Here is the latest in our year-long look at one cool comic (whether it be a self-contained work, an ongoing comic or a run on a long-running title that featured multiple creative teams on it over the years) a day (in no particular order whatsoever)! Here's the archive of the moments posted so far!

Today we look at the first Sin City storyline, retroactively dubbed "The Hard Goodbye"...

Enjoy!

Frank Miller's noir crime series, Sin City, debuted in the Fifth Anniversary Special for Dark Horse comics in 1991, then continued as a serialized story in Dark Horse Comics Presents #51-62 (interestingly enough, each chapter was a different length - so in one issue you might get a big chunk of story while in another issue you might only get a few pages).

The story is set in the desolate and corrupt "Sin City." The plot of the first storyline involves a man named Marv (the best description of Marv that I've heard comes from his creator, Frank Miller, who called him "Conan in a trenchcoat").

An attractive young woman named Goldie comes on to Marv in a bar (something that rarely happens for the brutishly unattractive Marv) and sleeps with him (clearly as a means to gain his protective abilities). When he wakes up, she is dead and the police are coming to get him.

That is basically the entire plot of the series - Marv striving to find (and punish, of course) Goldie's killers while avoiding going down for the murder himself.

While the plot is simple enough, the execution of said plot is not, as Miller does a tour de force with the style of the comic, through his artwork and the characters he creates to populate this dingy, dark world of Sin City.

Characters speak like they just stepped out of a Raymond Chandler novel, but Miller manages to make it work.

Still, though, while the characters and dialogue are interesting, it's the artwork that makes this comic such a much-lauded work.

Here's a couple of early interactions from the comic, beginning with when Marv first vows revenge...





And a later shot of how determined Marv is...



And finally, an interesting interaction between Marv and some hit men sent to deal with him...











A very notable comic work by Miller.