City film.*

*Miller’s Keynote address at the 1994 Diamond Conference is reprinted in issue #5 of BFK. It’s still impactful and important more than 25 years later. © Frank Miller, of course.*

Frank Miller — Wood’s World

July 11, 2020 Greg Goldstein Original Art and The Artists

Dark Horse Presents #100-1, August 1995 and Tales To Offend #1, July 1997

This is a great Frank Miller splash page from a 1995 Lance Blastoff story.

Wait — Who?

If you blinked, you likely missed Blastoff, Miller’s affectionate homage to Wallace (Wally) Wood’s classic EC SF stories. (With a bit of Al Williamson thrown in for good measure.)

The character originally appeared in only two short stories, both in Dark Horse Presents, both in black and white, in the mid 90s.

Ultimately, those stories, along with a few others, were repackaged in a fun one-shot comic book, Tales To Offend. For this reprint, the stories were newly colored.

And in a moment of inspired genius, Miller (or Dark Horse itself) hired Marie Severin — who colored most of the original EC stories — to color the Blastoff stories.

Nothing deep about these Blastoff stories — just some diversionary fun from the noir Sin City stories of the era. (Although the humor here is a definitely the dark kind.)

Dinosaurs. Rockets. Spacegirls. 40 years after EC’s heyday, it was nice to have them back again, even if just for a brief moment.