More about Frank Miller's now tiresome viewpoints

Here's a few more recent items involving an artist/writer who's got to be one of the most overrated in comicdom. First, in this recent UK Observer interview, he tells who his mentor was:

What prompted you to write this book? It’s not a straight-up memoir.

No, it’s a combination – a guidebook for storytelling and a portrait of the amazing little world I inhabit. I think it has something to do with my most important mentor, the artist Neal Adams, who helped me start my career and played the tough sensei in my life. After I met with some success, I asked him what I could do to pay him back for what he’d done for me. Without missing a beat he said: “Do it for the next [generation].” This book is the product of me trying to meet that pledge.

Wasn't Will Eisner an important mentor of his? Or is Miller deliberately trying to obscure Eisner, because the latter didn't live up to the former's exact expectations? Somehow, Miller seems to have disappointed again, all for the sake of political correctness. Besides, what's he actually doing for the next generation that could have lasting value?

You started out writing for Marvel and DC superhero franchises before branching off to create your own worlds, but was working within those confines a useful first step?

Oh, yes. I was being thrown problems to solve that I’d never been thrown before. I was working under specific instructions with this mythology of characters, many of whom I hadn’t even heard of, and learning to work in a much more disciplined situation.

I've got a feeling that even today, there's quite a few older creations he hasn't heard of, and at this point, not only doesn't care about them, he wouldn't be suited to work on them anyway.

You were still in your 20s when you were tasked with reimagining one of the world’s most cherished superheroes, Batman. It must have been a lot of pressure.

I don’t have any memory of having any fear. I was so full of ideas of where I wanted to take it. It was mostly enthusiasm and a sense of overwhelming joy. The amazing thing about Batman is that it’s so versatile. You can find different ways to make it work. Every once in a while I get a chuckle out of how much of The Dark Knight Returns is still surfacing in [Batman] movies after all these years.

Oh, but of course it was a joyous occasion, wasn't it? After all, he got to do swipes at Ronald Reagan, for ambiguous reasons. As for allusions to DKR in movies, the odd thing is that Miller hasn't found most of said movies appealing, and in another article coming later on the list here, they mention that subject.

Like so many East Coast writers before you, you were lured to Hollywood in the late 1980s.

That was wild. It was a whole lot of fun. I was playing in a much bigger ballpark to obviously a much bigger audience. But it was a very different experience: there were a whole lot more bosses.

You refer to “the fiery fallout of fame” and hitting rock bottom after moving to LA. What happened?

I lost my way. I’m afraid I got more involved with ego than with my mission as an auteur, and I lost track of things. But it’s through telling stories that I’ve been able to come back around to find myself and my purpose.

He sure did. His work on the Robocop sequels, if anything, was such a failure. But even his later adaptation of Sin City to film didn't pan out beyond 2 entries, IIRC, with the 2nd, A Dame to Kill For, thudding badly. It reminds me of a description of some two-season TV shows I once noticed on another blog a decade ago: "first season wonders, second season blunders". A similar description could be thought of for some recent live action comic adaptations.

Something that crops up again and again in your work, not least in Sin City, is the flawed but single-minded crime fighter who will clean up the mean streets against all the odds. What’s at the root of that fascination for you?

I’ve always liked my heroes, from Superman to Batman to Zorro. And I’ve always loved crime stories. The more I discovered film noir, the more I realised that stuff spoke to me like nobody’s business.

What's left out is that he developed a dim view of the Man of Steel, all because Supes in his narrow vision is ostensibly "too powerful". As for crime stories, based on the dark vision he alludes to, that's basically the problem: he seems more interested in honing skills for storytelling that's anything but science fiction, and maybe that's one of Miller's biggest weaknesses.

Somebody once asked you if you’re a conservative and you said “No, I’m a libertarian”. Is that still the case?

Let’s just say I’m an independent thinker. You know, being conservative right now means something very different than it did a generation ago. So I find my own way.

Unfortunately, it's been sadly apparent for years now he just can't bring himself to quit ragging on figures like Donald Trump, again, for ambiguous reasons. I just don't know what exactly Miller wants or expects.

As AI encroaches, do you regard it with excitement or something else?

Something else. At first I thought it was a magic mystery box. Then I thought it was the end of creativity. Now I think that it’s going to be something that everybody will eventually calm down about. Its uses are limited. It’s not a panacea, it’s not a god. It will be much like the personal computer, in that it will change things, but we need not all bow down before it.

I wonder how he'd feel if AI were used to imitate his art style, which has been mediocre for years? More to the point, if any would-be artists try cutting corners by resorting to AI to complete their assignment, isn't that dishonest and a poor approach? It's bad enough much of mainstream artwork's become so mediocre, but that doesn't mean we should approve of AI either, if anybody winds up using it as a way to save on employing actual artists.

