| Title | : | Sin City, Vol. 6: Booze, Broads, and Bullets (Sin City, #6) |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 1593072988 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9781593072988 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 160 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 1998 |
Sin City, Vol. 6: Booze, Broads, and Bullets (Sin City, #6) Reviews
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A collection of the Sin City short stories and one-shots including extra tales on the likes of Marv, Dwight and Miho as well a sleuth of new characters including 'Blue Eyes'. More great monochrome art with a powerful touch of colour now and again, like in the final story "The Babe Wore Red" 8 out of 12.
2019 read -
It’s a Sin City short story collection. And, when it comes to short, they really push the limit! I think one of the stories in this collection is two pages/five panels long!
Some of the characters in this volume are ones you may know from earlier volumes. Some of the dialogue and plot hints at events from the earlier volumes. Almost all of these little tales stand alone as a little glimpse into the Sin City world, but there are a couple of characters and plotlines that you will find throughout – and I get the impression they might serve as an into to the next (final) Sin City volume.
The art remains as it has been throughout the series. One of the things that I love is when the art includes one character with a color feature (like the yellow bastard) so that amid all the black and white, there is an explosion of color. In this volume there are three different female characters defined by a color and it looks very cool (see accompanying images).
This was a much quicker read than the other volumes, but a whole lot of fun! I recommend it to any Sin City fan – especially to keep on hand to inject a bit of this world into your day without taking more than a couple of minutes to get a complete story. -
[7/10]
It's not like I didn't know what to expect. It's right there in the title: violence, drunkenness and sex. And it's not like the previous five albums were dealing with a different subject matter. But I'm starting to wonder what is wrong with me that I come back so eagerly to Frank Miller's hellhole of a town. On a rational level, I tell myself it's the nod to all the classic hardboiled novels to come out of the Great Depression and the Prohibition. And it's also the daring, original graphic style pioneered by Miller. The devil sitting on my left shoulder is whispering in my ear though: you'd better go and join a Perverts Anonymous society:
Hello, my name is Algernon and I like to look at pictures of naked ladies with chains, and swords and guns and stuff!
Taken individually and out of context of the Sin City series as a whole, the short stories included here don't amount to much, which maybe explains why they are collected so late in an album. For readers already familiar with the universe and with the main actors, the stories work well at fleshing out some backstories and at re-creating the atmosphere of darkness, desire and danger that defines life in Basin City. One important bonus for me is the fact that a lot of the shorts were written early in the development of the series, so the artwork is in general better than the disappointing "Family Values" episode.
<"Just Another Saturday Night" opens the collection with the most iconic character, at least for me, in Sin City: Marv, the hulking brute that seems to be built from granite. Shooting him is useless, it will only serve make him angry, and you really don't want to be around when Marv is pissed off. Especially if he forgot to take his medication. Taking revenge on a gang of frat boys out to have fun on a Saturday Night by setting the homeless on fire is just a regular day for Marv. Like the girls of Old Town, Marv is both judge and executioner for tresspasers of the honor code of the underworld. The timeline is also interesting, as it offers a different take of the key moment from "That Yellow Bastard " when Nancy meets Hartigan in Kadie's Bar.
Fat Man and Little Boy is Frank Miller's attempt at humour. Two cheap goons for hire that we had seen in cameo appearances in the previous two albums, are now trying to dump a dead body from the docks. The jokes are relying mostly on their pretentious conversation, riddled with long, difficult words and affectations of sophistication. It works, but I still think Miller is at his best at internal monologues delivered in short, unadorned, tense sentences.
The Customer Is Always Right could have been great, but it's too short to develop any kind of connection with the two characters who met on a rainy night on a high rise balcony. Their conversation is long of innuendo and short on specifics. I couldn't decide if the lady is clothed or not. I think Miller drew her as a nude, and then added some lines to suggest an evening dress. (Hm! I guess I should study her panels a little more!)
