Frank Miller is pretty much a legend in the comic industry. I hadn’t heard of Hard Boiled (well, the comic book at least. John Woo’s awesome Chow Yun-fat vehicle on the other hand….) until I did a search for cyberpunk related media and this one popped up.
With only three issues running from 1990-1992 this doesn’t get too in-depth and it is pretty thin on plot and information, so I can’t really give you a synopsis here! Something about a hitman and memory issues, a huge level of bodily repair is needed after each job, which doesn’t seem to bother our main guy, Nixon? Yeah, that’ll do I think.
The real meat of this comic is in Geof Darrow’s illustrations and Claude Legris’s colouring and its depiction of the violence and masses. The level of detail in every panel is astounding so much so that sometimes it took me a while to figure out what I was looking at and where the pertinent parts of the image were.
It ends up feeling like a 1950s styled version of the future, a retro-cyber world with a bastardised amalgamation of The Terminator and Blade Runner with a little Ghost in the Shell thrown in for good measure. That all sounds wild and brilliant but it doesn’t manage to corral those wild horses into anything coherent unfortunately.
Film N Stuff 