Well, the colors are new. That does not sound like much after all. The comic itself is already 27 years old, it's called "Hard Boiled", it was out of print and now comes newly revised on the market, but it's true: the only new thing is actually the colors. So why should you run and buy it anyway? And I do not mean to run: At some point, when it comes down to it. But: now! Immediately!

For example, because it is one of the few examples of how to express something meaningful with totally exaggerated violence. And this is not even due to star author Frank Miller, who contributed the story: She plays in the future and revolves around the fighting robot Nixon, who is believed to be human because he works better - but he does but always running amok again. And rampage in this case means: something that I have seen in this extent in any comic since then.

That on the cover the reading age "16+" is, there can really only be a mistake. I mean: even on the first double page, where we meet Nixon, we see at least 55 dead, shot, crushed, victims of the efforts to recapture it between grotesquely deranged car wrecks. A car from Nixon's manufacturer Willeford rushes towards him, slams with him on the radiator through the house wall into a stuck full sex shop and explodes there. And yet this barely beatable, umpteen-fold overkill makes sense.

Detailed look at the deficits of the country

For one thing: it awakens and demands attention. Not only by the violence, but also by the unimaginable details. None of the 55 dead on this first double page is similar to the other, the walls around it are elaborated with all sorts of graffiti, electrical installations, air conditioners, flaking plaster, the engines of the car wrecks swell from the radiator hoods, in detail to the last gear part, dozens bullet holes in the bodies, and out of the guns that take Nixon under fire, mosquito-swarming clouds of empty cartridge cases rise.

It's simply impossible to turn this page around until you've looked around for five or ten minutes. And so, secondly, it is also thought: These details are the actual main thing, they contain the horrible, yet quite normal world of the draftsman of this massacre: Geof Darrow.

DISPLAY

Frank Miller, Dave Stewart, Geof Darrow:
Hard Boiled

Cross Cult; 128 pages; 30,00 Euro.

Order at Amazon. Order from Thalia.

Darrow, American, is 62 and has a clear view of the deficits of his homeland. What Darrow draws is nothing but a grotesquely elaborated reality. The ambulance driving Nixon into the garage turns through a quarter full of ragged miserable creatures sleeping on the sidewalks under pizza boxes, as before the cartridge cases Darrow now draws the filth, the garbage dumps, bottle shards in the street, the quarreling drunkards, humans, the one above the other, fucking pigeons and dogs.

Company boss Willeford is a fat monster cleansed and nourished in a bathtub by a sophisticated machine, and only he who follows the tiny, beautifully old-fashioned ramifications and cannulas through the countless motors and joints all the way to the top of the picture, pumping the machine into the fat sack: dozens of cans of Seven Up, Coca-Cola, French fries bags, hamburgers, chocolate bars and two toddlers.

And when Nixon later pursues a kidnapping granny back in action, he introduces them to a vending machine for handguns, throwing stars and hand grenades. The floor is covered with garbage, scraps of food and syringes, people on all levels and perversions are walking on the streets, pierced, an SM fan has - as I see it for the first time today - strapped a hamster to the shin. Many are naked and tattooed as it is now commonplace.

One might suspect that Darrow is just stuffy, but a quick look at the news proves his criticism: Darrow observes and analyzes very precisely. Not only tattoos and rampage are in the US 27 years later, but also the people in dungarees, in the "Hard Boiled" the drug syringes right in his arms stuck - the US is still officially in a state of emergency by the opioid crisis, and the addicts are just such normalos.

Especially bizarre or even plausible, dirt, sex, misery and brutality have the indifference that prevails in all faces. In the "Behemoth" supermarket, where people buy backpack-sized genetic engineering fruits, meter-long giant sausages and a barrel of digestive aid, nobody looks the other way when the man in his girlfriend's boxing snare slaps his fist in the face.

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Darrows "Hard-Boiled": The whole misery in new colors

It is amazing: Much of this fascinating unbearability is only noticeable with the new color scheme. Amazing what first-color-provider Claude Legris has sunk in a partially extremely psychedelic color swamp - Dave Stewart's rather conservative, contrasting coloration now makes much more scary accessible. You can become addicted to this disturbing, entertaining-repulsive world.

The only puzzling thing is why Darrow is not more successful in Germany: after all, he still draws and has neither lost in his evil joke, his playfulness nor his wealth of ideas. Nevertheless, for the newest band and the newly-released first adventure of the "Shaolin Cowboy", in which his hero not only against dogs with knife legs, flying sharks, a crab VW Beetle monster mix and against a gigantic motorized baby with Trump -Kopf fights, so far there is no German publisher.

Therefore: Get "Hard Boiled". Now! Immediately!