Manga Artists :: Part 5: American Artist Frank Miller

I love that Whitney is such a comic book geek, because through her I have learned a lot about the American comic book/graphic novel scene. On her blog to day she posted a great interview with American comic legend Frank Miller, which I really really liked and am therefore posting in its entirety below, so that I will forever have a copy of it. I can't wait for part 2 to come out. My fave line from it is this:

"The Greeks had their gods and heroes; we need to have ours."

So true. Are comic book heroes just a modern version of our folk heroes of old, a way for us to celebrate goodness and justice in an world that seems to mock those virtues? Who knows, and it's way too early in the day for me to write truly deep thoughts on the subject. So just read the article and enjoy.

:: Wonder Con 2006: Frank MIller Spotlight, Part 1 ::

At this year’s Wonder Con, Frank Miller has his own spotlight panel, wherein he was interviewed by Charles Brownstein, the Executive Director of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund.

You may have heard about it.

Something about Miller’s upcoming Batman book being about the hero fighting terrorists…or something.

We now present part one of a full transcript of the discussion between Miller and Brownstein.

Charles Brownstein: Frank, one of the consistent themes and consistent elements in your work is the urban environment, and it’s shifted a lot in time. When you began, there was a real sense of urban realism in regards to Daredevil, Batman: Year One, and Dark Knight. It transitioned into surrealism with Hard Boiled and Elektra Assassin, and there seems to be a stark, minimalist blend of the two in Sin City. So how did a farmboy from Vermont establish an interest, and more importantly, a facility for depicting these environments?

Frank Miller: I think precisely because I was a farmboy from Vermont I was able to fall in love with the city from afar. I think it helped me see its romance. I didn’t grow up in it, so every corner I turned when I was first in New York was a brand new, magical thing.

My view changed as my approach to the craft changed, but also as I moved from city to city. That’s why there’s so much Los Angeles in Sin City, because I was living there at the time when I created it. That’s why it’s full of palm trees and tiles and all of that. It also helped contribute to the fact that all the girls were gorgeous and the cars were vintage – because things don’t rust out there.

CB: When and how did the enthusiasm and imagination for the urban settings become subsumed by the observations and experiences of living in cities?

FM: I guess I learned, the more time passed, that cities are made of the people that fill them. I love buildings, but they’re all stories about people. The whole artifact is man-made, and every building is an artifact, so these buildings that shoot to the sky are extensions of us.

CB: One of the interesting things, reflecting on your body of work, is that Daredevil is, I think, without parallel, the most romantic thing you’ve done. A critic once observed that “the carefully crafted cityscapes made the book a love letter to New York” which I think is absolutely true. There was also the tortured, youthful romance of Matt Murdock and Elektra, which is a really good metaphor for something that everyone has to suffer through…

FM: Or at least you better suffer through it, or you’re missing something.

CB: That’s right. And then, there was above that, the bond of brotherly affection between Matt and Foggy, and the occasional intrusion of longing for an absent father. Without asking you to divulge too much autobiography, what aspects of your own experience informed these themes?

FM: Well, the love letter to New York part was that I was in love with New York. I hung out on Hell’s Kitchen rooftops with my sketchbook all the time. The city’s changed a lot since then, but it’s kept its essential magic. Now I’m back in Hell’s Kitchen, where I belong. As far as the other things, the youthful romance gone bad, the sense of brotherhood and all – we all go through them. They’re very eternal, and all but universal.

CB: What insights into the human condition did you gain, and more importantly, hopefully convey in that work?

FM: I don’t know about anything from the work, I was mainly gaining it from the world, and translating it into the work. I went from rural Vermont, to New York City, to Los Angeles, and back. The thing that most struck me was that, in New York in particular, people are right out in the open. One of the reasons it’s such a successful melting pot is that people are face to face. People tend to walk, or ride on trains, rather than drive everywhere. L.A.’s a city where individuals are much more isolated in their wheeled fortresses, and there’s less face to face connection. So no wonder they end up having race riots, because people can avoid each other so successfully.

I guess what I saw was every kind of human interaction I could ever imagine, plus more.

CB: Daredevil really bears the hallmarks of a young man’s work. It’s filled with the ambition, hopefulness, energy, arrogance, and swagger that we all have in our 20’s. We all think that we own the world. Matt owned New York – he was leaping from rooftop to rooftop, he’s kicking ass and taking names, he has all of that. Looking back on that work with the hindsight of age, what aspects do you feel hold up best and what enduring ideas and themes are contained within it?

