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| SEE THE RESEMBLANCE? The series of "negative-space" paperback covers that Corgi used to illustrate Mike Hammer in the 1960s gets a kind of resurrection in the work of Frank Miller, here in 1990's ELEKTRA LIVES AGAIN. |
In the previous Spillane Reverie post, I isolated a series of Mike Hammer paperback covers that most appeal to my design sense. In a postscript, I linked to a thumbnail image of a two-page spread from Frank Miller's ELEKTRA LIVES AGAIN (1990), whose composition bears a striking resemblance to the Corgi covers I highlighted in the post.
Unhappy, though, with the size of that ELEKTRA image, I dug up my old trade paperback copy and scanned in one of the two pages (too tough to scan in the spread, without breaking the spine of the book). As I was doing that, I remembered how Miller did a reverse image of this scene in his SIN CITY: THAT YELLOW BASTARD (1996). And, how his sense of negative space gets pushed further and further to its edge, its logical conclusion, as the SIN CITY series goes on.
Nobody would take it as news that the hard-boiled pastiche achieved in Miller's SIN CITY bears, as a towering influence, the work of writers like Spillane—the extended passages of narration in Miller's crime work draw into focus both the strengths *and* weaknesses so evident in the development of this tradition (for a bit more about this, I'll be posting an off-the-cuff Review-Cast for the 2014 film adaptation of A DAME TO KILLER FOR shortly).
The ELEKTRA image, you've seen above; directly below, you'll find the mirror image used six years later in BASTARD (one of several). Plus a number of negative-space compositions from SIN CITY: HELL AND BACK (1999-2000), which I happened to have on hand, and which show the progression of this technique in his work. To compare them to the Spillane Corgi covers, you can always go below.
NOTE: The last two SIN CITY images are from a two-page spread, separated by an absolute sea of white space.
Leonard Jacobs
May, 2015
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