by RUPERT BOTTENBERG

With all due respect to "respectable" comic artists like Art Spiegelman, the biggest name in American comic books right now is Frank Miller - as it has been for more than two decades, since his groundbreaking tenure on Marvel's Daredevil and the iconoclastic Dark Knight Returns Batman miniseries. So it's big news in the comics world, the stunted kid sibling to cinema, when Miller goes to the movies. Especially considering the deep and somewhat tortured relationship he and his work have with the silver screen.

His brilliant Daredevil run often, for entire issues, employed an explicit widescreen-storyboard layout scheme, and his debt to Japanese samurai cinema and gritty '70s urban-vigilante fare was unquestionable. The film world returned the favour in only the rudest ways, though, from his castrated Robocop II scripting to the recent, wretched Daredevil movie. It's understandable then that Miller would be intensely protective of his extensive Sin City series, perhaps his most dearly personal product.

A few years ago, Miller mused that an adaptation of Sin City would have to be animated, ideally by Bruce Timm (Batman: The Animated Series). He'd wanted complete creative control, too. Miller's an outspoken libertarian in his back-page soapbox columns, bashing Bible-thumpers and left-lib control freaks with equal venom for their efforts to censor comics. And you can bet that charges of excessive viciousness, misogyny, glorification of vigilantism and contempt for authority could stick to Sin City like glue. It's a furiously violent, sexed-up, sleaze-drenched miasma, an obtuse, adrenal exaggeration of classic hard-boiled noir peopled entirely by prostitutes, thugs, perverted priests, corrupt cops, hitmen, psychos, Nazis and more prostitutes. (Booze, Broads & Bullets is the telling title of one Sin City book.)

Too stupid to live, too ferocious to die

Thanks to the persistence of maverick semi-indie filmmaker Robert Rodriguez (El Mariachi, Spy Kids), Miller got most of what he wanted. While not a cartoon, Sin City joins Sky Captain, Japan's forthcoming Casshern and Enki Bilal's Immortel, itself a comic adaptation, in a wave of movies fusing blue-screened live actors with computer-animated environments. More importantly, Rodriguez begged Miller to co-direct (at the cost of his own membership in the Directors Guild, which has rigid rules about such things), making it clear that he intended to transport the comics to film entirely intact.

Intact it is. Sin City is a note-perfect translation, down to almost every tiny visual detail, of three early Sin City books - The Hard Goodbye, The Big Fat Kill and That Yellow Bastard. Sure, the dialogue is lifted word for word (thankfully - Miller is the medium's James Ellroy, with prose that kicks, bites and bruises). But that was the easy part. Sin City is above all Miller's most dramatic work in terms of graphic design. Printed in stark black and white, with tiny, signalling bits of colour, the series' use of extreme contrast and bold negatives was almost unparallelled. The live-mation fusion and largely grey-tone "colour" scheme, while a bit clunky in spots, nonetheless allowed that aspect of Sin City to jump over as perfectly as the dialogue.

The cast is pretty spot-on too, with Benicio Del Toro nailing the vile cop Jackie Boy, Elijah Wood terrifying as the silent preppie kung-fu cannibal Kevin, Rosario Dawson capturing the leatherclad, gun-toting dominatrix Gail and Mickey Rourke positively inhabiting Marv. The latter is a truly inspired assignment. The big, dumb, brutal, insufficiently medicated Marv, too stupid to live and too ferocious to die (easily, anyway), is a character that only a thick, deluded, borderline sociopath like Rourke could do justice to. Then again, in Miller's Sin City mythology, "justice" is a dirty, dirty word.

Sin City opens Friday, April 1

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