Silent Night has some of the best artwork in the whole series, and again stonefaced Marv is the lead character. The rendering of snow and the deep shadows cast by the hulking Marv create a feeling of claustrophobia and anxiety. The silence rules, as none of the actors utters a word until almost the last panel, and I dodn't think the story needed any. As for the plot, Marv's role as the Sin City justitiary is reinforced when he goes alone against a gang of sex traffickers.
And Behind Door Number Three... is a very short short about the other band of Sin City vigilantes, the hookers from Old Town. When a stranger starts to cut up with a butcher's knife the women he lures into his bed, the hookers set a trap for him and let tiny Miho teach him a lesson in the use of sharp blades.
Blue Eyes is one of the rare examples of Miller adding colour to his usual black & white palette. After yellow and red, we have now a femme fatale defined by the colour blue. Frank Miller is a great admirer of stereotypes when it comes to his ladies: they're all smoking hot, all willing to drop their clothes and jump into bed with the male leads, all terminally dangerous to men's health and sanity. A small time crook takes refuge in Kadie's Bar (I believe all roads in Sin City ultimately lead to this place), running from a hired killer. While drooling over Nancy the stripper girating on a raised scene, this guy Jim runs into his old flame Delia, who apparently wants him back. If it sounds familiar, it is because it is almost word for word the scene from "A Dame To Kill For" between Dwight and Ava. And likewise, it will probably not result in a happy ever after.
Rats is pretty forgettable, and unconnected to any other previous events, as far as I can tell. A man sits alone in a hotel room, thinking about his past as a Nazi killer and doing disgusting things to rats.
Daddy's Little Girl continues the trend of whimpering, scantily clad ladies causing troubles for the men they set their eyes on. Amy, a barely legal nymphet, asks her older lover to help her get rid of an overbearing father. The poor slob falls for one of the oldest tricks in the business - killing for sexual gratification. The story sets out to be provocative and it succeeds, in a weird, sleazy way.
Wrong Turn and Wrong Track are one story that for some reason was split into two unequal parts. Moral of the story: don't stop at night to pick up damsels in distress, especially if they have blue eyes and very short dresses. Delia is turning into a regular of the series (I cheated a little by looking through the album no. 7, where she plays a lead role). Even if Delia is the typical Miller deadly temptress, the story is worth checking out for the panels set in the Santa Yolanda Tar Pits, the Basin City abandoned amusement park, filled with giant statues of dinosaurs.
The Babe Wore Red is the last short story, and I almost told myself that if this babe is another killer with doe eyes, I will throw the book at the wall. It comes close, but this last dame appears to be in real distress, when our old acquaintance Dwight discovers her hiding in the bathroom of an apartment where one of his friends has just been murdered. A sniper shooting through the bathroom window throws the babe into the vigilante's arms, and they run for their lives. More shootings and beatings follow, and later some revelations about the drug related activities of the dead man and about the secret identity of the red dress.
Verdict: 2,5 stars for the stories
4.5 stars for the artwork.
recommended mostly for fans of the series and for completists. -
2.5 stars
"You being good yet?" -- Marv's closing line, from 'Silent Night'
Well . . . the review for your book won't exactly be 'good,' Marv. (Please don't hit me. XD) Hulking, reserved Marv - memorably portrayed by Mickey Rourke in the two cinematic adaptations - is undoubtedly the MVP of this volume, with his two segments - the violent opener 'Just Another Saturday Night' and the nearly wordless 'Silent Night,' in which he's in full-on heroic mode (!) - being the most memorable and action-packed of eleven short stories from Miller's darkly off-kilter crime noir series. Over half of them are forgettable and/or much too brief to make an impression, although 'Blue Eyes' and 'Wrong Turn' (which both feature azul-attired women who are equal parts duplicitous and deadly - watch out, all of you weak-willed fellas) each had their slinky if predictable charm. -
Booze, Broads and Bullets is the only Sin City volume that’s a short story collection. It features some characters from previous volumes like Marv from The Hard Goodbye, Nancy from That Yellow Bastard, and Dwight from A Dame To Kill For, and some new ones like Blue Eyes, a voluptuous assassin.
