I got this book through the LibraryThing Early Reviewers project. I don’t subscribe to any newspapers, so there are relatively few comic strips I read these days – they all mainly fall into the web comic category. That said, I have always been a fan of Calvin and Hobbes, Zits and Retail. The fact that Bill Watterson (author of Calvin and Hobbes) wrote the foreword to this Cul de Sac collection was definitely what made me curious about this comic strip.

The strip focuses around Alice, a four-year-old girl living in the suburbs with her parents and older brother Petey, and going to Blisshaven Academy with her group of friends.

The class pet – a guinea pig by the name of Mr. Danders – provides some of the most entertaining storylines that revolve around the preschool. I am thinking specifically of the ones where he escapes from the preschool in order to go in search of his long lost love. Alice reminds me a bit of Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes, minus the philosophical ponderings. But Petey is by far the best character in the strip. Not only neurotic, he’s also … well, he believes that child safety gates are the last defense against zombies. What’s not to love about that kid?

The first few strips (about 50 pages or so in this book) were written for a magazine – The Washington Post Magazine. When the comics go from colour to black and white, the strip had been picked up by newspapers. One of the things that I love best about collections of comic strips is the progression that you can see in terms of the style of drawings. This one certainly seemed to improve quite a bit throughout the book. While not the style of drawings I would normally like – it felt raw and unrefined – it certainly reflects the main character and the feel of the stories well.

As a result, I have spent most of my weekend curled up on the futon with a stack of books, and thus far have only manged to actually finish one of them. (Though, I’ve still got a number of hours left today so perhaps I shall make a good deal of progress with my other books on the go. If Hugh Laurie in the form of Wooster doesn’t beckon to me, that is. Or Nathan Fillion in the form of Mal Reynolds. Hmm.)

Anyway, I’m rambling.

This is the second volume in the Sin City series by Frank Miller.

Our main guy in this volume, Dwight, has been contacted by a dame who broke it off with him three years ago. He’s led to believe that this girl’s life is in danger, but it turns out that’s she’s still the same lying, manipulative, gold-digging girl she always was and just needed to use Dwight to kill her husband – making this dame the richest woman in Sin City.

I love the language used in this series. “Dame.” How fun! The language itself is enough to make me want to read more.

This story starts a little bit before the story in The Hard Goodbye, and certain events overlap. I wish I still had a copy of The Hard Goodbye, instead of having gotten these through the library, just so I could go over the stories together and see how much more would jump out at me from The Hard Goodbye after reading this one. It made things interesting, though, to start to understand a bit more about the time line about the series. I probably wouldn’t recommend these books to people who have to read a series in the order that events occur, just because of how events overlap from different peoples points of view and whatnot.

I really don’t know why it’s taken me so long to read this book. I loved the movie, and had heard so many good things about the graphic novels.

The Hard Goodbye is the first in the series, and focuses around Marv. One night Marv awakes to find the woman sleeping next to him, Goldie, dead – and discovers that he’s being framed for her murder. While he’s attempting to avoid the cops – and they’re all bad cops in Sin City – he’s also trying to exact revenge on the person who actually killed Goldie and set him up.

There were parts of this story that disturbed me, though not nearly as much as they had disturbed me when I had first seen the movie. I think I must have gotten a little … not so much used to the idea, but perhaps more desensitized, since I’ve seen the movie.

I have to admit that at times I had a hard time remember to read the story because I was paying so much attention to the pictures. And then at other times, I forgot to look at the pictures because I was enjoying the story too much. The narration drew me in completely, and the artwork… it was amazing how much can be put into something in just black and white. You can feel the movement in some of the panels… There’s this one part of the story where Marv is walking through the rain, where the lines of the rain get heavier or lighter to suggest his body, and just those panels drew me so completely in. It just amazes me what some people can do artistically.