Frank Miller: success story and major works of the artist

Frank Miller is an American comic book author and filmmaker. His success came from graphic novels in the «noir» style, including such series as Sin City, Batman, Daredevil, and 300 Spartans.

Miller was born January 27, 1957 in Onley, Maryland, but spent most of his childhood in Montpelier, Vermont. The Miller family of Irish Catholics, in which Frank was the fifth of seven children, was middle-class in American society-not too rich, but not too poor. Frank’s mother was a nurse, and his father was a carpenter and electrician. From an early age the boy had two hobbies to which he devoted most of his free time: drawing and reading detective novels.

source: en.wikipedia.org

Hobbies that influenced the artist

Drawing allowed to embody on paper all the most fantastic that emerged in the imagination of a child under the influence of television and comic books. By the way, the next wave of popularity of superhero comics came precisely in the 1960s. Then Marvel, DC Comics and some smaller publishers arranged a reboot, the result of which was the appearance of many new heroes and the updating of old ones.

Crime novels, like picture stories, helped Frank develop his imagination. Famous noir authors Raymond Chandler and John Macdonald so skillfully manipulated the attention of readers, among whom was young Frank, that they were lost in speculation until the last page.

The Beginning of a Career

After receiving important lessons in pop culture, Frank decided to make his way in the big world and headed to New York City. Here the nineteen-year-old had a quick success waiting for him: he got a job at Gold Key Comics, where he worked as an artist on several little-known stories in pictures. Already in 1978, he specialized as a cover artist at Marvel — that is, he worked on the main picture of the issue, which is usually drawn much more thoroughly than the internal illustrations.

Among the projects in which Miller was involved were, among others, the adventures of Spider-Man. Frank was involved in the creation of a comic book where another character, Daredevil, appeared alongside Spidey. The blind invalid as the superhero Avenger did not arouse much interest from the public that time. It usually meant an inglorious end to the character’s career and oblivion; many names are now remembered only by historians of the genre. But thanks to Frank Miller, Daredevil had a different fate.

source: voyagecomics.com

Daredevil

The first comic book for which Frank Miller came up with the stories himself and determined what the hero would be like. Before Miller, Daredevil was often seen as a pale copy of Spider-Man, the same young superhero with problems in his personal life, who was not saving the world, but helping people in his neighborhood. The main thing that distinguished Matt Murdoch from Peter Parker was that he went blind as a teenager, but his other senses multiplied. By the late 1970s, sales of Daredevil comics were so low that issues of his solo series came out only every two months. Miller joined the team working on the Blind Lawyer series in 1979, and over the first half of the 1980s managed to make him one of Marvel’s major superheroes. He radically reworked all the storylines, ignoring previous stories, and turned Daredevil into practically an anti-hero who doesn’t bend to violence and is as if capable of murder. The main character’s father, as interpreted by Miller, was an alcoholic and abusive son, which was the reason he chose a career as a lawyer.

It was Frank Miller who came up with the idea of turning Spider-Man’s mediocre rival, Kingpin, into Daredevil’s main enemy and introduced the superhero’s new lover Electra into the plot. Unlike traditional love interests in the comics, the heroine was not defenseless, and their relationship was full of conflict and drama. Murdoch’s canonical adversaries, a group of deadly ninjas, were also suggested by Miller. The screenwriter wanted more realism in his portrayal of the character, so his Daredevil fought hard and dirty. Miller, who in his youth read the detectives of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, essentially reproduced the basic tropes of crime drama through the superhero story: the mean streets, the ambiguous hero, the atmosphere of paranoia and the femme fatale — the femme fatale.

source: www.insider.com

Batman

Frank Miller addressed the iconic DC hero several times and in many ways laid the foundations for his current popularity. Batman was first introduced to readers in the 1930s as a grim vigilante who dealt harshly with gangsters, and his adventures served as an outlet for Great Depression-stricken Americans. With the introduction of censorship in comic books in the 1950s, the hero eventually became more associated with the lighthearted and hilarious image of Adam West in the colorful tights of the 1960s television series. Frank Miller was among the writers and editors who wanted to bring Batman back to his former gloominess, and did so by showing the superhero as an old, 55-year-old and tired of fighting criminals. Gotham in The Dark Knight Returns was reminiscent of a dystopian New York City, and the realistic fights lent credibility. But most importantly, Miller was able to get inside the iconic hero’s head and find fears, complexes and insecurities there. Whereas Alan Moore in Watchmen did the same thing with fictional superheroes, Miller was able to deconstruct the Batman that had already existed for almost 50 years. Both of these works were the beginning of the so-called Dark Age of comics, when all authors rushed to reinvent familiar characters in a darker way.

source: www.deviantart.com/

Sin City

In the ’90s, Frank Miller created a series of graphic novels united by one setting. Everything took place in a town located somewhere in the southern United States (BaSin City). Miller put the dregs of society — criminals backed by corrupt cops and run by corrupt politicians — in this city. But even in this horrible place you could find people with good hearts.

The Sin City series doesn’t have an end-to-end plot. It is a set of short novellas, each telling the story of one of the town’s residents. The phenomenon of Sin City is that it initially appears to be an ordinary crime story, which in fact is more like a philosophical parable about the struggle between good and evil. And often the side of evil is represented by respectable citizens — politicians, businessmen, priests, policemen. And in the role of good are people who lead a disorderly life, endowed with fine human qualities.