FM: It’s always hard to review one’s own work, but the things that I cherish most about the Daredevil run are the celebration of New York City, which I think deserves a celebration. I remain madly in love with it. The other thing that I would pinpoint, beyond the constant and steady heroism, is the romantic aspects. If you look at Sin City, you’ll see that clearly, each one is a love story. I’m going to challenge one thing you said when you said that Daredevil was my most romantic work. I think the most romantic thing that I ever did was That Yellow Bastard.

[audience laughs, applauds]

CB: I’ll take that, Miller – why?

FM: Because it’s a story of pure love and sacrifice. It’s star crossed lovers…generationally crossed lovers, and Hartigan’s love for Nancy is so pure that he not only will not consummate it, out of a sense of propriety, but he will sacrifice everything he has – not only his life, but also his dignity and his reputation.

CB: Going back just very briefly to Daredevil - when you started the book, you were a hayseed. How did you change in that process, in the discipline of a monthly work, and in the creative leaps and bounds that you made?

FM: The ‘80s were an electric time to work at Marvel Comics. Jim Shooter had turned the company around in a very dramatic way. Now, he broke an awful lot of eggs to make his omelet, but he enforced a much more rigorous sense of storytelling. He was always up for a challenge, and was always up for an argument, and he would listen, but mainly, he infused that company with a kind of energy that I don’t think had been in comics – anywhere – for years. Also, in the trenches, month by month, they had to produce a monthly comic. Back then, they didn’t delay a book if you were late, they replaced you. So your job was to produce. That taught me a lot. It taught me that comic books happen in time, not as precious little pieces of art. That it’s the story that counts more than anything else. So the art by its nature can be very direct. So, it formed me in a lot of ways. I couldn’t have done Sin City without having put in years of monthly comics.

CB: This is interesting to hear, because you’re talking about the monthly grind, that comics aren’t precious pieces of art. That’s certainly changed. We’re witnessing it – not to bust your chops – with All Star Batman and Robin, which is on a six week schedule. What have we lost in waiting for the work, and making it a precious object, and what have we gained by waiting for the work and treating it as the precious object?

FM: We gained a higher standard of artwork, and we gained better writing too. These are definitely pluses. I find Jim’s work very vigorous – he’s has a very different intellect than mine, and a very different approach. It’s definitely is in the pulp tradition, it’s just that he can get a lot more lines on the page than I can.

CB: Switching gears slightly, in past interviews and conversations with you, I’ve noted that the connective tissue between the two Dark Knight books, as I see it, is that they’re both commentaries on the media environment as it reflects the culture and politics of each book’s respective time. Why did you regard comics as the proper medium and Batman the proper vehicle for composing such commentaries?

FM: I’m going to answer this backwards. Batman was the choice because I’ll always love the character. But also, I find it wonderful to use such a big megaphone to do political satire. As far as the role of political satire and parody in comics, it seemed to me that we were just missing a big bed. Every time I opened a newspaper, unless it was the New York Times, you see an editorial cartoon, and could see how comics could play against current moments and current issues. I felt that we should be in the middle of that game with all the rest. Everybody else talks politics, why can’t we?

CB: Dark Knight Returns acknowledges the advent of media saturation. There are the ubiquitous talking heads moving around the narrative, and they display these…sometimes subtly, sometimes abjectly distorted descriptions of events. What was your attitude towards the media’s overall role in society when you were composing the book?

FM: I composed Dark Knight Returns when Ronald Reagan was president, and very silly things seemed to be happening, and I wanted to satirize them, but they just kept topping me.

[audience laughs]

So I played the media as a Greek chorus, but as a Greek chorus, I don’t know…on drugs or something. They were constantly…jumping ahead a bit…Monica Lewinsky? We have people out to slaughter us, and we’re talking about Monica Lewinsky? So, I wanted to play the media very sarcastically and to show how, particularly television, only hits the surface of the issue, and only gives you issues focused on an hourly, or daily basis, not the in-depth understanding that events should have – especially in a historical context.

CB: How did the enormous swell of media attention you received confirm or contradict your attitudes about the media that you’re talking about?

FM: In just felt like good luck. In terms of the comic book industry, everybody’s waiting for a breakout Batman book. He’s always listed as a favorite character, even when his book’s sales are in the toilet. As for the overall media attention, maybe it was time for comics to break out. We’d been hiding in the shadows too long. Now we’re out there and about, and they’re looking at us, and ripping us off, and some of us are finding work in other fields. We’re finally out there. Dark Knight was a part of that – a big part.

