These Are the 25 Most Gorgeous Moments From the Sin City Comics

The first Sin City saga opened with scarred hunk Marv narrating a canoodling session with a woman named Goldie, and this panel, taking up the bottom of the sixth page, was one of the most striking that Miller had drawn in his career. It was the beginning of a running motif: the sensation that the characters are floating in a void that doesn't obey the laws of physics.

Throughout the Sin City stories, there are moments when characters leave town, and Miller usually takes the phrase "head for the hills" very literally. If a character is driving away from the titular city, all of a sudden his or her car appears to be on some kind of mountain that runs at an almost 180-degree angle away from its point of departure, and perspective folds in on itself so we can see the steel canyons as a receding backdrop.

Fair warning: The first Sin City tale, The Hard Goodbye, pops up on this list more than any subsequent story. Miller has never really topped the overflow of visual ideas he had when he introduced readers to his neo-noir yearnings. Take this panel, in which Marv tries to escape a locked cell by tossing his formidable body weight against a metal door. It's a deeply unnatural image, in which he seems to be in a different gravitational pull than his companion. And yet, it's profoundly evocative — you know exactly what's happening, as odd as the representation might be.

Speaking of bodies and gravity, here's another example of a male figure tossed through the air, though this time we're back in that void I warned you about. This is a great example of minimalist cartooning, in a way: If you take away that line of white spit (or is it blood?) and remove the first panel, it might look like protagonist Dwight is in some kind of dream, or floating in a pool. But adding in a simple panel and a simple line make all the difference, conveying forward momentum and brutal violence.

Remember how we were talking about the void? There's never been a better example of Miller playing around in it than what we see here. In That Yellow Bastard, wronged cop John Hartigan winds up in a jail cell for years of his life, and Miller conveys how hard-up John is by subverting your visual expectations: the bars are white, not black; the prison is nonexistent, not crowded and loud. He's stuck in his cell, but his cell is unstuck in time and space.

Miller had played around with overhead shots of people waking up from beds in his pathbreaking run on Marvel's Daredevil, and in the first Sin City volume, he perfected that motif. This panel comes right after the gravity-free ecstasy of Marv's night with Goldie, and all of a sudden, we're in a world that's cramped, dirty, and dappled with detail. Who among us hasn't had a morning that feels like this image?

No list of Sin City images would be complete without Nancy Callahan, the town's most beloved stripper. Frank Miller is a dirty old man, in many respects, so there are waaaaay too many full-page panels of Nancy doing her thing in cowboy chaps (and not much else). But, that said, he puts a lot of passion into those images. This one's my favorite because it turns Nancy into a superhero: even though she's just dancing, she might as well be Batman here. It's an interesting and unintentional contrast between a strong female form and a creepy male gaze.

Rodriguez and Miller wisely kept this moment almost entirely intact in the first Sin City movie. Dwight interrogates a baddie in a messy bathroom and shoves his head into an unflushed toilet. But the depiction is as striking as the moment is gross. Miller doesn't use the standard visual shorthand of warped light to convey that we're looking from underwater — instead, he uses abstract lines to signal that the guy's head has been pounded in, turning his face into a commedia dell'arte mask. The viewer is quite literally in the shit

Thankfully, Miller doesn't take himself 100% seriously throughout Sin City, and there are more than a few moments of delightful visual humor. This one isn't just funny, it's also a startling and alarming way to depict a violent act. This isn't the moment before impact, nor is it the moment of death, nor is it even the moment when the victim realizes he's going to die. All he's done is notice that something's off.

More visual humor, largely granted because this scene consists of exactly one panel. We never find out who Marv is torturing, nor what happened before or after this moment. It's an entire interrogation scene, complete with a one-liner, in just a few square inches.

Speaking of quiet negative space, here's a great image of the calm before a storm. Note Miller's decision not to have his protagonist leave any footprints in the snow, meaning the whiteness on the ground might not even be snow — it could just be that ever-present void.

This is a master class in something comics do that no other medium can: depict a sequence of discrete events with a static image. There are only two panels here, two pictures, two frozen moments of time. But there are no fewer than ten actions that occur! Head hits wall, gun fires, bullet hits, bad guy screams, gun fires, bullet hits, guy screams, gun fires... and so on. And yet, like all great comics art, it's done so simply that you don't even register how elegant and efficient the image is.

Sin City's houses are, with few exceptions, done in Mission Revival style. In addition to conveying his American West setting, the Mission Revival also allows him to make these beautiful little tiled rooftops. They're such a delightful mix of order and chaos, sequence and error, rows and imperfections. This panel doesn't let anything get in the way of his rooftop obsession.

I just love the disgusting, comical incongruity of this image of a naked sniper in an easy chair. Oh, also, Miller may draw a lot of skeezy images of naked women, but I'll give him this: He's also totally unafraid to draw penises.

As That Yellow Bastard enters its final act, John hobbles toward a building edifice that might as well be the Black Gate of Mordor ... except it's drawn with giant splashes of white, which goes to show how much Miller is willing to experiment with the emotions we can get from black-and-white imagery.

We'll close out with one of the most iconic Sin City images of all. Marv walks alone through a manmade canyon, drawn without the aid of computers, where one's eye can only see light's total absence or undiluted presence.