Hard Boiled
Written by: Frank Miller
Artist: Geof Darrow
Colorist: Claude Legris

So, I’m not really even sure where to start with this comic. It wasn’t that it was bad, in fact it was AMAZING. The artistry is incredible; it’s a Where’s Waldo made up of gore, sex, and metal. The more you look at some of the pictures, the more random, strange things you’ll notice (like a tiny Pop-Eye tattoo on a naked chick’s butt). It’s certainly not the kind of comic you can just stroll through and only really pay attention to the word bubbles. And it’s definitely not a comic for the faint-of-heart.

I spent a good hour of my life just perusing the strange world of Hard Boiled. What’s funny is that while I was reading the story, the dialog suddenly reminded me of Bruce Willis’ character from Sin City (which makes sense because Frank Miller wrote that as well). Just the way the main character Nixon talks, it reminded me of Bruce’s hardened but ultimately good-guy character from Sin City. Like when Nixon’s trying to save a little girl from an evil robot, he says, “Little girls shouldn’t die…Little girls should get any kind of ice cream they want.” This kind of comment just seems really out of place when Nixon’s pumped full of holes after the evil robot has fired numerous rounds into him…but he keeps trying to save the little girl, like that’s the only reason he’s alive. Just like Willis’ character is eternally trying to save Nancy in Sin City.

In Miller’s story, people are cast out into the streets like litter; hookers, children, and trash all intermingle in the dirty world of Hard Boiled. People have sex on crowded streets with other people, dogs and kids all walking by, seemingly unfazed. The story is really about a robot named Nixon who has human memories implanted into him by his makers, the evil corporation Willeford Corp. which is run by a grotesquely fat, lazy guy. Nixon’s pursuing the evil, child-stealing robot who is in turn just trying to get Nixon to realize that he’s not human at all. But no matter what evidence he’s presented with, Nixon still thinks he’s a “normal guy” with a wife and two kids who lives in the suburbs. Even when his skin has completely come off, revealing the metal skull of a robot, Nixon still insists he’s just a normal guy.

The story is essentially about robots who become self-aware and try to get Nixon, who’s been built to fight and withstand just about any kind of abuse, to join them and kill all of their human captors. In the end, Nixon does manage to kill just about every human who stands between him and him getting back to his normal life. So it’s kind of ironic that he ends up killing so many humans. He just doesn’t kill them for the reasons the other robots want him to kill them.

No matter what happens, in the end, Nixon can’t shed his human identity. I mean technically he doesn’t have a human identity, but his memories have been so ingrained into himself that he can’t distinguish between the robots with whom he should identify, and the human wife he believes he’s so in love with. I think that as technology inevitably advances over the years, we all wonder what would happen if artificial intelligence would ever be just that: intelligent.

What makes us human? Is it our ability to love? If it is, could a robot be taught to love something? And if it could be taught, could it unlearn it? Miller doesn’t seem to think so. Nixon ends up getting back home to his wife but the reader is aware that Nixon is just preferring to believe what he wants to believe. Nixon is basically just choosing which reality to believe. It’s an interesting thought…if you had the choice between the harsh truth and an easier, more pleasant reality, which would you choose? I’d probably say that in this case, ignorance is bliss.