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Words and pictures. They’re what sum up Frank Miller’s life. He’s labored on them since he first walked into a New England kitchen at five years old and handed his mother a folded piece of paper. It was his earliest comic book. Since then, Miller has known he was destined to be a storyteller in the medium of Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko, Will Eisner and Bill Finger.
Not too long afterward, he would move to the big city and work both in the industry of those idols and with characters they created. Yet when Miller got his hands on them, he had a penchant for making the stories his own, transforming superheroes into often haunted, complex figures whose appearances in stories like Daredevil: Born Again, The Dark Knight Returns,and Batman: Year One influence popular culture to this day. In those early years, Miller dreamed of bringing the prestige and muscular storytelling of cinema to the page. But by the time he was himself in Hollywood, whether to co-direct movies based on his own hardboiled works like Sin City—or to see what filmmakers did with his 300graphic novel—he had come to a more nuanced view on the virtues of cinema versus comics.
He considers both at length in his new memoir, Push the Wall, which just hit bookshelves this month. In advance of its release, Miller also took the time to visit us at the epicenter of his fantasies, and the backdrop of the Gotham and Metropolis of his mind: New York City. Here is that conversation, edited for length.
In your new book, you describe your childhood in Vermont as an American Eden. Do you think this Emerson-esque beginning made city life seem especially seductive to you from the start?
It certainly did. The other thing I’ve got to admit is that was where Spider-Man lived, and I love the way artists like Steve Ditko drew the big city. It had a romance, I would say that New York became my Oz when I was a child.
You say romance, which is a word you use to describe certain characters, including Daredevil. But you say that you use romance in the classical sense. What does that mean to you?
To me, romance is a wonderful genre that is best personified in characters like Robin Hood where you would see a hero who encapsulated all the best virtues of masculinity in that he would fight for right, protect the weak, and fight for justice. At the same time, it involved what we now associate with romance, which would be romantic love. All of these things were part of one genre. My whole fictional life has been in that genre.
Your father grew up in Hell’s Kitchen. Did he ever have back-in-the-day stories about the neighborhood?
My father was a classic World War II vet who was rather tight-lipped about anything that was tough. He grew up poor in Hell’s Kitchen. He saw some very rough times in World War II, and I never heard much of anything about them.
So when you were reading early Daredevil then, were you making that connection as a kid about Hell’s Kitchen and your father’s past?
Yeah, but less so because Spider-Man was just the intoxicatingly brilliant comic book of its time. Daredevil really was always the also-ran. But to take it further, if you look at the superhero genre, it’s always been about New York. The American superhero comics have always been there. In the case of Marvel Comics, it was called New York City. In the case of the stuff down at DC Comics, Superman and Batman, say, they dressed up New York as Metropolis or Gotham City, which are both nicknames for New York.
You’ve said that when you got to New York, it was both Gotham and Metropolis for you. How so?
Breaks down pretty simply. Below 42nd Street, it’s Gotham. Above 42nd, it’s Metropolis. [Laughs] The buildings get taller, the people dress better, and things are a lot cleaner.
There’s still criminals, they just maybe have a nicer wardrobe.
One thing that struck me about your childhood memories in this book is that when you were in the Boy Scouts, a friend of yours handed you a copy ofTales of the Incredible, which is an EC sci-fi comic. Could you talk about what impact that had on you?
It was huge! It actually was passed around over a campfire in Boy Scouts, and I swiped it because I had to have it. What it showed me, more than anything, was a lost era of comic books. I knew nothing about what had happened in the 1950s to the comic book medium. I didn’t know that there was really a genuine golden era that existed before of much higher quality artwork and story, and that comics were actually moving out of the realm of just being kid-lit into something that was at least charging into adolescence. This was before all of that was shut down in the early 1950s during the McCarthy era as part of that entire censorious period where parents essentially became afraid of their own children.
So to delve into this and to find the absolute mastery of the craft in the hands of people like Johnny Craig and Wallace Wood was an enlightenment for me.
You mention that period of self-censorship in the ‘50s. Do you think if that hadn’t happened, the comic book medium would be in a drastically different place?
I think we would’ve gotten forward a lot faster. You can see how the moviemakers made their own truces with the censors by developing their rating system with the MPAA. Comics accepted their role as being kids stuff and allowed themselves essentially to be shut down just as they were exploding. So what survived were the superheroes. They took over comics and still maintain their command over them to this day.
Speaking of going elsewhere, to go back to New York City, obviously you were drawn to the city of Spider-Man, but you were mugged early on as a transplant. Did that experience change your perception at all of the city? Or did it maybe even add to a certain type of seductive quality to New York for you?
