“Camp noir”! Of course!

My friend Jeff Overstreet has just posted some thoughts on Sin City that another friend of his gave him — and somewhere in there, his friend says:

The guy who created -and continues to create- Sin City, Frank Miller, works in a style that can best be described as “camp noir”. He utilises all the sensibility of Chandler with his “knights in dirty armor”, and he surrounds these driven individuals with an absurd universe in which a lot of humor exists. You have to laugh at a guy who from the electric chair, after the switch has been thrown, says, “Is that the best you can do, pansies?”

“Camp noir”! Of course! It seems so obvious a description, now that I hear it, yet it never occurred to me as I was writing my own review (which is already out of my hands). Add this to that very big file of things I wish I had thought of first.