Best known as one of the greatest innovators in the comic book field, the hard-boiled writer and artist Frank Miller has also made his presence felt in film, most notably in the visually arresting movie adaptation of his signature graphic series “Sin City” (2005), which Miller co-directed with Robert Rodriguez.
Raised in Montpelier, Vermont, Miller considered himself a "maladjusted" child, whose self-proclaimed "miserable" youth prompted him to immerse himself in the fantasy world of comic books. As he matured, he adjusted to real world a bit better, but maintained his interest in graphic entertainment as well as broadening his horizons into detective fiction and film. With influences ranging from comic book legends Jack Kirby, Will Eisner and Wallace Wood to film masters Alfred Hitchcock and Akira Kurasawa, Miller moved to New York and labored in fan publications before finally seeing his artwork published in Gold Key’s “Twilight Zone” comic in 1978. He then found freelance work at DC Comics drawing stories for such titles as “Weird War Tales” and a piece for anthology collection of Christmas stories that marked his first artwork depicting Batman, a character which he would later become famous for reinventing.
Miller’s first regular work came from DC’s primary rival, Marvel Comics, penciling a two-part Spider-Man story that guest-starred the less popular superhero, Daredevil—a blind attorney whose other senses have been heightened. In 1980, at age 21, Miller lobbied to assume the art chores on the regular “Daredevil” title and earned the job, teaming for the first time with his frequent collaborator, inker Klaus Janson. The artist impressed fans with his kinetic depiction of the athletic, street-fighting hero and with his diligently detailed yet stylized depiction of the grim and gritty side of the hero’s turf, New York City’s Hell’s Kitchen. Miller’s influences and enthusiasm soon pervaded the book, and he quickly took over as writer and artist. Daredevil became a superhero with realistic personal problems moving through a crime noir world that was also home to exotic ninjas, and he introduced controversial subject matter including an angel dust storyline and the deadly vigilante anti-hero The Punisher.
The swelling readership devoured each new issue, especially after the introduction of the villainess/love interest Elektra, the college love of Daredevil who was corrupted by an evil ninja cult after the assassination of her father and turned into a deadly assassin. Her redemption and ultimate death at the hands of Daredevil’s enemies proved to be the centerpiece of Miller’s groundbreaking run on the series, which ended in 1982 (Miller occasionally returned to the characters, including 1986’s “Born Again,” his acclaimed pairing with artist David Mazzuccelli; 1986’s “Elektra: Assassin” with the brilliant painter Bill Sienkiewicz; and 1990s’ “Elektra Lives Again”). The 2003 film adaptation of “Daredevil” would owe more to Miller’s run than any other incarnation of the series and his fond remembrance of the comic would prompt Ben Affleck to take on the role, and he was credited as the creator of the character played by Jennifer Garner in that film and the 2005 spin-off “Elektra.”
In 1982 Miller the artist teamed with the hugely influential “X-Men” writer Chris Claremont for another landmark series, the four-issue “Wolverine” title that fleshed out and defined the X-Men’s most popular mutant, depicting his internal conflict as a noble-hearted samurai-style warrior who battles the instincts of a bestial killer—elements that would inform director Bryan Singer and actor Hugh Jackman’s portrayal of the character in the later “X-Men” films (2000, 2003).
Establishing himself as an iconoclast, Miller relocated to Los Angeles and left Marvel to pursue a golden opportunity at competitor DC: writing and drawing his own self-created 1983 graphic miniseries “Ronin.” An ambitious and experimental serialized adventure set in the future, in which a man is inhabited by the soul of a fierce ancient samurai and fights the repressive dystopia in which he exists, Miller was a one-man show—he wrote, penciled, inked, edited, designed and even supervised at the printer. Although it was only distributed through comic shops, “Ronin’s” innovative, adult and majestically violent themes caught the attention of the mainstream.
It also gave DC the confidence to let Miller loose on one of their flagship characters, and one he had been dying to get carte blanche on: Batman. Once a camp figure known primarily for the 1960s TV character, DC had brought Batman back to his original 30s crime noir roots as early as 1970, but in 1986 Miller’s groundbreaking 4-part miniseries “The Dark Knight Returns” (with Janson as inker and Miller’s eventual wife Lynn Varley as colorist) gave the crimefighter’s dark and foreboding qualities a radical post-modern rethinking. The story found a retired, 50-year-old Bruce Wayne compelled to reassume the mantle of the Batman to battle the hellish crime-ridden cesspool that Gotham City had become—the superhero became a grim, tortured, psychologically obsessed vigilante with little regret inflicting pain on enemies like Two-Face and the Joker, whose behavior he seemed perilously close to mirroring. Yet there was also a compelling righteous feel to Batman’s brilliantly waged war on crime, making him more freedom fighter than fascist, even as he took on such institutions as the media, the government and his ex-friend Superman and ultimately came to a heartbreaking but inspirational end.
