Starring recurring characters Dwight and Miho, Family Values is about the vengeance than ensues when someone breaks the law of Old Town. Dwight’s involvement is pure business (ongoing debt to Gail), but Miho loves every minute of death and torture she can inflict. An investigation of a diner shootout leads them to one of Sin City’s mafia families.
Once Dwight finds his goons and gets on the inside, he hears the mafia bad guy boast about how much he enjoyed killing every living thing he saw, including a stray dog, so the reader has no trouble watching Dwight give Miho the okay to start her own revenge killing spree. There’s no nuance here — bad guys are bad guys.
Though published as volume five, Family Values was written before the other graphics novels of the Sin City universe, and the artwork shows an as yet unpolished stark black and white style. The images are busy, noisy, and crowded compared to the previous volumes. Miho is drawn to stand out from the everything else in white, but the narrative doesn’t focus at all on her (Dwight is the narrator), so both her appearance and her motivation seem cartoonishly shallow.
This is certainly not the best of the series, but I can still recommend if for hard-core fans of Miller, compulsive finishers of series’, and all who are dying for more ladies of Old Town, hired hit men, and corrupted cops.