What if all of this bloody business was something he just made up, and that he finally had gone crazy. Now with a name and someone new to kill, Marv gets himself ready to take on the Roarks. Marv goes wild and kills them all, but takes his time on the leader The Painted Cop who confirms that Roark had Goldie killed, and Kevin was the assassin. Lucille knocked Marv out thinking the cops will help and Marv would try something stupid, but after she surrenders to the police they gun her down. After she calms down Marv busts them out and heads for the woods when the police show up. She tells him about Kevin about his killer dog, about his collection of woman's heads on the wall, about how he ate her hand and made her watch. After being knocked out with a sledgehammer, Marv is tossed into the basement where he finds Lucille who was brought in earlier. Instead he heads for The Roark Family Farm where he is attacked by Kevin. She leaves him for dead and Marv writes it off as his condition kicking up. When he left the church he was attacked by Wendy, Goldie's twin sister, who he obviously mistakens for his lost love. The Priest names Patrick Henry Roark but Marv doesn't believe him and kills him. He worked his way up the food chain, killing and torturing, until someone fingered The Priest. He killed them, tortured them first, and got another name. First Kadie's where he was picked up by some hit men. He left for one final stop on his errands before his rampage, his mother's house to pick up Gladys.

She tries to talk him down but he got riled up. He went to Lucille's to get bandaged up and for his pills. He swore revenge, swearing to Goldie that he would get the man who killed her and 'the hell I send him to will feel like heaven after what I've done to him'. The cops showed up alerting him to a set up, and he escaped, smashing a few cops up on the way. Too bad when he woke up the next morning Goldie was dead and he didn't remember a thing. The first time in a long time that a woman had slept with him, Marv fell in love. So it must have come as a surprise when a beauty like Goldie came strolling into Kadies looking like a million bucks and took him to bed with her at the beginning of the events of The Hard Goodbye. He had nothing against prostitutes but he knew that none of the women there would trust him the way he looked.

Originally intended only to be a short story, Miller just kept going, blaming Marv in an interview. It introduces many of the familiar people and places in Sin City including Marv, Nancy, the Girls of Old Town, and the Roarks. The Hard Goodbye is the first of the comic books in the Sin City series written by Frank Miller.

Hard goodbye