This is also the last great Frank Miller book. Miller would go on making comics for years afterward - The Dark Knight Strikes Again, All-Star Batman and Robin, and Holy Terror for example - but they never recaptured the brilliance of his glory days and many were just plain terrible. Even Hell and Back, the final Sin City book, was slow and overlong and is the only Sin City book that could be considered boring.
So what makes Booze, Broads and Bullets so damn good? The stories are simply awesome. The Josh Harnett short that opened the 2005 Sin City movie is here in “The Customer is Always Right”, a mere 3-page story that grabs you instantly. A handsome, James-Bond-ish man stands behind a beautiful woman on a balcony in the rain, they talk cryptically and breathlessly about death, they embrace and then - BANG - she’s dead and lying in his arms. He’s a hitman and she was his target.
The book showcases Miller’s adeptness at the short story format, each one coming at you like a string of bullets and each one hitting the target square on. Rats, a 7-page story, depicts a claustrophobic, nightmarish dark room where the mere thoughts in the man’s head are enlarged captions in the panels showing how quiet it is. It’s intimated the man is a Nazi officer in hiding - another man appears, and kills him with the oven, in the same way the Nazi must’ve killed Jews in the death camps. Another story, Daddy’s Little Girl, a 9-pager, shows how a sick couple get their rocks off with strangers.
If you love characters like Marv and Dwight then you’ll be delighted with their stories here. Marv is at his laconic best, having drinks while watching Nancy on stage doing her act, gleefully getting into fights with mobsters and police alike in “Just Another Saturday Night”. Later on he appears as an avenging angel, rescuing a little girl from sexual slavery in a near silent story appropriately called “Silent Night”. Dwight meanwhile continues his streak of bad luck with women in “The Babe Wore Red”, picking up a woman in trouble, gallantly fighting off her oppressors.
The black and white art is perfect. The scene where the man and woman kiss in the rain in “The Customer is Always Right” is iconic and was replicated by Robert Rodriguez for his film; “Silent Night” uses full page panels to tell its story and the way Miller draws the heavy snow captures its remarkable beauty juxtaposed with the ugliness in the stories’ conclusion; Miller’s only use of colour is with regards to the women, using blue, pink and red for their dresses as if saying the only joy in this grim world lies with the women.
So what’s the effect of this stylised art and storytelling combination? Sin City is genre writing, specifically hard-boiled noir. Miller is writing in the tradition of Raymond Chandler, Mickey Spillane, Dashiell Hammett, and numerous others, albeit in a heightened manner as to almost parody the genre. Narrators frequently speak in clipped sentences, rarely stepping outside the bounds of what the reader needs to know to follow the story, occasionally tossing in a melodramatic metaphor in the style of noir. Miller’s characters are deliberately exaggerated: the men are either men’s men like Marv and Dwight who can fight, drink and love like gods, or else they’re degenerate slobs, ugly on the inside and the outside; the women are generally beautiful with perfect figures. They are extremes of characters to match the extreme stories Miller tells - life and death stories, people who are either about to die or about to kill. There are no half measures in the storytelling therefore there are no half measures in the characters.
The art style matches this approach - simple black and white for 99% of the books. Characters are either good or bad, black and white, their morality and world depicted in the stark absence of any grey. The bad are punished - badly - by the good. And because Basin City is so full of bad people, the books’ art is drawn heavily in black with slivers of white used for definition - the title of the series is called Sin City for a reason.
I can understand some readers’ reactions to Miller’s work as unimpressed with its portrayal of men and women, but when it comes to Sin City, readers should go in knowing that what they’re about to read has nothing to do with reality, or even subtlety, and everything to do with the noir literary genre. Noir is not reality, it’s a cartoonish viewpoint of larger-than-life characters that’re cynical and world-weary, the stories containing extreme stakes, soaked in seedy sex and dive bars surrounded by the pallor and whiff of stale cigarette smoke. In this sense, Miller’s Sin City books are a triumph, especially Booze, Broads and Bullets that are enthralling melodramatic stories told in perfectly measured pages where no panel is wasted and the art and writing compliment each other to enormous effect.