It didn’t make it more attractive to me. That was New York during a very bad time. It was certainly a deeply traumatic moment, and I went into a profound rage. I did what any cartoonist would do. I took it out on the page. And that was a lot of my inspiration for my Dark Knight, to transform Batman into this massive nighttime avenger.
What was the comic book scene like in the 1970s when you got here?
The best thing I could compare it to would be almost a scattered, broken tribe. It was a lot of people who dearly believed in these characters they’d grown up with, but an industry that was living in fear of the forces that had brought them to their knees. And they certainly lived in fear of the comics code, but we were a pretty determined bunch. People were determined to do really good work, and among them was an idol of mine who became a mentor, Neal Adams, who ran a small studio in Manhattan that produced mostly advertising work, but comic book work as well. It became almost a clubhouse where comic book people would gather and show work, and where Neal would meet people who were aspiring to get in. He was very generous with his time. He gave me endless hours of advice.
In moments like that, when you had Neal Adams holding court and helping the next generation, did it feel Hemmingway-esque? Like the literary “moveable feast” of 1920s Paris?
It was the promise of that. There was real, serious talent, some of it the old guys from earlier eras. They would be there working in his studio and showing off their old pages and stuff. And a lot of us young puppies. So yeah, it had that quality but certainly wasn’t anything that occupied neighborhoods.
Were Marvel and DC writers meeting up at restaurants though and sharing story ideas? No “across the street” division?
That developed. Early on, the rivalry between the publishers had affected the social lives of the freelance artists to the point where you tended to be part of one camp or the other. But that faded before my eyes as we all ended up having parties together, having dinners together, and so on. As time went by, I was one of the ones who sort of pushed this idea of us becoming more free agents and getting better terms, and also more opportunities for the kind of work we could do.
Neal was a big advocate for that. You also mentioned in your book how Neal told you to “take criticism personally. Use it.” Is there a particular piece of criticism you’ve hung on to and used?
Yeah, there was one in particular that I’ve never forgotten from him. Neal said to me: “Artists aren’t just people who make pretty things to amuse people. Artists are part of society. Artists are the people who know how things work, and they know why things happen.”
I found that absolutely enlightening. In order to draw something, have a working knowledge of how it works. Essentially, it doesn’t mean you have to be a car mechanic in order to draw a car, but you do have to know what the things under the car are doing while the car is moving. You have to work to understand what things really look like. For instance, we’re in New York right now; one of the things you’ll notice is if you look up around you in this room, you think it’s a bare room, but if you look up around you’ll see pipes everywhere. Lots of pipes. That’s the kind of stuff that as an artist you have to learn to give verisimilitude to. Have enough detail so that people believe they are where they are.
To that point, when you were working onDaredevil, you were going to Coney Island to draw inspiration, to sketch out the Cyclone rollercoaster, you were drawing real rooftops in New York City. Was that common in comics of the time?
I don’t know. In terms of the city stuff, yeah I was pushing it a lot. Most people were just working off photographs, and a lot of people weren’t even doing that, they were just looking at other comic books. But what other people were doing with anatomy was far beyond anything I cared to do.
WithDaredevil, you started as an artist but then you became a writer, and in your first issue you created Elektra. How did that change your perception of what you did?
It’s what I wanted to do all along, but at the time it wasn’t done. You see, the old way of doing things—and I believe this was related to the way things were broken down legally—is they didn’t want any one person to be an author of anything. It was considered almost an ethical code that someone who drew didn’t write, and since none of the people who could write could draw, that wasn’t even an issue. And it was just a matter of cracking that, and luckily I had in particular [editor-in-chief] Jim Shooter at Marvel, who was an artist and a writer, so he was open to the notion. And he knew my story sense was good.
She is a wonderful character, and she won readers over immediately. What was it like when you go to Jim Shooter a year later and say, “I want to kill her?”
Well, he was not my editor, and therein lies the tale. My editor was Daniel O’Neil, and I presented it to him as a fact. I said, “Elektra’s gonna die.” And he went, “You can’t do that, she’s more popular than Daredevil!” And I said, “No, that’s the way the story’s gonna end.” To me, it was as simple as could be, it wasn’t a matter of question.
And Denny just said, “Shooter will never allow it.” So Jim Shooter was right in the corner of our office, so I just walked down to his office, and his door was always open. And I sat in front of his desk and I said to him, “I’ve worked out a story. Elektra’s gotta die.” And he went, “She’s more popular than Daredevil is!” I said, “Yeah, but it’s the only way.” He leaned back with a kind of sad look on his face and he said, “Tell me a story, Frank.”
