The project got mixed reviews, and prompted discussions about whether it was moral to do stories about superheroes taking on Islamic extremists the way Captain America took on the Nazis (a comparison that Miller welcomed). In 2011, Miller released Holy Terror, which began as a “Batman versus al-Qaeda” story that replaced Batman with a thinly developed hero The Fixer. Miller’s Batman prequel All Star Batman & Robin the Boy Wonder was canceled in midstream for being too bizarrely violent. Shortly afterward, Miller contributed a comic strip to 9-11: Artists Respond, a strip which one reviewer described as “an atom bomb of anger and cynicism dropped into the middle of a book filled with stories about unity and tolerance and sadness.” His ex-wife Lynn Varley commented to WIRED‘s Sean Howe that the attacks haunted Miller, which Howe suggests is why T he Dark Knight Strikes Again morphed into an ugly, garish story in later installments. Unlike Superman, Miller had a much harder time moving on. “I was drawing this story while I was breathing in the World Trade Center in my Manhattan home,” Miller reflected in the documentary Comic Book Superheroes Unmasked, “and I had to acknowledge it, and the only way I could is have Superman in the wreckage of Metropolis, finding a locket of Lois Lane’s, finding out that the love of his live was dead. The World Trade Center fell when Miller was in the middle of The Dark Knight Strikes Again, shortly after he’d written an issue where Batman crashed a plane into a Metropolis skyscraper. Later there would be 300 and Sin City, both acclaimed if controversial, and the famous movie versions (Miller would co-direct the Sin City adaptation with Robert Rodriguez).īut then in 2001, a shift happened. Ronin, a heady mix of samurai action and cyberpunk post-apocalyptic, followed in 1983-1984, and two years later Miller released The Dark Knight Returns, easily one the most important Batman stories ever written.

In the 1970s, he took the Marvel comic Daredevil and transformed the devil from Hell’s Kitchen into one of Marvel’s top properties (and largely created the character we see in Netflix’s series).

Over the last 20 years, Miller has gone back and forth from being one of the most lauded, to the most hated figures in the graphic novel world. These aren’t things many people would put together, but for graphic novel fans with a strong sense of the genre’s history (or people interested in Marvel’s Daredevil) they’ve intertwined in a way that shows how artists can be deeply affected by catastrophe, and process it in problematic ways. I’m sitting now in my backyard, thinking about Frank Miller and 9/11.

Frank miller lynn varley 300