In the common imagination, comic books are associated with massively muscled men pounding each other into submission. Call it the Superman problem. On the other hand, very few books are illustrated in black and white, let alone feature a neon child-molester named “That Yellow Bastard.”.

But, as viewers of the new movie Frank Miller’s Sin City, based on the tales ‘The Hard Goodbye,’ ‘That Yellow Bastard,’ and ‘The Big Fat Kill’ are well aware, this is no ordinary comic.

And now is the best time for the uninitiated to take a trip to Sin City: in honor of the movie’s release, Dark Horse Comics has re-released all seven of creator/movie co-director Frank Miller’s Sin City stories in new editions.

Why take up these stories in a format many find inaccessible? Sex and violence that can feel overwhelming and deadening on screen—think Showgirls or The Passion of The Christ—is exciting and alive on the page. Sentiments that seem ludicrous spoken become empowering or frightening or sickening on the printed page.

For instance, 'Goodbye' opens with a woman striding toward the viewer. Her hourglass figure—white with a shimmering black dress on a black background—drips with sensuality reality can never deliver. Next page: she is wrapped in only a sheet, he’s naked and wiping the booze off his chin. The rectangular text blocks say everything we all dream: “I’m staring at a goddess. She’s telling me she wants me. She sounds like she means it.” Two pages later the woman is dead and dirty cops are charging up the stairs.

By getting into Marv’s mind readers discover that, behind his tough façade is a sad, mentally unstable man hoping he can live the right way as he tracks down the girl’s killers—from a silent cannibal to a Kennedyesque Cardinal—and we are drawn into his fight against the system without giving into mindless nihilism.

In each of the stories, our hero fights against people for the sake of a chivalric ideal: women and innocence need to be protected against the ever-present forces of twisted darkness. Female empowerment has never seen an incarnation quite like “Deadly Little Miho,” a heroic prostitute astoundingly fond of severing appendages. For everyone who has been frustrated by a world that seems arbitrarily evil—that is, all of us—take a trip to Sin City and fight back, if only vicariously.

—Crimson Staff Writer Scoop A. Wasserstein can be reached at wasserst@fas.harvard.edu.