Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 5/10

Into every magnificent series must come a dip, a lack of form or supposed interest that makes all the other titles so far printed seem even more tantilising. In Frank Miller’s Sin City series that fall comes with the sixth in the range, Booze, Broads and Bullets.

The problem isn’t with the artwork, which remains at its high vantage point, the epitome of the Neo-noir genre, it isn’t even with the writing which in parts remains impeccable. If there is something that really catches at the back of the graphic novel throat, it is with the short deviation from the long story process in which some of the great characters have been fleshed out and become iconic figures such as Hartigan, Nancy, Dwight and the women who frequent and keep order for a price in Old Town. The short story format is one that works fine in other graphic novels but somehow seems to be something of a failing in Booze, Broads and Bullets.

It isn’t as if their isn’t some great characterisation placed within the covers of this particular book, the introduction of the female assassin known as Blue Eyes and her distinctive blue dress in the story Blue Eyes and its smaller sequel The Wrong Turn is a major high in a series of books that has relied upon the starkness and gravity of the monochrome finish. So too is the small but perfectly wrung out The Customer is Always Right, which served its purpose superbly at the start of the Rodriguez film adaptation in 2005. However these are the only two stories worth their weight in Basin City gold. Understandably the latter tale is one that if it had been any longer would have perhaps become just another predictable tale but in its few framed format is intriguing enough to have the reader wanting and greedily expecting more. It’s delivery, like the assassin’s bullet, hits the spot perfectly and with no sound attached.

Blue Eyes and The Wrong Turn though are a different matter, they both are superbly spun tales of such devilish proportions that is a real shame that nobody suggested forcibly that it should be turned into one complete story. With the artwork that comes with such a tale, it surely would have made a fine addition to what was and still remains one of the finest independent graphic novels of the last 30 years.

Into the cess pit that residents call Basin City a little hard rain must inevitably fall and murders committed but perhaps upon reflection Sin City: Booze, Broads and Bullets was one title that never truly needed to be looked at with much enthusiasm.

Sin City: Booze, Broads and Bullets is available to purchase from worlds Apart on Lime Street, Liverpool.

Ian D. Hall