I also don’t remember where I heard it, but Frank Miller described Kevin and Miho as both being supernatural beings; Kevin basically being a devil and Miho being Sin City’s avenging angel. So that’s cool too.

If they are all in sex work yet that is their ONLY defining characteristic, I’m not giving him the credit of assuming he wants our stories to be told. It’s an excuse for limiting all female characters to be defined by sex and their sex life, because if they’re sex workers they must not have anything else going on, right?

I refuse to settle for representation that is no more than the job itself.

I get the whole male gaze critique but I generally cannot understand why writing all your characters as sex workers is anti-woman or even any-feminist. Isn’t the goal to produce as many representations of women as possible such that our cultural depictions of women in film and other media are challenged? And though I’ve not seen the film, it sounds like it passes the Bechdale Test? If so, it’s a more transgressive flick than most.

That’s not the criticism I’ve seen of Miller – it’s more like, “if almost every female character you write is a sex worker, and the few who aren’t are two-dimensional sex objects, you probably hate women.”

In the setting of Sin City it makes a kind of sense to have a lot of street workers, but he’s also written two versions of Catwoman – one dominatrix, one escort agency manager – retconned Black Canary’s story so her costume is the uniform of the strip club she bartends at, and regularly designs covers which reduce superheroines like Wonder Woman to their ass alone.

Emma, if you ever have time to write that metal piece for us, please let me know! Sounds like it’d be a very important read, and we definitely don’t have enough music analysis on TAS.