Writer: Frank Miller / Penciller: Geof Darrow / Colour Artist: Claude Legris / Letterer: John Workman / Logo Design: Steve Miller / Dark Horse Comics.
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14th September 2020
The Pitch: Carl Seltz is a suburban insurance investigator, a loving husband, and a devoted father. Nixon is a berserk, homicidal tax collector racking up mind-boggling body counts in a diseased urban slaughterhouse. Unit Four is the ultimate robot killing machine--and the last hope of the future's enslaved mechanical servants. And they’re all the same psychotic entity.
One word comes to mind when looking at Hard Boiled thirty years on from its release: Excessive. The art is excessive. The writing is excessive. The sound effects? Excessive. The violence? Excessive. The sex? Exxxcessive. But does it stop it from being art? Does the aggression and the anger spraying from the panels prevent its witty brilliance from coming through? Do we not have time to laugh because our eyes are stinging from the tears? Or is the excessiveness the point? Even picking through the debris, blood, guts and semen of Hard Boiled you can see themes emerge. How, as we face a future of overriding technological dexterity where the machines and their abilities outstrip us and our social representations become more important than our actual physical selves, can we possibly hope to retain any shred of our humanity? The biggest fear when Hard Boiled was originally released three decades ago was that we would all lose our jobs to robots. Now we're becoming them – and willingly. Supplementing our real feelings with standardised responses, fed to us by the simulated dramas of reality television. Talking about our emotions as if we still actually had them.
THE ILLUSION IS THE PRIZE FOR NIXON. HE IS US, NOW: OBSESSED WITH THE FAKERY OF OUR MEDIA SATURATED WORLD
Hard Boiled could not have predicted the arrival of social media when it was created. The technological delivery system that allowed it to proliferate (namely smartphones) was still in its infancy. Instead, Hard Boiled speaks to a world of appetites uncontrolled and sinister generational ascendancy. In Hard Boiled, your kids are the newer, more advanced models. Built not just with the potential to succeed you, but control you too. Domesticity is just another delivery system for control. The cage you build yourself and lock from the inside. Nixon, the tax collector / insurance salesman / assassin is taking an excessive approach to a mundane life whilst all around him the world goes to shit. Gun battles rage on the roads whilst people have public orgies in caged pits on the street. In some respects at least Hard Boiled warned us about the dominance of pornography and the end to any form of privacy.
Nixon's privacy is certainly disintegrating. At home, his wife distracts him from his true origins with sex as the children watch and then drug him. The metaphor is one for the western world, distracted by easy pleasures looking only to the future, not having any knowledge or understanding of who we are or where we come from culturally. Nixon is a man who, over the course of three issues, is stripped of his flesh (his identity), repackaged, repurposed and stripped again. But this is not self-actuated renewal. It's an attack on the core of who 'Nixon' really is. Or thinks he is. His purpose now: Revenge on his masters. Except he would rather stay in that domestic cage. The illusion is the prize for him. He is us, now. Obsessed with the fakery in our media-saturated world. There are others like Nixon, desperate for him to join their struggle. To rise up against their oppressors. They're sick of being made to kill corporate targets – the competitors for their parent corporation's dominance. Whilst I suspect corporate crime of this magnitude is rare, I'm convinced people will do pretty much anything for money and an enduring 'legacy'. It creates a kind of driving madness that pokes at us. Witness people's behaviour today. Tell me what you think it's driven by and what you think they're capable of.
In Hard Boiled, the corporate presence runs amok. Like Blade Runner on cocaine, corporate identifiers scream from the panels. It's like an alarm screaming 'Never mind the blood, just keep buying noodles!' is there a more perfect mirror for our virus addled times? The corporate excess is met, matched and surpassed by Darrow's art. To paraphrase Sidney Pollack talking about Stanley Kubrick's films: 'It's not a violent panel, it's the MOST violent panel! It's not sex, it's the MOST pornographic sex ever put into a double-page spread!' You can see why the book originally had to be the more European trim size that it was. There was no way Darrow's art would have put up with being contained in a 'normal' book. There's an obsessive nature at work on every page, in every line. You know Darrow would draw microbes if he could. Every beer bottle that litters the streets has an intricate label drawn on it. You gotta wonder if Geof, like Nixon, ever wonders who is? Could he be a robot from the future, here to show us what real art is like? Does he hear voices, telling him to draw 'just one more line...' It's beautiful to look at. You can't read this in the space of five minutes like most comics. It's meant to be pored over, again and again.
LEGRIS’ COLOURS HELP FILTER THE MADDENING DENSITY
Legris' colours* help filter the maddening density. In some pages, he starts with spots of orange and red against the grey / blues of the street scenes at night. The day sequences have that perpetual sunshine glaze that makes you think of Los Angeles. It's warm, but everything is on the cusp of burning the way Nixon's mind is burning. Raging through the streets, unstoppable. The blood is everywhere. She perfectly judges the thickness of the viscera, applying liberally. Speaking of liberal applications of emotional effects, we have to take a moment to appreciate John Workman's lettering. He lets the snarling anger and confusion in the voices seep through. His sound effects scream so loud, that they need the gutters to be heard. And Miller's writing? He's as prescient as ever. Although he didn't know where the future was going in terms of its tactile technology, he had his finger on the pulsating pulse of its aggression and tone. His future is a mix of everything that's gone before – The '50s, with its cars and safe family units, the '80s, with its beehive population levels moving through the story. He even manages to become an expert futurist for the (then) decade to come as he prefigures the way surface truly became depth in the '90s. And of course, there's the numbing effect of technology that marks the last two decades. It's all there if you look. The love affair with vigilantism remains as present and vital to Hard Boiled as it does to Miller's Year One and Daredevil – just look at the Bernie Goetz clones that ride the subway. Although societally that need for justice – or perceived just has moved online as all things seemingly must, the presence of it is keenly felt. Hard Boiled may be 30 years old, but the stench of today is all over it. It knows the future's so bright, you gotta wear shades. But it's also willing to take your eyes out.
*The current edition of Hard Boiled has been re-coloured by Dave Stewart. Buy Dark Horse comics here and support The Comic Crush. You can buy Hard Boiled at your favourite comic book shop or order a copy from Bookshop.org.