Frank Miller: Ranking His Comics From Worst To Best

4. Sin City, Vol. 1-7 (1991-2000)

The word that jumps to mind when attempting to place Miller's work inside a particular genre is probably "noir" - both his writing and his art are dripping with backalley crime, booze, cigarette smoke, shadows and a huge dose of tragedy. So it gels that one Miller comic acts as the culmination of this genre-love, and Sin City is indeed the height of noir comics. Spanning seven collected volumes and nine years, Sin City is a sprawling and multifaceted epic packed with some of the most memorable characters in comics. Chief among these is Marv, the hulking knight of Basin City and star of The Hard Goodbye (1991-92) who holds a surprisingly big heart beneath his colossal frame. The storylines incorporated into the 2005 film adaptation were the aforementioned Hard Goodbye, The Big Fat Kill (1994-95), and That Yellow Bastard (1996), which are three of the best Sin City yarns. But Miller has linked all of the Sin City stories, regardless of their status as epic revenge tales or simple threads of Saturday night delinquency - each of them oozes neo-noir from every crime-riddled gutter, and the characters are some of the most lasting of his career.