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You certainly gotta be hard boiled to get through this one. A trippy, terrifying read that is a dark vision of a future we hopefully will never find ourselves in.



Hard Boiled tells the story of insurance investigator Carl Seltz. He's a simple man, living in a peaceful Los Angeles' suburb with his wife and two children. But then he starts having dreams of being berserk tax collector Nixon and then there's also that robot killing machine Unit Four that seems tied to him � so how do all the puzzle pieces fit together?



We're the bad guys. With a mere 128 pages this covers a lot of the themes that the dystopian sci-fi genre loves so much: the downfall of humanity, the playing-God aspect of science, questions of power and hierarchy within a world where cyborgs are as integrated as their fleshier versions. You're thrown into a world of chaos and there's just no room for you to get out of it.

The story line is tight and slightly confusing. The pace is literally rapid. There's loads of blood and gore, shooting and shouting, jumping back and forth from dreams to reality. And because it's so short, there are a few questions which answers are rather implied than answered. Why are humans so keen on fighting robots? You can guess, but the story will have moved on before you can truly be sure.

Geoff Darrow's art made me drool all over these pages. Some comics from the 90s age better than others, but Darrow's work is as impeccable as it must have been thirty years ago. There's so much detail in every frame, so much movement and a such a dynamic range! So many colours, yet such a grim atmosphere!

All in all, I think the narration would have benefitted from more space to give the reader a bit more room to breathe. There's a fine line between a fast-paced story and a rushed one, and there was definitely enough in here to allow deeper digging without succumbing to boredom or redundancy. But maybe the straightforwardness is part of its charm as well, so who am I to judge!