Hard Boiled

AUTHOR: Miller, Frank

ARTIST: Geof Darrow (illustrator); Claude Legris (colorist); John Workman (letterer)

PUBLISHER: Dark Horse Comics

FIRST SERIAL PUBLICATION: 1990-1992

FIRST BOOK PUBLICATION: 1993

Publication History

Originally serialized as three separate volumes, Hard Boiled was published by Dark Horse Comics. Hard Boiled, issue 1, was released in September, 1990, followed by Hard Boiled, issue 2, in December, 1990. The series was not completed until the release of Hard Boiled, issue 3, in March, 1992. The work was a collaborative effort between author Frank Miller and artist Geof Darrow.

Miller was best known for his successful runs at both Marvel Comics and DC Comics, revolutionizing the superhero genre with his 1979-1983 work on Marvel Comics’ Daredevil and on DC Comics’ The Dark Knight Returns (1986). Darrow was previously known for his work with French comics writer Moebius, who inspired much of his highly detailed style and influenced his cyberpunk flourishes. Although Miller initially scripted the work, Darrow took liberties with the script in his illustrations. Miller then reinterpreted his script for the final product. The gap between issues is partially attributed to Miller’s work from 1991 to 1992 on Sin City (1991-2000) and to Darrow’s European-influenced artistic work ethic, taking months at a time to produce his illustrations. Following Miller’s departure from DC Comics in 1988 over a censorship dispute, Miller and Darrow came together at Dark Horse Comics with the purpose of pushing the boundaries of what could be depicted in mainstream comics.

Plot

Hard Boiled tells the story of Nixon, an assassin android working for Willeford Home Appliances in a futuristic Los Angeles. The graphic novel begins as Norman, a member of the Willeford group, panics over Nixon’s most recent assassination attempt, one that has quickly escalated out of control. Nixon is causing a wave of public destruction as he attempts to take down his target. He is rammed by a car but continues to fight despite his intense injuries, killing his target in the process. Norman sends a repair crew to Nixon, which brings him back to the Willeford building and operates on him with a combination of human medical and mechanical-repair techniques. Nixon awakens in his Burbank home lying next to his wife, thinking that the previous experience had been a dream. He returns to sleep, continuing to have nightmares about the experience he is unsure he had.

In the morning, Nixon drives across Los Angeles, referring to himself as Carl Seltz, an insurance investigator. He pursues a car that he believes holds a person committing insurance fraud. Following a chase and a series of crashes, both cars become unusable, and Nixon continues to pursue his target on foot. Nixon sees that the person he is pursuing is an elderly woman, later revealed to be named Blanche, who is holding a child captive. The child claims to be Christie, an innocent girl in need of help. Nixon eventually retrieves Christie and creates an explosion to serve as a cover for his escape from Blanche. He steals a police car and drives away with Christie, only to be ripped out of the car by Blanche. The two engage in hand-to-hand combat. Nixon detonates a grenade in her body and escapes again.

Nixon walks to a junkyard, where Blanche and Christie find him. Blanche removes her human vestiges and reveals herself to be an android. She tells Nixon that he is also an android, which he refuses to believe. She conveys her disdain for the human race and implores him to join her in her cause against their makers at Willeford. He responds by destroying her. Christie makes clear that she too is an android and that their race is doomed because of his refusal to accept reality. A watchdog from Willeford destroys Christie to silence her. After an attempt to make himself appear human proves futile, Nixon takes a train home.

While sitting on the train, he sees the Willeford brand marking on his left arm and finally acknowledges his android self. The watchdog shows him the way to Willeford Home Appliances, where he kills all people present except for Mr. Willeford and his assistant. Mr. Willeford captures Nixon and begins to disassemble him. However, Nixon agrees to continue to be Willeford’s assassin if he can have his mind returned to his previous ignorance as an android believing he is human. Nixon returns home to his family, reformatted and unaware of the graphic novel’s events.

Characters

•Nixon, a.k.a. Carl Seltz, the protagonist, is an assassin android built by Willeford to murder the corporation’s competitors. Although other androids refer to him as Nixon, he is programmed to believe that he is insurance investigator Carl Seltz, married, a father of two children, and living in Burbank. A malfunctioning unit, he continuously shifts his identity in name and occupation. His only constant is a belief that he is and desires to be human. He is also referred to as Harry Burns and Unit Four.

•Blanche, the antagonist, is the previous year’s model android built by Willeford. She has defected from the company. Initially appearing as an overweight, elderly woman, she engages Nixon in combat in an attempt to make him realize he is an android and to join her cause to destroy Willeford. She is also known as Unit Two.

•Barbara is an android working for Willeford. She is fully cognizant of her status as an android and only wears human clothing on the lower half of her body. She is secretly working in support of Blanche’s cause to overthrow Willeford’s corporation.

•Mr. Willeford is the owner of Willeford Home Appliances and the creator of Nixon and his fellow androids. He is obese to the point of having almost no independent motor control over his own body. He relies on the use of mechanized devices to perform all tasks. He lives in the Willeford Home Appliances building.

•Becky Seltz is Nixon’s wife and the mother of his two children. She is aware that her husband is actually an android, and it is suggested that she is employed by Willeford as well. She uses her sexuality to prevent Nixon from recalling or pondering his android state.

•Christie is an android built by Willeford. She appears as a blond-haired child, playing a part in Blanche’s plan by luring Nixon in as she pretends to be held captive by Blanche.

