Frank Miller and Geoff Darrow's Hard Boiled.

Buy it HERE.

Maniacal attention to detail.

I was told once that of the comic book artist Geof Darrow (born 1955) his artwork was so detailed that he would sometimes draw each panel separately. This was so he could cram in more and more 'stuff' in it. The artwork would then be shrunken down (it being the pre-computer 1980s and early 1990s) and pasted into the panel on the page before going off to the printer. I believe it.

There was a certain phase where I guess in order to compete with the big two Image and Dark Horse and others had to do something that you couldn't get from Marvel/DC. In the case of Hard Boiled at least you had this maniacal endless attention to detail. Such detail that you had to think there was a mental breakdown happening somewhere here.

The genius in its execution lies in Frank Miller's unwavering faith in Darrow's 'aftermath' quality of illustration. There's lots of scenes that show you just after the last bullet has fired, out of millions, or the last bloody military city policeman's body drops, out of hundreds. Even then, the dialogue is thin, dry, non descriptive as possible. Otis' retorts are kept to saying simply 'Uncle. I said uncle.' as he's surrounded by an almost impossible to count number of bodies and a few dozen police tanks.

The balance of writing to art is intentionally kept skewed to the pictures describing in high detail everything that's going on, but the actual words used only obfuscating and mis-directing what you see, with small doses of irony.

There are a good number of 'normal' pages, that is, pages with panels, characters and dialogue that move the story along. Mostly they're scientists in the background trying to maintain and monitor the actions of our horrific robot-killing machine that is Mr. Nixon. More doses of irony in that he's pursued by his equally dangerous robot/human who is in the form of a fat and flabby grandmother. Another one's a little girl. And there's a talking dog (!)