From The Desk of eric: On Frank Miller
This is from our friend eric's brain:
Frank Miller Has the Crazies
Ugh.
For those of you out of the know, there was once a great comic book author by the name of Frank Miller. You’ve probably heard of him if you’ve ever asked that friend of your’s who’s really into comics for a place to jump into the world of tights and flight:
“Dark Night Returns. I know it’s a superhero comic, but give it a try. You’ll love it.â€
We’ve all said it and we all mean it. Frank Miller has produced some of the most defining works of genre literature in the history of sequential art (fuck off, I like the term). From his revolutionary noir storytelling in Sin City, to his reinvention of superhero morality in Dark Knight Returns, this dickhead has blown a lot of overweight, acne-scarred minds.
And then he stopped.
While most of bitch about how lame it is to be talented and influential, Frank Miller decided to do something about it.
After being offered a paltry million dollars from DC Comics, Frank shat a rushed and under-thought collection of his sketches upon the world under the title The Dark Knight Strikes Back. This garbage dump of random ideas and amateur Photoshop made DC a billion dollars and found all of us fans dry heaving at our slavish devotion to a fading beauty. Most fans wrote it off as a fluke. But really, Frank needed some tough love. Instead he got some of the heftiest paychecks ever offered a comic creator.
Then he made a movie with the Spy Kids director. It looked like his comics.
Most recently he has been pinching off another Batman series that I was really hoping was a joke. But then I read about a new project of his. Read.
Most comic creators are unabashedly left-wing, and I must say that having a voice that is not afraid to go ahead and throw out some straight-faced jingoism is not such a terrible thing. The untapped beauty of the graphic medium is its ability to tell any type of story blah, blah, blah. But to shanghai an iconic character (whose narrative corpse Frank just can’t seem to stop humping) in order to exercise one’s idiotic catharsis is just about beyond the pale. We get it. You like Batman. Me too. But he exists in a fantasy world. Where he should stay. No matter how gritty and parabolic a writer tries to make him, he is still a super-ninja in leather footies.
Dark Knight Returns was awesome. Really. But like Watchmen, V for Vendetta, Squadron Supreme, or countless other dystopian tales of revisionist heroics, it is still just a brightly colored escape where an untouchable messiah figure saves our convoluted world from itself. The reason these stories work is because they are just far enough removed from reality to be comforting. Dragging Osama Bin Laden into the world of costumes is ridiculous. Maybe you could write a story blaming 9/11 on the Joker, and then have Batman fight him. You could feature a bunch of weeping 9/11 orphans tugging on Batman’s cape for retribution. Maybe Bruce Wayne could design and fund the rebuilding project, showing up that squabbling bureaucrat Pataki. That’d show ‘em!
What happened to the artist that created an emotionally charged spread for one of the 9/11 tribute books? You remember the one: denouncing blind hate and religiosity? No? Oh right. Holy Crap, Batman.
Ugh. I’ll probably buy the fucking thing anyway…
