Hard Boiled

Author: Frank Miller
Artist: Geof Darrow

Reviewed by Lorenzo Princi
2014-07-04

Carl Seltz has a wife, 2 kids, 3 mortgages and an uneventful job as a tax collector, or so he believes. His simple life is infact a facade, programmed by his creators at Willeford Home Appliances. He's in fact a robot killing machine on a mission to assassinate their corporate competition. The war raging within his circuitry between ignorant bliss and the search for truth ensures things boil over, leaving a trail of carnage in his wake as the illusion (and his false skin) is shed.

Hard Boiled reads like a Philip K. Dick or Richard Matheson short where a science fiction dystopia sets the scene for a horrifying cycle of hopeless revolution. The hyper-real violence is set in a place best compared to Mega-City One from 2000 AD's Judge Dredd. Vast, overcrowded and full of malfunctioning, de-humanising technology.

The artwork outclasses the story in many ways, with full page intricate spreads of the outrageous landscapes and highly detailed emotive expression. This isn't Frank Miller's best work, but a quick, fun and thoughtful short for fans of Science Fiction.