Subcultural engagement for the 21st Century...
Barbelith is a new kind of community (find out more)...
You can login or register.

Which Noir Comic?

Quantum

10:41 / 15.11.05

I love 100 bullets and Stray bullets pretty much equally, and since the Sin City film I suspect there will be a surge of interest in Noir comics. There are quite a few about now, what do you think about it? Are they the future, or just a novelty? Will they become the standard, like the Pirate comics in Watchmen? Are they cooler than superheroes?

sleazenation

11:02 / 15.11.05

I'd argue 'none of the above' - what you identify as noir comics and i'd probably refer to as a sub-genre of crime comics is just another comics genre amongst all the others.

I'm very glad to see it doing well - it has only been in the last 15 years or so that comics have begun to live up to their infinite promise and we are now in a situation where there are comics covering a wide range of genres, but the depth of quality material across this range is still rather patchy, although improving all the ime...

This Sunday

21:01 / 20.11.05

The only of those three I would qualify as 'noir' would be... some of 'Sin City'. The first one, (recently retitled as) 'The Hard Goodbye', and maybe one or two of the others. 'A Dame...' maybe. Because to be noir they have to be dark. Not just unremitting or vicious, not simply unflinching, but dark as is lacking much brightness. 'Stray Bullets' has too much whitespace. '100 Bullets'... I dunno, it just doesn't seem right. And with genre stuff, it's pretty much how a thing feels, more than how it stacks up point by point.
I'd say, comfortably, that noir comics might probably never take over the world, but that chiarascuro comics will/do definitely have impact. Dichtomous structures tend to hit a chord in people the way works heavily angled one way or the other, do not. Paul Schrader and Walt Disney have their fans, but it's a mixture of the two that would attract the bigger audience, I'd predict.

PatrickMM

21:33 / 20.11.05

Assuming noir is derived from film noir, I would seriously question the idea that it has to be unremittingly dark. Dark yes, but there can be some strands of light in there, if only to have the hero end up even more broken at the end of the work.

And I would defintiely consider 100 Bullets noir. It's got all the trademarks, though it's certainly less retro than Sin City, which could be what throws you. It's a modern re-interpretation of film noir conventions, but I would argue that it's certainly still as noir as Sin City.

matthew.

21:50 / 20.11.05

One could argue that 100 Bullets is actually film soleil, a new term for an old type of film noir that does not depend on the dark at all.

Personally, it's gotta be the early Sin City stuff. Once Frank Miller got all "experimental" (the last long one, the love story one, I forget the title) that's when I lost interest. The early Sin City stuff spends most of its time in the darkest, foulest corners of the American experience and also works with film noir conventions. It's neo-noir, though.

eddie thirteen

23:34 / 20.11.05

100 Bullets mixes in too many conventions from related-but-separate genres to qualify -- very '90s X-Files-type conspiracy theories, cheesy action movie tropes, etc. -- and that's probably why it doesn't feel right. (Though it is retro, at least in the sense that it's dated...only by about ten years, not fifty or sixty.) Sin City is purer, but a little...um...difficult to take seriously. Which isn't really a bad thing. But I'm not sure either one is really an example of neo-noir the same way, say, LA Confidential or Chinatown is.

Add Your Reply