Sin City in colour? The first impression is why not? Lynn Varley just
won Best Colourist in the Eisner Awards, and 300 looked great, so
where's the harm? It already has beautiful colour covers that don't seem
to have broken any invisible rules, so hell, yeah.
But colour's easy to miss, which is ridiculous. Okay, look at a page of
Sin City and a page of Daredevil and you'll notice the difference
immediately; red, blue, yellow, on top of black and white. But colour in
comics, if it's done well, means a whole lot more than just livening up
the page. It's the original wood that's hard to spot for the trees -
it's atmosphere, mood, tone, and all those other words that, when it
gets down to it, mean colour. Frank's use of colour in his previous
work has never been anything less than sublime. It's so subtle much of
the time that it's easy to miss. I first became aware of the role played
by colour, and the use of black & white, while writing a dissertation on
Ronin at university. I cast it as the postmodernist cyberpunk link
between Neuromancer and Akira, and also interpreted as an illustration
of the theories of Lyotard and Jameson. Which was, like most things done
at university, beside the point.
What surprised me most when I began to examine Ronin was how subtly the
colourwork controls the story, and vice versa. We're immediately sold a
pup; the first ten pages or so present themselves as a Japanese fable.
With Frank's new Japanese brushwork, we've no reason to believe it's not
accurate. Hey, in 1983/84 who'd ever seen Japanese comics before (apart
from the Japanese?) The clues are in the colour and the pacing, both
pure Jack Kirby. Bright primary colours - green grass, blue sky - and
simple action-to-action transitions. The subtext is what we eventually
discover over the series; that the Ronin's a cartoon fantasy, his legend
(or at least the version Billy Challas sees) is a fake. When we reach
the second chapter, where the Ronin's wandering lost through the ruins
of New York City, Miller switches to real Japanese comic stylings. The
colours are murky and disorientating, the transitions are either
confusingly sudden or disconcertingly slow - we (Western readers) are
like the Ronin, lost in an unfamiliar and threatening landscape.
For the first three chapters of Ronin we're in a moral wasteland.
Outside Aquarius everything's murky and motiveless, and every choice is
a bad one - as Ronin decides for himself, there are no essential
differences between the Nazis and the Panthers. Likewise, inside
Aquarius humanity is diminished and irrelevant. The all-pervading green,
the ambient light coming from no direction and casting no shadows, give
an impression of an environment where everything is controlled, and
constantly monitored. In the bedroom scene between Casey and Peter, both
characters are rendered equally androgynous, desexualized. With no real
dark or light, there are no moral choices to be made. Everything's
homogenized. It's the fourth chapter, with Casey & Ronin's descent into
darkness, that humanity takes the reins; the moral choices become
simple. The dark is the enemy, enveloping Casey. The Ronin is heralded
by the spark of light on the blade of his sword, and becomes the hero.
All the ambiguities of the characters are blown away; they're in a world
of absolute good or absolute evil, of dark and light, or of black and
white.
Even without analysis, it was obvious from the first Sin City story that
the characters weren't just black and white on the page. Has there ever
been a character with a moral outlook as black and white as Marv's?
(Rorschach maybe, but he wore his symbolism on his face.) If you're
against him, he'll kill. If you're against his buddies, he'll kill. If
he's been asked to help, to save a little girl, you're in the ground.
There's no middle ground and no hesitancy. That's why Sin City was such
a breath of fresh air; in the poisoned atmosphere post-Dark Knight and
Watchmen, when everyone with nothing better to do was simply imitating
those groundbreaking works. Every hero was violent and conflicted. Every
plotline wound like a Slinky before ending up the same as usual.
Everyone quoted Nietzche. Sin City came along to show us art doesn't
have to be complicated to be complex. Over the length of the original
series, Frank's art, like Marv's cause, got less and less complicated.
Hatching was out, outlines were out, and the page was either solid black
or solid white, with no room for compromise. To the death.
Dame To Kill For continued with the experiment over six issues; remember
the pure joy in the covers, the ecstasy in all the different ways that
this simplicity could be used? And, though the lead character had a more
conflicted worldview than Marv (hey, burgers have more moral qualms than
Marv), ultimately everything was just as plain. Ava went out of her way,
Bond-villain style, to tell us how unredeemably evil she was. With the
Big Fat Kill, Lynn Varley sneaked her way back onto the covers, as did
little movie taglines for each issue, but the good guys stayed as sexy,
righteous, murderous (and, unconnectedly, outside the law) as ever. The
colour was just Frank's way of telling the world what was going on, in
here. That if you liked heroic men, sexy women, and plenty of action,
you'd come to the right place. Even when flat colour was introduced, for
the Babe Wore Red's lipstick and dress, it was used as simple
synaesthesia - the visual equivalent of Dwight's "smell of a woman who
doesn't need perfume". It's the same for That Yellow Bastard, but in
this case standing in for his unholy stink.
Now there are rumours floating around, so far unsubstantiated, that Lynn
Varley's gonna be pulling a bigger paycheck than usual for the new
series. That at some point over the next nine (or is it eleven? Another
rumour) issues of Hell & Back, we're going to see Sin City in full
colour. I know Blue Eyes is going to return, for me a case of colour not
being used so well. The Town Without Pity, edging out of black and
white? Is this going to be a case of Dorothy leaving Kansas for Oz, or
Oz coming right back home? Are the characters, the places, the life
going to be more or less real for it? Does this mean we'll be leaving
the old order of good and bad behind, along with the black and white, as
an archaic piece of the past? Or will black and white remain as the real
world, and things turn distinctly hyperreal? Either way, it's an
intriguing prospect. And I guess there's nothing I can do but wait and
see.