So I told him the story in detail, and his face brightened up and he said “Oh, that’s great! We’ve gotta give that a double-sized issue, and we’ll make it the biggest thing we release!” So that’s the way it proceeded.
I believe you received hate mail and death threats for this. Was that a first in comicdom?
I think the death threats were, they hadn’t seen it before at Marvel.
In your memoir, you say there is a pact between reader and writer, where the story the writer tells can and will piss off the reader. Do you think most readers are aware of that contract going in?
I think not consciously, no. Not most of them. But I don’t think that anybody picks up any piece of fiction expecting to have no emotional reaction. To me, it’s part of my job to evoke that kind of emotional reaction. And it can’t always be a happy, reassuring one.
During this part of your life, you had a good friend who was also a roommate named Josie. What’s it like when you name a bar in Daredevil after her as a token of affection, and 40 years later you still see it on a <a href="https://comicvibe.com/disney-calls-it-quits-with-1-marvel-tv-series-after-one-season/” title=”Disney+ Calls It Quits With 1 Marvel TV Series After One Season”>Disney+ TV show this year?
I hope wherever she is that she got a chance to see it and got a smile out of it.
Your run onDaredevileventually leads to another superhero, the Dark Knight. What was the perception of Batman like in the 1980s?
In the 1980s, I would say that there’d been a long stretch of time where a series of talented people had worked to pull away from that god-awful TV show from the ‘60s, which had really dominated people’s perceptions of the character. Most notably Neal Adams and Denny O’Neil on Batman had established a very different look and tone, a more high adventure and spooky atmospheric artwork. As New York was really crashing into the 1980s, it was the time of Martin Scorsese, and New York had really become nightmarish—and also by the way comic book readership had gotten older—I wanted to really take Batman somewhere new and old at the same time.
So I gave the physical stature I remembered him having when I was a little boy. The big shouldered, brawny Dick Sprang drawings, but I gave him a touch of Dirty Harry and Death Wish. So along the way, it got more and more epic, and I eventually dragged half the other DC characters into it and it turned into a massive project.
Right before you didDark Knight Returns, you did another story for DC,Ronin, which you said you had total freedom on. But onDark Knightit was only “near total freedom.” What wouldn’t they let you do?
There were just certain things that were just way over the top. My first proposal had Batman dying at the end, and there were some other things like places where I used too much profanity. They were right about not letting him die. Sometimes publishers can be right. But they embraced Robin being replaced by a girl, and all of that, and the very bold reinterpretation of the Joker. I mean even the questionable role of Superman. Once it took off and once it was rolling, they stood by it.
You talked about the Joker a moment ago. I feel like yours was a real transition in how we saw the Batman character as well as the Joker. How did you see their relationship?
There’s a real Janus-like relationship between the two. It’s almost like one can’t exist without the other. Batman is most profoundly someone who, when he was five years old, his life stopped making sense. And he’s been forcing it to make sense ever since. So he’s someone who’s imposing order and logic onto the world. The Joker is the dead opposite, he’s imposing chaos on the world. I added to that by giving Joker unmistakably sexually perverse sides and so on, that just played out across it.
Obviously readers really responded to it, but at the time were you receiving any pushback from colleagues? Not from editorial necessarily, but anyone who maybe ever worked at DC going, “This isn’t our Batman, this isn’t our Superman, our Joker?”
Oh, yes, from the editor. I had to argue pretty much every step of the way in making that book.
The irony is that almost every Batman movie made after 1989 pulls from your books one way or another. Did that surprise you?
Do you have a favorite interpretation among all those movies?
There was one I really liked. I don’t remember the names of all the movies, because as they go on the titles are kind of redundant… Which is the one with [Heath] Ledger in it?
Nolan. The Dark Knight.
I remember that that Joker was about as good as you could ask for.
I and I think many people would agree with you.
And I’ve got to say, even though there have been some really good performances as Batman, I think there’s something not quite there convincing me [about those interpretations]… Also one that I can’t leave out, because it’s my favorite of the bunch, is the one that was put together by Paul Dini and Bruce Timm, which is the animated adaptation of Dark Knight Returns. I think it’s an extraordinary work, and you really should study it next to all the others because it’s really, really a wonderful, top-to-bottom adaptation.
What does it capture about Bruce Wayne you think might be missing in other versions?
The iconography, the mass of the character, and the stature and mythic quality. It doesn’t have much as much of the flash and dazzle, but it really does have a great deal of that. Now there’s virtues across all of it, and nothing could match the absolute pizzazz of some of the Batmobile stuff and some of the rain sequences and all of that [in the live-action movies]. But I’m just saying as far as what Timm and Dini did, I felt, was a real comic book come to life.
