Ok, so you know that Sin City is opening on Friday and it's got more big names in it than a Will and Grace episode. You know the trailer looks kick ass and you know that a lot of it looks like it's in black and white. But after that you know NOTHING about it other than it was a comic book (or "graphic novel").

Well, the good folks over at CulturePulp have posted up a brief overview and history of Sin City to get you up to speed. Here's a little taste:

A thug named Marv kills his way up a ladder of corruption as he tries to find out who murdered a hooker named Goldie. But the style? That was a jaw-dropper.

Historically, comic books and pulp fiction are crazy traveling companions: Sci-fi pulp deity Alfred Bester cut his teeth writing "Green Lantern," for example. But "Sin City" mashed crime and comics together in ways no one had quite seen before. Miller was tapping into some long-repressed id, and he wasn't censoring a single word or image that spilled from his brain to the page. "Sin City" was pure bloodlust, albeit smartly rendered bloodlust -- mixing the larger-than-life iconography of his superhero work with film-noir dialogue and a brutality straight out of a men's-adventure magazine from the '50s.

Marv ran afoul of cannibal priests and a well-armed band of gorgeous prostitutes, all while narrating his story with a ferocity that verged on parody: "When I find out who did it, it won't be quick or quiet like it was with you," he promises the dead Goldie. "No, it'll be loud and nasty, my kind of kill. I'll stare the bastard in the face and laugh as he screams to God and I'll laugh harder when he whimpers like a baby. And when his eyes go dead, the hell I send him to will seem like Heaven after what I've done to him. I love you, Goldie."