The series became one of the most resonant and influential of its era (indeed, far too many comic creators unsuccessfully tried to ape his “grim and gritty” rethinking of superheroes), and Miller—along with “Swamp Thing” writer Alan Moore and a handful of others—was anointed among the comic book industry’s revolutionary vanguards of the 1980s. As writer, Miller then teamed with artist David Mazzuccelli for the flip side of the Dark Knight’s ultimate end when they created the four-part storyline “Batman: Year One,” a taught, suspenseful, edgy postmodern origin story, in 1987.
Those two brief runs made Miller one of the most significant creators in the character’s long history, and the influences from both storylines were strongly felt in each of the “Batman” films, beginning with Tim Burton’s 1989 outing with its towering but goulish urban cityscapes, and most especially in “Batman Begins,” the 2005 film telling of his origins. Miller’s distinctive art style was even directly adapted into a sequence in an episode of the animated “Batman: Gotham Knights” series (1997-1999). In the episode “Legends of the Dark Knight,” the second fantasy derives from scenes in Miller's “Dark Knight,” and include verbatim dialogue, including “This isn't a mudhole. It's an operating table. And I'm the surgeon.” His highly anticipated graphic 2001 sequel “The Dark Knight Strikes Again” was a disappointment, however, but buzz was high on his 2005 teaming with superstar artist Jim Lee on the non-continuity comic title “All-Star Batman,"--or "Batman & Robin, the Boy Wonder"--DC's first attempt to launch a regular book that allowed creators to tell a year-long arc starring their iconic superheroes without being beholden to any previously established continuity.
With his status within the industry at an all-time high, Miller also became a vocal champion of creators’ right and anti-censorship within the comics industry. He also drew the attention of Hollywood and was tapped to provide the screenplay for “RoboCop 2” (1990), a move that, given the original’s tormented “man vs. machine” undercurrents and pointed, fascistic use of violence, seemed promising. However, per Miller’s version of events, the grind of the typical Hollywood machinery largely undercut his original vision for the film and left him disappointed despite providing rewrites on the set every day. Some Miller-esque elements survived and he did return for the underwhelming third outing “RoboCop III” (1993), claiming he was fascinated by the moviemaking process but definitely learned to appreciate the silence of his art studio. Miller was also hired by Warner Bros. to pen the script for a “Batman: Year One” movie to be directed by Darren Aronofsky, but the project died in development.
Miller next teamed with famed “Watchmen” artist Dave Gibbons for the 1991 recurring series “Give Me Liberty,” a scathing, satiric and frequently hilarious sci-fi parable starring Martha Washington, a poor black woman from Chicago’s Cabrini Green who is drafted into a totalitarian paramilitary group, only to become humanity’s best and brightest hope—Followed by two sequel miniseries, the Martha Washington books offered interesting in-your-face social criticism but not the resonance of Miller’s earlier works. Nor did the otherwise entertaining 1991 “Hard Boiled” which was essentially an extreme, ultra-violent and surreal private eye pastiche set in yet another near-future dystopia, beautifully and startlingly illustrated by artist Geoff Darrow. Miller and Darrow’s subsequent 1996 collaboration “Big Guy and Rusty the Boy Robot,” a fond deconstruction of junky Japanese films and goofy robot-boy comics, proved durable and accessible enough to be turned into the unlikely but entertaining animated TV series of the same name (1999-2001).
But it was Miller’s 1992 original creation “Sin City,” which he wrote, drew and published through the prestigious indie Dark Horse Comics, that would ultimately prove to become his best-known work, and the one most perfectly realized when it was adapted into a feature film. Drawing on his love of crime noir and detective fiction, Miller disposed of his recent samurai and sci-fi trappings to create a dark, deadly town of boozy back alleys, bereft of superheroes but filled to the brim with downtrodden men with shady pasts, violent tendencies and noble intentions, dangerous dames who mix sex, violence and manipulations, and corruption around every corner.