Miller may have become a crazy person in the years following this book’s release, producing some of the most mocked comics ever, like All-Star Batman and Robin (“I’m the goddamn Batman!”), as well as a flat-out offensively racist book in Holy Terror, but his Sin City books are flawless and represent the pinnacle of comics art. They’re a good example for me of loving the art, hating the artist. I may not care for Miller as a person but the comics he produced in the 80s and 90s are undeniable in their artistry.
Booze, Broads and Bullets is the last gasp of Miller’s incredible talent but it’s a helluva great book to leave on. I’ve re-read it many times over the years and it still manages to hook and draw me in, holding me in my seat as I go through the book in one relentless sitting every time. The Sin City books are among the comics I turn to after reading several bad comics to remind me what a great comic looks like and how great the medium can be. If you’ve never read it, do yourself a favour and check it out today; if you’ve read it before, it’s definitely worth re-reading again. -
Miller's short stories.
He's just re-hashing all his same-old, same-old plots.
Nothing terrible, but nothing new or exciting either.
Great illustrations.
Only for die-hard fans who can't get enough and just want Sin City to go on forever and ever. -
This is the sixth volume of Sin City, which I am reading in the Big Damn Sin City collection, all seven volumes, more than 1300 pages, BIG format, brassy and bold. And this volume is a collection of short stories, a glimpse at the essence of the series, not deep but emblematic of what he thinks the genre is all about: Booze, Broads and Bullets. Well, this is not what noir is all about, but in his cartoon version of it, without substantial character development, he strips it all down to this, with a laugh and a sneer and says, this is what we really read this stuff for. And the stories give you a kind of smorgasbord glimpse into the whole series, the whole world. It's a kind of short short story coda where he summarizes what it all about before the Big Finish of chapter seven, Hell and Back. But this is pithy and stripped down compared to that, and that's the strength of it, it's like a kind of poem, so spare as stories, really almost like tableaux. And the art in this one is varied and shows off in a constantly shifting set of scenes what he is capable of. This is when Miller was a master. Yes, women are objects here, because that's the genre he was depicting in a city that is almost a caricature of a city, Sin City. But men are also objectified as bodies, too, caricatures of gangsters, infused with testosterone. If you see it as caricature, as style, you can see why in spite of its limitations I still like it a lot. I am influenced in this review by Sam Quixote's fine review of the same, I'll admit it, but I really did admire it.
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Booze, Broads & Bullets is a daring and bold collection of short-stories set in Sin City. This collection from the series brings eleven stories, involving the usual characters from the tainted town (Marv and Dwight), as well as the prostitutes from Old Town, and some characters who appeared before in cameo appearances. New and unknown characters that represent the average Joe from Sin City also have their own part in this collection.
Miller added color to some of the characters (low-life women) in order to emphasize their sexual features. Miller's noir artwork reaches its pinnacle in some of the stories, such as "Blue Eyes", and "The Babe Wore Red". In these short-stories, the artwork jumps from the bold black & white palette to the defined color of blue and red.
The "Silent night", where Marv takes part of it, depicts an extraordinary noir design, with a raw episode of Marv killing six sex traffickers.
In this volume, Miller writes new stories about "femme fatale" characters, reaching the peak of sensuality in Miller's female characters.
In general, the stories lack new development to the characters, however, it's stil an interesting collection of short stories that manages to portray new adventures.
Rating: 3.5/5 stars -
Perfectly captures Miller's approach to writing: short stories devoid of anything resembling the emotions of people over the age of five or of anything passing for characters learning from their experiences, mistakes or fellows. Everyone gets punished quickly, sharply and without comment.
Makes me wonder one thing: is Miller power-fantasizing, or is this sublimated Catholic guilt that drives him to externalize the treatment he believes he himself deserves?
One thing's for sure: he has a healthy relationship with women.
