10 Comic Books Where Evil Won

3. The Hard Goodbye

Sin City The Hard Goodbye
Dark Horse Comics / Frank Miller

Sin City is a classic Frank Miller tale that plants its roots firmly in the noir genre, and anyone familiar with the series will know it has a habit of ending things on dour notes.

Nowhere is this best embodied than in the comic's debut arc, The Hard Goodbye, which would later be adapted to the big screen along with many of Miller's other Sin City works in 2005, with Mickey Rourke playing the comic's protagonist Marv.

The Hard Goodbye sees Marv - a veteran-cum-hitman - stand accused of the murder of a sex worker he'd been frequenting, called Goldie. Marv sets out to clear his name, and eventually discovers that Goldie was the victim of a Sin City serial killer called Kevin (played by Elijah Wood in the film).

Marv gets his revenge in brutal fashion, dismembering Kevin and feeding him to his dogs, but it's all for nought. Kevin was well connected to Sin City's influential Roark family, who have the cops in their pocket. Marv is tried and eventually convicted of all of Kevin's murders, and is summarily executed in the electric chair.

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WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well. In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.