CB: But going into your own work and your own themes and your own territory, you became with Dark Knight, not just the focus of many a fan magazine and CBG article, but you were in Rolling Stone, and were all over the damn place. In the intervening years between the two Dark Knights, you dealt with a lot of media; you dealt with a lot of reporters from the great to the terrible. How did your interaction as an interviewed figure, a media figure, inform your work, and inform the views that went into the work?

FM: … I love it when you ask one of these easy ones…

[audience laughs]

Everything is material, and I learned a lot from being interviewed. Sometimes the interviews can be brilliant, or they can be terrible. The terrible ones are the ones where the writer has already sold the piece with a narrative to the publisher, which was about 80% of the interviews I did. That means they’re asking questions, but they use the pieces of the answers that fit their narrative. The best interviews are the ones that are coming to explore, and there are lots of surprises along the way. Those end up being a portrait…a set of ideas, rather than a Zap! Pow! comics story.

CB: I think Dark Knight Strikes Again was a tremendous departure from Dark Knight Returns…

FM: Damn straight.

[audience laughs]

CB: In many ways, it functions as the polar opposite of Dark Knight Returns. The first book is a really earnest depiction of a world gone wrong, a world really sinister and bleak, and of course it was because there was the Iron Curtain, the Cold War, the nuclear paranoia. We were building up the military industrial complex, and crime was on the rise, and it really commented on that environment. Dark Knight 2, on the other hand, was a brighter sensibility, both in visual technique and in story. It was a vicious satire, where the first was a subtle satire. What was the decision to pursue this opposite approach?

FM: First off, I had to take a different approach, because so many people had been using my last approach.

[audience laughs]

But also, I felt that in the midst of all of this sturm und drang, we’d lost some of the central joy of the heroes. I wanted to get right back to the bone and break it all down, and show you that the Flash was cool because he’s really quick, and I don’t give a damn about his marriage. The Atom’s cool because he gets really little. The way I chose to make that cooler was instead of showing him getting smaller; I showed everything else around him getting bigger. But again, I don’t care about the Atom’s love life. One after the other, I was looking at the characters and getting back to what made them so cool at their core.

At the same time, the [media] culture just kept parodying itself, especially in the internet age, the whole media presence is very different, very much more fragmented. So to have a cultural event about people running around in tights struck me as just our kind of news.

CB: One of the interesting things about technique was the way that you depicted the idea of online news. Paul Pope, I remember, once described it as panel surfing.

FM: [laughs]

CB: What informed the technique that you applied there? The first one was a really rigid grid, but the second was really open, like a Neal Adams story.

FM: The first one was based on cable TV – very sequential. Talking heads that go on for a long time. And though it would cut from story to story, it stayed in a linear fashion. I was trying to capture what I see as an emerging combination of all media, to the point where we won’t really have televisions, or computers – we’ll have these systems whereby you can witness five different stories at once. In that model, the presentation becomes briefer and briefer to the point of near non-existence, just to keep your attention.

CB: I remember interviewing you on that bizarre CBLDF cruise that we had years ago, and it was about Dark Knight 2. The announcement of the project was made, I believe, at that Wonder Con, or somewhere nearabouts. One of the comments you made was that when you did the book, you were going to capture a kinder, gentler fascism. And this was in the Clinton era. Tell me about the Clinton era and the Clinton environment that led you to use that very poignant phrase.

FM: I’ve found that these days, everything is expressed as its reverse. And so, the very word “freedom,” one of our most important words, has switched from the freedom to do something to freedom from something. In other words, “freedom” means something you can’t do. Through all the various grievance groups, we’ve set up a very restrictive society where people are afraid to think things, let alone talk them if they stray from a kind of understood dictate.

CB: Talk to me about Monica Lewinsky and the talking heads, and how your obvious outrage at these things informed the landscape of this book.

FM: I stumbled into 9-11, because…well, I didn’t even know who was going to be the next President when I started DK2. And there did seem to be an essential silliness to the news. There were great issues shaping the world, and everything was and is, Paris Hilton, Monica Lewinsky, and all this nonsense. And then, along the way, I happened to have this Brainiac monster destroy Metropolis. And then they took the Towers down. And killed 3,000 of my neighbors. All of a sudden, I realized I’d walked into a maelstrom. The people at DC Comics, through Bob Schreck, told me that I could go whatever way I wanted – I could remove things, redo that, it was fine. But I told them I’d rather write through it. And so, that’s why there’s an abrupt shift in tone in the middle of the book, because that’s when 9-11 happened. The book, and my life, and our country changed forever.

CB: Let’s drive through that. Let’s drive through how the book and your immediate reaction to 9-11 was formed in the context of the third issue. What were you thinking, and what were you working out on the page? What do you think you conveyed?

