Greg Goldstein's Comic Art Gallery

Tag: Sin City

Frank Miller — Scene Of The Crime

Original Art and The Artists

Sin City: Family Values, October 1997

Original comic art from Frank Miller's Sin City:Family Values --- from the collection of Greg Goldstein

Family Values — The fifth Sin City yarn (and the only one released as a straight graphic novel instead of individual comic issues) — seems to be at the lower end of the rankings for Frank Miller Sin City fans. If you ask me (and I know you didn’t) this is a bad rap.

While definitely more straightforward and less rich story-wise than some of the earlier tales, Family Values is a revenge thriller told well.  Perhaps fans found it too conventional: Had Miller decided to make a few changes, it could easily be transformed into a Daredevil/Electra/Punisher story.

This art is from the terrific multi-page opening sequence. Dwight McCarthy visits the scene of the crime of a recent gangland killing, at night, in Volkswagen Beetle… in a blizzard. Beautiful noir storytelling — and perhaps the best-looking snowstorm to ever appear in comics.  And has a VW bug ever previously looked menacing? Only Miller could pull it off quite this way.

“Pok Pok “indeed.

(And my folks were in the food business. How could I resist a splash page with a diner in it?)

Family Values has been offered in multiple editions, most recently (the red graphic cover) in a lovely deluxe format (8 x 12 vs. 6 x 9).

Frank Miller — Deadly Tar

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

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.

A sampling of Wood’s greatest EC SF covers.