One star for writing (even a kindergartener could pull off), four stars for stellar art. -
This comes as a bad surprise after vol 5, I was hoping to see a course correction in this one to bring back the story in traction, but here we are with a collection of short stories that does not sit well with me for 2 reasons, the first one is the course correction and thecsecond one is that even if looked at and evaluated indepentently of the main story, the collection is entirely without impression or identity, they are really very short short stories, rather more of quick scenes...
MiM -
A short story collection that was occasionally fun when we got to see old characters, but didn't give me nearly enough time as I needed to love the new characters. Nothing new but good for fans — and as always, the art style is cool.
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Nice short story collection, Marv is back, Dwight is back, some new interesting characters like "Blue Eyes". I thought the one-color addition on some of the stories (mainly dresses) gave a fresh tone to the saga.
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Review in English • en Français • en Español
A great volume of the Sin City saga. It’s really in the spirit of the first one. The character Marv returns. We see again the merciless struggle instead of overly justified feuds. Excellent introduction of new characters too.
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Un très bon volume de la saga Sin City. Celui-ci reprend bien le ton du tome original. Le personnage de Marv revient. On voit une fois de plus une lutte sans merci au lieu de batailles hyper justifiées. Il y a aussi l’excellente introduction de nouveau personnages.
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Un muy buen volumen de la saga de Sin City. Este retoma bien el tono original de la serie. El personaje de Marv regresa. Vemos una vez mas a luchas sin piedad en lugar de batallas altamente justificadas. También se introduce un nuevo personaje que no puedo esperar ver de nuevo. -
Book Info: This collection contains
Sin City: Booze, Broads, and Bullets issue #1.
Simply opening the book and seeing the table of contents was enough for me to know that this book could very well be the worst of Miller's Sin City publications so far, and that's saying something. He should continue writing extended stories rather than short ones. The Sin City title has been ruined for no good reason, but I'm hoping it will at least end on a positive note. -
I may be new to graphic novels but...pointless and silly! Sorry, not sorry!
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This is probably one of the more interesting Sin City books due to it being a collection of short stories. I typically fault the Sin City books for not having good characters and a thin plot - that still exists here, but its less noticeable because of the story lengths, or rather more excusable.
The best part of this book are the sexy female drawings. Occasionally the stories will get exciting, or the 'twist-ending' is interesting, but overall the stories take a back-seat to Miller drawing sexy girls - and not wrongly: I believe Miller was more interested, at this point, in drawing girls than he was in crafting stories.
I don't really understand why Sin City has numbered volumes, as I figure you could read them in any order. And this is the volume I would recommend first for someone that is interested in checking out the series (especially if you have seen the first movie as that is based on the first few volumes, and makes those volumes less enjoyable). -
Really short stories. Some ok and some just meh. Did not mind the limited color, but sometimes the black and white looked confusing.
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Didn't expect the short story format. It was fun though, of course, I liked some stories better than others. Some seemed a bit meaningless. Overall, this is my least favourite instalment in the Sin City series, albeit I still enjoyed the art style and Miller's play with a few colours.
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Chyba wolę jednak jak komiks opiera się na jednej historii a nie kilku opowiadaniach, wydały mi się strasznie okrojone.
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Inessential Sin City shorts which hardly benefit from being slung together like this. I still find Miller’s art breathtaking but the noir tropes are starting to wear thin.
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Several short vignettes about murder, revenge and assassination. Tongue in dirty cheek.
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Booze, Broads, and Bullets is the sixth book in the Sin City series. On the heels of
Family Values one often doesn't know what to expect, but thankfully this book reinstated the bulk of the more entertaining and satisfying Sin City stories. This collection is full of humor, and does indeed provide some of the backstory that was missing from previous volumes in regards to Dwight, Fat Man, and Little Boy.
This collection also fixes some of the problems with the art that I had in the previous volume. With the exception of
That Yellow Bastard the books have been completely black and white. This volume adds red and blue to the mixture as well, though always in very small number and to great effect. I'm glad that the film adaptation used a similar array of colors rather than just the yellow.