FM: What I was describing was absolute shock. There was no way to address the issue of the actual enemy. I mean, after all, Dark Knight is always parable, but I had to get across what it felt like to live in New York, in the aftermath, when you were chocking on dust for weeks, when you didn’t know what you were coughing up, or who. It was a terrible time, and I wanted to get that across. I knew you always had to personalize things, as well, so I killed Lois Lane.

CB: That was a heartbreaking page. There were two moments that really captured 9-11, in my view, in that book, and one was the photograph of Lois Lane in the wreckage, and the other was that marvelous two-page spread where one page is ash, and the other page is bright blue sky. It came across very well. Certainly, politics have really informed the direction of your cartooning – you’ve always been very political. My understanding is that your next major graphic novel is probably going to be the most overtly political of your works.

FM: Yeah.

CB: Tell me about it.

FM: My next graphic novel, I’ve inked about 120 pages of it, so it’s a work in progress, and will probably be about 200 pages long – is called “Holy Terror, Batman!”

[audience applauds]

FM: And not to put too fine a point on it, it is a piece of propaganda. Batman kicks al-Qaeda’s ass.

[audience applauds]

CB: Alright – so in calling it propaganda, how do you want your art to impact the war effort?

FM: I want us to win the war…

[very minor applause]

FM: Oh, only a couple? I know this is San Francisco, but come on! What, you want to lose?

I’m doing this mainly as an explosion from my own gut in reaction to what’s happening now, but also as a reminder to people who’ve seem to have forgotten that we’re up against an utterly ruthless existential foe who is as vile as any we’ve ever faced. I’m appalled at the equivocations, and I wish that the entertainers of our time had the spine and the focus that the ones who faced down Hitler did.

[From audience: “Amen!”, applause]

CB: Taking the opposite tact, however, why do you think it’s proper, and what impact do you hope to achieve using one of the most recognized pop-culture icons of the West as a piece of propaganda?

FM: Superman punched out Hitler. So did Captain America. That’s one of the things they’re there for. These are symbols of our people, of our country. These are our folk heroes. It just seemed to be kind of silly to be chasing around the Riddler when you’ve got al-Qaeda out there.

[applause]

CB: What can you impart to us about what we should expect from this story?

FM: Be afraid.

I don’t want to go too much into it, but it’s very pulpy. It’s quite emotional, and I think it’s the best artwork I’ve ever done.

CB: I’ll second that – I’ve seen some, and it’s great.

FM: Again, it’s a love letter to a city, because it’s about Gotham City coming under attack. So it involves a lot more dramatic, industrial landscapes than I’ve done in years. Emotionally, it’s deliberately raw. Whether it comes between a man and a woman, or a man and his city, or between a man and a guy who’s going to go out and kick al-Qaeda’s butt.

CB: You just described these characters as our folk heroes, and it’s absolutely true when you look at the World War II comics, they did use the characters to improve our national morale, to show Captain America punching a really stupid looking Hitler on the nose. That’s really not something that we’re seeing in the media, and here you are staking your claim that you’re going to take it back. So culturally, as readers, how do you think that the use of these heroes to convey these sorts of messages helps us work through the crises that we’re facing?

FM: I don’t now what the effect is, I just know that these are really good tools. The Greeks had their gods and heroes. We need to have ours. During the darkest part of the urban crime wave, up comes Dirty Harry and becomes an instant folk hero. Superman’s always stood as a real icon, but an icon of what? It’s worth a look. Is he this complicated character with eighteen relatives from Krypton living with him, who’s got some complex personal life? Is he the flag-bearer that he came to be during World War II? Is he the golem that he was in the late ‘30s and early ‘40s that dragged generals to the fronts to face each other, to face the bullets the soldiers were facing? Is he the confused guy from the ‘60s? Is he the kind of bland guy from the ‘70s? So who is Superman? Since they’ve made him more powerful than God, I figure he had all the bad guys stopped. It was a matter of converting him.

Batman, the same way, is a man who’s in love with a city. He’s not protecting a planet. It made sense that he would be protecting Gotham. So what are they there for? Are they really going to be up against Toyman in the next issue? Are they really going to be saving damn cats from damn trees? They’ve got to do something with all of these powers.

Check back tomorrow for the conclusion of the panel, beginning with a discussion of All Star Batman and Robin the Boy Wonder, where Miller is presented with the question from Brownstein of, “Why is Batman a dick?”

Newsarama Note: The transcript of this panel was proofread by Brownstein. Any mistakes or misquotes belong to Brownstein, rather than Miller or Newsarama.