Next, when the latest Spider-Man movie came out, how fascinating that Miller saw fit to praise this particular film, according to the Hollywood Reporter:

The comics icon took to Instagram to share his feelings about Sony’s latest Tom Holland adventure, calling the film, “The most Ditko movie yet and with my Hand in it for all to celebrate. This fan’s dream come true. Tom Holland is my forever Spider-Man as romantic as he is heroic. Congratulations to Destin and the whole team.”

Miller, who famously wrote The Dark Knight Returns and Batman Year One for DC, has sometimes been a tough critic of comic book movies over the years. In 2014, Playboy asked Miller about the “lousy” movie adaptations of Daredevil and Elektra. “When people come out with movies about characters I’ve worked on, I always hate them,” Miller said. “I have my own ideas about what the characters are like. I mean, I can’t watch a Batman movie. I’ve seen pieces of them, but I generally think, No, that’s not him. And I walk out of the theater before it’s over.”

When asked if that includes Christopher Nolan’s acclaimed Batman trilogy, Miller replied, “It includes all of them. I’m not condemning what he does. I don’t even understand it, except that he seems to think he owns the title Dark Knight. He’s about 20 years too late for that.”

Oh yes, that's interesting history too. I can't recall now if Nolan ever made use of any noticeable allusions to Miller's writings in his screenplays, but years later, when Nolan produced a woke adaptation of Homer's The Odyssey, which unfortunately grossed quite a bit at the box office, one could wonder if Miller would change his mind. There's another writer, more Hollywood-connected, however, who also had what to say about this:

Longtime Spider-Man comic book writer, J. Michael Straczynski, also had some praise for Brand New Day, writing on X: “To be clear I’ve enjoyed all the Spider-Man movies. But for my money, this latest iteration feels most authentically Peter, and Spider-Man. So many comic movies have fallen into MacGuffin plots, looking for the code, the stone, the box, the sword…this one is all about what William Faulkner called ‘the human heart in conflict with itself.’ It’s a very human story, emotional without being slow or dull or self-indulgent. It feels like stepping into a really good Spidey comic. Well done to all concerned (and even those unconcerned).”

As Toy People News notes, both Miller and J. Michael Straczynski are credited in the film's special thanks listings, "suggesting their comic work may have served as inspiration for the movie." But as the latter's presence makes clear to me, anybody as overrated and contemptuous of Spidey's world as JMS turned out to be is reason enough to skip this film for a long time. He played a part in the dissolving of the Spider-marriage 2 decades ago, and no matter what defense he employed at the time, it was just inexcusable. Also, Miller seems to think he owns the Dark Knight as well, so why complain about Nolan, regardless of where he's been going lately?

Here's also a review on Quillette of Push the Wall, which while mostly behind a paywall, offers the following visibly:

Even outside of comic book circles, Frank Miller is known as a gifted artist and writer who made comics grown up and gritty. From his damaged version of Bruce Wayne to Marv in Sin City (whom Miller pithily describes as “Conan the Barbarian in a trenchcoat”), Miller has created stories that resemble a strikingly original blend of film noir and dark Wagnerian opera. But the Miller who emerges from this memoir—part autobiography, part primer for aspiring graphic novelists—is as much a romantic as a gung-ho rebel.

It's always sad how earlier scribes like Dennis O'Neil and Steve Englehart are obscured in regards to whomever made comics "grown up". And why do they think a scribe who originally lucked out with the Robocop sequels is truly a "gifted" creator? Let's also not forget his only solo directorial effort to date, the cinematic adaptation of Will Eisner's Spirit, which was dreadful.

More importantly, New York was the home of his first great love: “Sure the city was violent, but it was also the hub of comic books and had been since the beginning. Marvel and DC were there, and all my real-life heroes were either still there bent over their drawing boards or they had spent formative time in the city, honing their skills and learning the lessons that only New York can teach you.” Miller was a childhood fan of the medium, and developed a particular fondness for EC comics, which were geared towards adults and “explored forbidden themes such as environmentalism, nuclear disarmament, and the miseries of war.” From EC comics, Miller “learned to always push the walls that others constructed, to challenge the strictures others put in place to stifle and smother.”

How does he feel about the mainstream moving away to Hollywood, apparently because that's how to truly manage a live action adaptation? One could argue the comics industry won't have as much impact as it used to, when DC/Marvel have been taken away from where they began.

Part of EC’s appeal no doubt rested on the reproaches it earned from the Comics Code Authority, which Miller describes as “a crusty remnant of ‘Red Scare’ censorship and the prim morality of postwar America.” The attempt to drum up a moral panic about comics will be familiar to those who have followed similar media and public campaigns to ban and censor video games and “video nasties” in the name of child protection:

And on this, one can only wonder how he feels about modern censorship, which made a comeback in the past decade, and the industry still hasn't recovered from it? Moral panics as we know them turned up again 15 years ago, with video games some of the primary victims, and Miller, unshockingly, seems oblivious to all that, as does the book reviewer.