This is altogether a very satisfying volume and a breath of fresh air after the disappointingly slim previous collection. Only one more left now until the end. I remember it being a bit of a doozy. -
Recopilatorio de 11 historias cortas que representan a la perfección el espíritu de Basin City. Incluye:
· Just Another Saturday Night………………………Otro sábado a la noche
· Fat Man and Little Boy………………………………Fat Man y Little Boy
· The Customer Is Always Right……………………El cliente siempre tiene la razón
· Silent Night………………………………………………Noche de paz
· And Behind Door Number Three……………….Y detrás de la puerta número tres…
· Blue Eyes…………………………………………………Ojos azules
· Rats…………………………………………………………Ratas
· Daddy’s Little Girl……………………………………La nenita de papá
· Wrong Turn………………………………………………Giro equivocado
· Wrong Track………………………………………………Carril equivocado
· The Babe Wore Red……………………………………La chica estaba de rojo
Y una Galería de portadas que, al igual que varias de las historias cortas, incluye páginas a color. -
جلد ششم از مجموعه کمیک "شهر گناه" اثر فرانک میلر.
به طرز عجیبی نقاشی های این جلد افت کرده بود. نمیدونم چرا این طوری نقاشی کشیده بود؟ عنصر اصلی نقاشی های سه جلد قبل، سادگی نور پردازی و استفاده از حداقل جزئیات بود که حقیقتاً هیجان انگیز بودن. در این جلد، پرداختن بیش از حد به جزئیات و سایه روشن های زیاد نقاشی ها رو شدیداً خراب کرده بود. همین طور چیدمان کادرها هم شدیداً افت کرده بود. استفاده ی بی دلیل و زیاد از عنصر رنگ (که یه بار توی کمیک "آن حرامزاده ی زرد رنگ" خوب جواب داده بود) یه جورایی شورش رو درآورده بود.
کمیک داستان واحدی هم نداشت و مجموعه ای از داستان های کوتاه و ده پونزده صفحه ای بود که بیشترشون اصلاً خوب نبودن.
خلاصه، ظاهراً باید توی جلد چهار تموم میکرد مجموعه کمیک رو. این دو جلد اخیر که خوب نبودن. -
While the vast majority of Sin City is structured around yarns of singularly contained narratives this volume breaks this uniformity by organizing itself around a series of vignettes. Multiple one-shots are saturated with the titular noir-esque standbys which unite their triumvirate to perform a web-like dance that binds the collection itself as much as the over-arc in its totality. All topped off with Miller's unforgettably idiosyncratic black & white style who’s uniform application is only punctuated by the occasional deployment of an extra chrome, providing accented emphasis in just the right places.
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Another bloody kickass entry in the ultimate bloody kickass series.
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Historias en las que Miller está afiladísimo con el dibujo en todas y en el guion con varias. Lástima que no hizo más tomos de historias cortas en Basin City porque es de los que más disfruté.
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The penultimate Sin City volume. This instalment is a series of short stories rather than one.
⚠️Triggers: anxiety, nudity, violence, sexually explicit, sexism, domestic violence, death, murder.
I noticed some stories overlink with the previous running narrative so time is not in chonological order.
Not sure what to make of this one as some of the stories connected to the previous volumes but others didn't. I like how certain elements of illustration like blue eyes, red lips, clothing etc. are depicted in colour as most of are shown in monochrome.
I liked a few of the short stories which are based on a female seductive type assassin/hit woman that uses her feminine charms before snuffing her victims out.
⭐️⭐️⭐️ star read. -
Overall this collection of short stories is a bit style over substance but I can't complain because that style is incredible. "The Babe Wore Red" and "The Customer Is Always Right" are really good but my favorite (and most subtle) is the "Silent Night" which I might have read at least six times.
As the description says, "It's sure to scratch your Sin City itch again and again, in just that way that makes you itch for more." -
The only short story collection in the series did not disappoint like the previous volume did. I found the stories entertaining with reoccurring characters like Marv, Miho and Nancy cementing their spots in the series as key figures of the city. Miller's artwork and rare use of colour was amazing and perfectly complimented the stories. A must read volume for all, even if you have not read any previous volumes.