The Dark Knight Returnseventually leads to the offer to come out to Hollywood forRoboCop 2. Was there any hesitation when the offer was broached to come out to LA?
Ah no. [Laughs] I was like “This’ll be fun!”
What’s harder, going from Vermont to New York, or New York to LA?
I don’t know, it’s all an adventure. In each case, they were life-changing and deeply rewarding. In the case of going from New York to LA, going from Comic Book Land to Hollywood, it was going from being a big fish in a small pond, to being a minnow in the ocean. The education was really fast and furious.
What are the advantages of a film versus a comic book? What does one do better than the other?
Film has so many of the advantages that I might as well list those first. The reason why it is the dominant story form of at least the last century and the foreseeable future is it completely envelopes and consumes the viewer and the listener. The audience. It’s complete immersion, or as close as we have to it. Comic books have different virtues, which are much closer to those of prose, in that because of their portability and for a number of reasons, they are on the surface more in control of the reader.
At the same time, they are involving the reader’s mind in very different ways. Just as when you’re reading a prose novel, you are making pictures constantly. In a comic book, you’re basically looking at marks on paper and you’re making three-dimensional images out of them. Also there are blank spaces between static images, in which you’re making up a thousand images to fill in the spaces between them. So I submit that while both involve the audience on a creative level, the comic book is more what Marshall McLuhan would refer to as a high-participation medium. It’s activating different parts of the brain more acutely.
I guess this is also a cartoonist trying to make up for the fact that we don’t have that kind of power. There’s nothing as overwhelming as a movie; there’s nothing like having a real-life actor staring at you from the screen. But we do have other virtues that I think make us a decent sister to movies.
Your response to being out of LA and Hollywood is to go back and make something that’s purely the comic book medium, something you thought would be unfilmable: Sin City. So what’s going through your mind when you’re on a plane going down to Austin, Texas, because a guy named Robert Rodriguez wants to prove you wrong with a screen test?
[Laughs] I’m open. I’m open at that point, because I met him, and he wouldn’t let go of the idea. He’s an irresistible guy and an intensely creative one. So I thought, what the hell? Let’s see. And in one day he proved he was right.
You said in the book it was something specifically in Marley Shelton’s performance in the screen test that changed your mind. What was it?
Marley, before we started shooting, she convinced me. She came up to me and stared at me with those impossibly beautiful blue eyes of hers and said, “Um, Robert tells me I hired this guy to kill me. Why?” So there I was, talking to my character, telling her her backstory. I told her the whole story that I had in my mind, all these years, about why she did that. And then she nodded and went out and gave just a killer performance and I shook hands with her and said I’m in, let’s go.
Would you care to share any of that backstory you told her?
The backstory would probably bore you, but it was essentially she had broken out of a bad marriage and the husband had told her that he was going to kill her, but she wouldn’t know when and wouldn’t know where, and she could just live with that until eventually he got to her. So she couldn’t stand it anymore.
Is the Sin City in the title more New York or LA?
Great question! I really appreciate that question, believe me. It started out as New York. If you look at the first Sin City, the Marv story, it looks like New York. But halfway through it, it starts to grow palm trees and terracotta tile rooftops, because I moved to LA. So it turned into LA and it pretty much stayed there. It’s an LA with a big downtown.
You’ve described Marv as your id. Do you think that’s why you kind of make him the antithesis of a noir hero? He’s virtually fearless and cannot be killed.
I started out really thinking of Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer and just took it further. And then at one point, I jotted down the phrase, “Conan in a trenchcoat,” and that locked him in my mind. He is virtually superhuman. I mean, he goes through something that’s a steel door, that’s Conan [the Barbarian], that’s not noir.
Why do you think you cast yourself opposite Marv in the movie as one of several priests who need to be corrected along the way?
Because my co-director has a sense of humor. He just tossed me in there! [Laughs] You want to die. If you’re in a movie and you’re a bit part, you want to die.
Your legacy is so shrouded in a sense of myth to readers. Do you think it’s a good thing when they put creators or artists so much on a pedestal like that?
I think it’s better to break things down and figure out how it works. I study other artists to this day, and you know now I’ve got a much more educated eye, I can see much more readily how they did what they did. But the choices sometimes are fascinating to look at and go “why make this choice?” And it’s much like studying film. It’s the same way that filmmakers often act like they’re witch doctors. It can all be broken down and figured out. The magic is really knowing which decision to make.
What would you like your legacy to be?
It’s always a tough one for me. I always like to say legacies are for dead people. But I guess the legacy I’d like to have is, “Remember that cool thing when…?” Just for somebody to remember something really cool in one of the books, or a really good ending to a story, or something like that. He told good stories.