Next, more recently, the BBC also interviewed Miller, and they perpetuate the whole notion only he succeeded in convincing everybody Batman was more than just kids stuff:

A deadpan do-gooder who wears underpants over his tights, and always carries a can of shark repellent spray.

For a long time, that was Batman – or, at least, Batman as the general public saw him, thanks to the camp 1960s television show and film. In his DC Comics adventures, he was depicted as a more serious and even sinister character, but the average person still saw him as Adam West in a self-mocking comedy with an infuriatingly catchy theme song.

Then came the graphic novel that changed everything – not just Batman, but superhero comics, and the many Hollywood films those comics would inspire.

I guess they too are just too lazy to do any research about Englehart and O'Neil's work in the 1970s. It's just like such an otherwise awful news network to be such favoratists. What's so special about Miller's work that isn't about most other Batman writers? Wasn't Chuck Dixon's creation, Bane, adapted for either the 2nd or 3rd Nolan film? Miller also told them:

"We do not have a Superman in the real world, but we do have huge military forces which can be used for good or evil. We do not have Batman out there, but we do have people's own desire to resist the use of force against them, and so on. I wanted to use the machinery and iconography of a children's story to tell a story for an older audience."

Back at the time, it was sadly intended to feature negative right-wing metaphors, and Miller doesn't seem troubled by how it all went from bad to worse, or that his very own 1986 miniseries was exploited by the editors by the turn of the century for depicting Batman as a mindless control freak. With the biggest irony being that Miller didn't apply the characterization wholesale from the miniseries to the ongoing flagship series when he scripted those.

As he recalls in his newly published memoir, Push the Wall, Miller was still in his twenties when he was commissioned by DC to "breathe new life" into a character who was at the time "emasculated" and "a second-class citizen in comics".

No kidding! That could easily describe what's gone wrong with a lot of portrayals of heroes in recent times: they're either emasculated and even depicted as cowards. Does it also sit well with them if Superman was transformed into a 2nd class citizen in comicdom, all for the sake of the Masked Manhunter? Such balderdash the BBC wrote up.

The idea was that while Batman was absent, Gotham City had crumbled into an urban hellhole, overrun by murderous gangs. The setting was based in part on Miller's own experiences. He moved to New York in the 1970s after a childhood in idyllic rural Vermont, and while he adored his new metropolitan home, "it was really a city in pretty serious decay".

Luckily for Gotham, the Batman of The Dark Knight Returns is no longer a gentlemanly sleuth, but an intimidating, ultra-violent vigilante who takes a grim satisfaction in breaking criminals' bones. He's so brutal, in fact, that it's almost incredible that DC's editors didn't object.

When you notice how ultra-violent modern entertainment's become, their acceptance of even a stand-alone tale set in a future era could be considered a precursor to modern problems. As for what Miller thought of NYC in the past, does that also sum up what he thinks of it today, when it's easily worse?

Most radical of all, Superman became a government stooge, loyal to a president who happened to resemble Ronald Reagan. And the Joker became a monstrous sadist. When the mini-series was first published, these revisions seemed iconoclastic, but Miller maintains that he was looking back as well as forward.

One can only wonder if the Joker was written as a metaphor for conservatives too, and IIRC, Marvel published a story featuring the Red Skull in the past decade that depicted him as one.

Numerous articles were written about how superhero comics weren't for children anymore. And the influence his work had on the comics industry was "pretty obvious fairly quickly", he admits – as were the shameless imitations. "But that's the nature of the beast. If something succeeds, there's a natural inclination by not just the publishers but the talent as well to imitate it. It's certainly nothing to resent or deplore."

At least they admit there's blatant imitations, not the least being some of Miller's own. I'm sorry, but when one looks at how bad entertainment's become today, it is what to resent and deplore. One more reason I'm not wasting time and money on Sin City.

His influence on the film industry was clear, too. Every single modern Batman film, from Tim Burton's 1989 blockbuster onwards, has taken some of its toughness and noirish style from The Dark Knight Returns.

Christopher Nolan's second and third Batman films took their name from it. And Zack Snyder's Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice lifted whole sections directly from its pages. Beyond those, it could be argued that Hollywood's current understanding that superhero stories can appeal to all ages, without being dumbed down, can be traced back to Miller.

But he stresses that he was only one of several writers and artists who were revolutionising the genre in the 1980s. And he isn't losing any sleep over the many films that owe their existence to him. "It's better for sanity's sake and blood pressure's sake to take it all with a good nature," he says with a cackle.

Unfortunately, much of modern comicdom's been dumbed down, and all the while, Miller doesn't care about anything but his own writing and art. Also, Snyder's Batman v. Superman film wasn't that successful, so what's the big deal there? At least Miller and the BBC admit he's not the only scribe who "revolutionized" the mediums 40 years ago. Even so, they still insult intellects by refusing to give other artists and writers a spotlight for people to judge, and as a result, it all comes down to another mediocre puff piece that doesn't add anything new to what perceptions we could have of comicdom in general.