Warning. This is going to stray a fair distance off-topic…

You see, I used to read a lot of comics. It is an addiction which I have let lapse in recent years as it is expensive and accumulates mass at an aggregate rate that my tiny apartment would struggle to sustain.

Of the titles I used to collect, easily at the top of the heap was the Sin City series, written and drawn by Frank Miller. They are a series of interconnecting graphic novels set in the titular Basin City. A city indebted to film noir where the characters are good or evil, drunks or prostitutes, the art is stark black and white and the cars are in a constant state of mid jump.

After more than ten years the art from the first book still ranks as my favourite comic book illustration with the sequence depicting Marv in the rain a defining moment.

Now they have a made a film. Normally this would be cause for alarm; Daredevil, Catwoman, Batman Forever et al have shown us that comic book adaptations are fraught, fraught, with danger. In this case, hover, things look up. Robert Rodriguez is co-directing with Frank Miller and they have set about bringing all of the Sin City books into one film frame by frame. Looking at the trailer for the film, every scene, every pose, every line of dialogue comes directly from the comics. The film matches the stark high contrast black and white imagery of the books and rescues it from pure film noir homage with the splashes of colour that characterised the later books.