the great comic book heroes by jules feiffer

Just as with the movies, it was labelled realism.' Eisner retooled this mythic realism to his own uses: black fantasies on paper. the further films dug into the black fantasies of a Depression generation, the more they were labelled realism. Eisner's world seemed more real than other comic books because it looked more like a movie. His work, says Feiffer, was 'full of dark shadows, creepy angle shots, graphic close-ups of violence and terror. In his The Great Comic Book Heroes, Jules Feiffer calls Eisner 'an early master of the German Expressionist approach in comic books - the Fritz Lang school'. Miller recognises the Thirties cartoonist Will Eisner as one of his great mentors. The only intruders into this enclosed world are a band of Irish terrorists led by the frightening Scottish actor Tommy Flanagan. The third hero, Dwight, a journalist turned private eye (Clive Owen), stands up for the collective of whores, most of them strident dominatrices who control the old city and whom he calls 'my Valkyries'. He's framed for the murder of a beautiful whore, the only woman to show him love, and sets out to hunt down her killers. Mickey Rourke is the plug-ugly, psychopathically violent Marv, who resembles a centaur walking on two feet. He's after a depraved paedophile who has kidnapped an 11-year-old girl and is being protected by his father, the city's Mr Big, a snarling senator played by Powers Boothe. In one, Bruce Willis plays tough, plainclothes policeman John Hartigan, 'pushing 60 and with a dicky ticker', the only honest cop in Sin City.

They are tales of appalling outrages followed by equally appalling revenge. The film tells three stories in parallel, though their actions are not concurrent, and only one character occurs in all three.

In this, it resembles Miller's probable models - Hammett's Poisonville in Red Harvest and Chandler's Bay City - as well as the TV series Deadwood. Miller has created a bleak film noir world of wholesale corruption where crooked cops, a venal church and dishonest politicians run everything, inviting and responding only to brute force from occasional opposition.Īnarchic Basin City, known as Sin City, is given over to cut-throat capitalism, a place from which the rule of law, moral values and decency have fled. Sin City goes beyond last year's Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow in combining live actors with digitised settings. To give him this privileged status, Rodriguez had to resign from the Directors' Guild. This gap has been narrowed to the point of non-existence by Robert Rodriguez in Sin City, the latest, highly expensive movie to be adapted from what are termed graphic novels, and he has given Frank Miller, the celebrated author of the books he's drawn on, a prominent credit as co-director.

The great comic book heroes by jules feiffer