Hard Boiled

Hard Boiled is a three-issue comic book mini-series written by Frank Miller and drawn by Geof Darrow. It was published by American company Dark Horse Comics in 1990-1992. Frank Miller and Geof Darrow won the 1991 Eisner award for Best Writer/Artist for this series. The story follows Carl Seltz, an insurance investigator who discovers he is also a homicidal cyborg tax collector who happens to be the last hope of an enslaved robot race. Plot In a dystopian, near-future Los Angeles, city tax collector Nixon is badly injured during a violent encounter with one of his targets, and he undergoes extensive surgery to survive. Nixon then wakes up in a bedroom, believing his previous experience was a bad dream and that he is really Carl Seltz, an insurance investigator for the Benevolent Assurance Corporation, with a wife, two children, a dog, and a normal life. However, when his persistent dreams disturb his sleep, his wife distracts him with sex while his children inject him with a sleep-inducing drug, indicating not all is as it seems. The next day, Carl heads out to pursue a delinquent account, talking to himself the whole way. His ramblings reveal increasingly large inconsistencies in his own memory, to the point where he even starts referring to himself by different names. He is distracted when his target's vehicle appears on his car's scanner, and he sets out in pursuit. After a high-speed chase through the city, both cars end up destroyed, and Carl continues pursuing his targets, an old woman and a young girl, on foot. As the two parties battle each other, the old woman is injured and revealed to be a robot, which Carl seemingly destroys with a large grenade just as the police converge on the area. The resulting explosion blows Carl into a Behemoth supermarket, where he finds that the flesh of his hands and face have been torn away, revealing robotic parts like those of the old woman.