Artistic Style

Hard Boiled draws upon Ridley Scott’s 1982 cyberpunk film Blade Runner as well as on themes from the hard-boiled pulp fictions popularized during the 1920’s and 1930’s. With the cyberpunk aesthetic, Darrow’s Los Angeles is a combination of ever-present consumer culture in streets filled with the grime of industrialism. A majority of the panels are filled with hordes of consumer objects, futuristic technologies, symbols, cars, and people. This is countered with Darrow’s attention to the hard-boiled noir aesthetic; he clothes his protagonist in a trench coat and makes his home a divided space between the light and the dark. Together, these influences form a vision of Los Angeles in which there is only escape from the crowd in the domestic space, yet even there, the presence of the outside world creeps in.

Darrow makes use of contrastingly sprawling and confining paneling to create his futuristic Los Angeles. On many pages he uses half-page, full-page, and two-page canvases to paint portraits of the enormity of the city, filling these spaces with details designed to suffocate the characters in the mass. Crinkles on the clothing of the dead can be found in all portions of his wide-angle shots with expression penciled onto every face and symbols of the mechanized world, as graffiti covers every inch of many of the walls in his full-page and two-page scenes. In contrast, he uses smaller panels in sequence to provide close-ups and allow even more finely inked expressions to come through, such as wrinkles on foreheads above lips curled with enticement. The city becomes a space dominated by finely detailed excess, yet Darrow’s domestic spaces have an impressionistic quality, providing characters a softer, sleeker look in comparison with the jagged horror of the city. Yellows, blues, and reds dominate Claude Legris’s color scheme, evoking the noir elements of Golden Age comics while injecting them into a Modern Age dystopia.

Themes

Identity is among Hard Boiled’s central themes. Nixon constantly wars between his own self-perception and the perceptions of other characters, managing to maintain any one identity for only brief periods of time. Initially, he identifies himself as Nixon the tax collector. However, another character refers to him as Unit Four, stripping Nixon of even his programmed individuality. He is identified as Dad by his son and is a tortured soul unable to drift to sleep as visions of his bifurcated self haunt him in his dreams. As Dad, he can be comforted only by domestic life and sexual gratification from his wife. When he goes into Los Angeles during the daytime, however, he imagines himself in a variety of identities: Carl Seltz, an insurance investigator; Harry Seltz, investigator for the Benevolent Assurance Corporation; Harry Burns; and Carl Burns. He cycles through these identities while struggling to keep his humanity that can only be bestowed upon him by his creator, Mr. Willeford.

Another central theme in Hard Boiled is consumerism. A majority of Darrow’s panels and pages are layered with the presence of corporate structures and consumer products. Consumerism is present in objects ranging from signs and advertisements inhabiting the Los Angeles landscape to beer bottles lining the streets, candy bars connected with fetuses in medical and mechanical equipment, and giant cans of soda in grocery stores with screens constantly advertising new products. Humans are reduced to consumer products as well, conveyed through the pastiche of human and android prostitution and by symbols of popular culture icons presented as dolls and figures on t-shirts.

Impact

Hard Boiled was initially met with critical and popular responses ranging from disgust to delighted applause. Some viewed it as borderline pornography, and its publication created moral uproar and legal problems. A Gainesville, Florida, comic-store owner was charged and acquitted for selling mature content to a minor; an Oshkosh, Wisconsin, retailer had his stock of Hard Boiled seized until he would agree to put an in-store censor over the material after allegedly selling it to a minor. Ultimately, it was decided that the material, although offensive, could be sold as long as it was to adult audiences.

In Hard Boiled, issue 3, Dark Horse Comics printed a variety of reader responses, and although many expressed sentiment similar to those found in the Florida and Wisconsin court cases, many were positive analyses of the nature of such a project. Many lauded the extreme nature of the work as a statement about the medium’s abilities, while others simply reveled in the pure excess of the work and its visual complexity. Hard Boiled’s success was assured when Miller and Darrow won an Eisner Award for Best Writer/Artist in 1991.

Although underground comics had previously depicted violence, sexuality, and other taboo subjects to equal extremes, Hard Boiled served as an introduction of hyperviolence and hypersexuality to mainstream comic books. In this regard, many of the increasingly violent and pessimistic works of the Modern Age during the 1990’s and 2000’s can be traced to Hard Boiled. Mark Millar, J. G. Jones, and Paul Mounts’s Wanted (2003-2004) is an example of a comic influenced by Hard Boiled that infuses hyperviolence and mature language into mainstream comics; it was even developed into a major film released in 2008. The introduction of these mature, adult themes can even be extended to manga works such as Atsushi Kaneko’s Bambi and Her Pink Gun (1998-2001) series that explores intense violence and is grounded in American pulp culture. Additionally, Darrow’s European, Moebius-inspired artwork and increasingly layered, heavily populated landscapes introduced sensibilities from European comics to the American mainstream. The influence of his art can be seen in Miller’s later works such as 300 (1998).

Further Reading

Dick, Philip K., and Tony Parker. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968)

Giraud, Jean. Moebius 4: The Long Tomorrow and Other Science Fiction Stories (1988).

Kaneko, Atsushi. Bambi and Her Pink Gun (1998-2001).

Millar, Mark, J. G. Jones, and Paul Mounts. Wanted (2007).

Miller, Frank, and Geof Darrow. Big Guy and Rusty the Boy Robot (1996).

Bibliography

Cavallaro, Dani. “The Brain in a Vat in Cyberpunk: The Persistence of the Flesh.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 35 (2004): 287-305.

DuBose, Mike S. “Holding Out for a Hero: Reaganism, Comic Book Vigilantes, and Captain America.” Journal of Popular Culture 40, no. 6 (2007): 915-935.

Wandtke, Terrence R. “Frank Miller Strikes Again and Batman Becomes a Postmodern Anti-Hero: The Tragi(Comic) Reformulation of the Dark Knight.” In The Amazing Transforming Superhero! Essays on the Revision of Characters in Comic Books, Film, and Television. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2007.