Hardboiled

Rating:
Summary: Comic Book SUPREME
Review: "Worth every penny"? You bet...regardless of what the price tag happens to be on this masterpiece by Frank Miller (Sin City, Dark Knight Returns, Robocop 2 & 3) and Geof Darrow (Big Guy & Rusty the Boy Robot, Another Chance To Get It Right, Hard Looks, Bourbon Thret, conceptual designer for the Matrix Trilogy).
I've got my grubbies on every Geof Darrow item I've been able to find and/or afford...like the portfolio "Le Cite Feu" ("City of Fire") and Comics & Stories (a book of Bourbon Thret stories and pin-ups, etc.), and I've read Miller and Darrow's other collaboration, Big Guy & Rusty the Boy Robot, but none of these really reaches the impossible standard set by this...thing. The story, which much of the time serves to steer and hold fast the monstrous, unwieldy complexity of Geof's panels, is Miller in his PRIME, the world in which it's set being the same as that of his Martha Washington series, but with the Darrow *bite*.
Because of the intricacy of Geof's style, one page of this is good for hours of enjoyment at a time. One panel for that matter.
It's no bull, pal. This is a treasure.
Buy the book.
For those of you who think you're unfamiliar with Geof Darrow, he designed the Nebuchadnezzar, Sentinels, Subway Shootout sequence (El Fight), Zion, Power Suit, Human Power Plants (the inspiration for which can be seen in Hard Boiled, where surgical robots and assistants for the fantastically obese are powered by babies, soda, and candy bars in pods.) and other key elements of the Matrix Trilogy.
Frank Miller is, of course, known to anyone who reads comics. His Dark Knight Returns is the inspiration for the majority of Batman material that came after it, including the first three movies. It also obviously inspired the first Robocop film, the sequels to which Miller wrote, not to mention that cameo, which blew the Daredevil cameo outta the nuke-lab...uh...I mean water.
His Sin City series, the first in particular, starring Marv, is essential Miller, more so than any of his mainstream work, in my opinion (and includes a certain bespectacled somebody, not Frank, guest-starring as the deranged villain;).

Rating:
Summary: Highly recommended
Review: First, a note to the parents and easily offended: This is NOT the book for you, or children younger than 17. It puts the ultra in ultraviolent, and has depictions of nudity and gross consumerism. Buy this for a relative at your own risk. And now,
onward.

You know, when a graphic novel merits a mention in an Andrew Vachss novel, it's quality. It is a very simple noirish tale, set in a an ugly future Amerika. Hopeless urban sprawl, violent crime, gun-toting citzenry. Everyone walks around tattooed with brand-names and eating irradiated cheeseburgers. Corporate masters set killer robots on their competitors, and get away with it. The stuff of crappy cyberpunk, in other words.
What elevates this, however, is the wonderful, fantastically intricate art. "Vibrates like liquid poetry", I believe the Vachss novel said.
And it's true. Everything, from the skin folds of the characters, to the grafitti on the wall in the far background, is fully realized in great detail. I could go on in this vein for a while, but why bother? Buy it. It's worth every penny.