At the time of the publication of his first “Sin City” storyline in the anthology comic “Dark Horse Presents,” Miller’s writing style had evolved into a lean, sparse prose that packed as much punch as Mickey Spillane and as much urban poetry as Raymond Chandler, while his art style was a graphic euphoria of stylized black and white imagery (in later story arcs, he would also introduce characters like Blue Eyes and the Yellow Bastard who would stand out through the use of a single color) that artfully depicted the casual but viscerally effective violence of a Quentin Tarantino film. Leaning as far away from mainstream comic book work as possible, “Sin City” was a singular vision that caught fire with both Miller’s legion of devotees and the substantial sampling of mainstream readers who also discovered it. He eventually produced an increasingly impressive canon of intertwining series in which background characters in one story arc might emerge as major players in another. The first story arc, eventually titled “The Hard Goodbye,” was re-published as a top-selling graphic collection, as were the subsequent series “A Dame to Kill For,” “The Big Fat Kill,” “That Yellow Bastard,” “Family Values” and “Hell and Back,” along with various short stories. Miller, who is widely credited for giving comic books a cinematic feel and pace, found influences in the works of noir masters Sam Fuller, Orson Welles, Fritz Lang, Robert Siodmak and Roy William Neill.
Miller had felt somewhat burned by his Hollywood experiences and had ditched his onetime desire to direct a film in favor of a return to the drawing board, and when the industry repeatedly offered to option “Sin City,” the writer-artist remained fiercely protective of his “baby,” viewing it as the safe haven he could always return to after other artistic disappointments. One Hollywood admirer of Miller’s masterwork proved tenacious, however: filmmaker Robert Rodriguez, a bit of a maverick visionary himself, vigorously pursued the property by wooing Miller directly. Rodriguez assembled an animated storyboard presentation of the film he had in mind, using photographs he'd shot mirroring Miller's comic book imagery, and met with the writer-artist in a Hell's Kitchen bar to show it to him on his laptop. Miller was impressed, but still declined. To fully win Miller over, Rodriguez, who had previously developed his own f/x house Troublemaker Digital, offered to shoot a short film based on one of the “Sin City” short stories, “The Customer Is Always Right,” to illustrate how he planned to translate Miller’s imagery and dialogue directly via digitally created and manipulated shots—at best it would persuade Miller to trust him, and at worst he’s make a cool, experimental short. Convincing his actor friends Josh Hartnett and Marley Shelton to appear in the short, Rodriguez successfully captured all of “Sin City’s” noir-ish allure, and Miller gave the project the go-ahead.
Rodriguez then decided that Miller should be credited with the screenplay culled from “The Hard Goodbye,” “The Big Fat Kill” and “That Yellow Bastard” (as dialogue was largely cut-and-pasted into the script from his original comic works), and in a surprisingly generous move, by Hollywood standards, he offered to let Miller co-direct the film with him. One week prior to the start of the production, the Directors Guild of America attempted to shut the film down due to Miller’s lack of approved credentials, but Rodriguez simply quit the DGA to keep the film on track. Rodriguez also got his friend Quentin Tarantino to direct a particularly harrowing segment within the “Big Fat Kill” sequence, and recruited and all-star roster of actors to bring Miller’s creations to life, including Mickey Rourke Bruce Willis, Clive Owen, Jessica Alba, Elijah Wood, Benicio del Toro, Brittany Murphy, Rosario Dawson, Nick Stahl, Alexis Bledel, Michael Madsen and more. The resultant film was a visually stunning knockout, a perfectly realized filmic interpretation of Miller’s works. Following the film's better-than-expected box office success, Rodriquez and Miller were quickly tapped to reconvene for a sequel, possibly filming second and third films back-to-back.
Miller created another well-received comic book miniseries during his “Sin City” period, 1998’s “300,” a compelling, machismo-soaked, highly cinematic interpretation of the historic battle of Thermopylae during the Spartan wars of 480 B.C.—indeed, the project was inspired by the 1962 film “The 300 Spartans,” which Miller had loved as a young boy. A film adaptation of that project was announced by Warner Bros. in 2004 with Miller as an executive producer and “Dawn of the Dead” director Zach Snyder at the helm. The same studio was also planned a big-screen version of “Hard Boiled.”
Miller has occasionally appeared on-screen as well: he’s been featured in documentary-style works such as “Comic Book Confidential” (1987) and “Sex, Lies and Superheroes” (2003), had cameo roles as Frank the Chemist in “RoboCop 2,” as a morgue corpse with a pen in his head in “Daredevil,” and he appeared as a corrupt priest menaced by Marv (Mickey Rourke) in “Sin City.”