Max Riffner

The Parlor

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Sin City

It has been a long week, even with the time off. I’ve been gorging myself with turkey, booze and football while trying to hang out with most of my post-graduate friends who are in town for a few days. Sleep has mostly been optional.

Anyway, the gluttony finally caught up with me last night, and I crashed hard. I slept so good that it hurt a bit when I got up since I had pretty much stayed in the same position all night. It didn’t matter. It had all the signs of a perfect morning, and I thought, what better way to celebrate than to sit down and read Sin City by Frank Miller.

I bought my copy of the Sin City trade paperback the day it came out, never reading it in serialized form in Dark Horse Presents, just on a whim really. People said it was good. I liked Frank Miller. I was sixteen that year. I got home and read it on a cold December night close to Christmas. It blew me away.

I carried it around with me everyday at school, studying it, copying it. I had Marv pictures all over my sketchbook violently maiming corrupt cops and other various shady sorts. The scratchboard effects, how Miller lovingly drew every brick in an alley, how the linework eventually gave way to black and white shapes, it was just all too much for me. I even loved just holding it. The production of the book was quality all the way. Great paper, good thick cover stock, it was a class act for a class artist.

This morning, I laid down on my couch to read Sin City again for the first time in years. I studied the exterior of the cover, the marks, rips and tears from my abuse of it. It took me all of an hour to read the whole thing again, but I was flooded with nostalgia and memories of a sixteen year old who had put down his X-Men comics and dreamed of black and white noir comics for a long time since then.

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