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Post by Carade on Apr 24, 2015 17:57:41 GMT -5
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Kid Q
AV Clubber 
bruised and cruised
Posts: 1,182
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Post by Kid Q on Apr 24, 2015 20:12:30 GMT -5
Let me start by saying holy shit that is insane. Miller has definitely gone off the rails into some horribly xenophobic, right-wing ways over the last several decades. I saw him at SDCC two or three years ago and he was a drunken, racist mess in my nonprofessional opinion. Not impressed by him of late at all.
That being said, I do think he once was an extremely talented and gifted artist who, at the top of his game, created some of the best and enduring comics work of any generation. His work with Daredevil in particular makes his current decent into apparent madness all the more painful for me to see. I read an interview with Geoff Darrow awhile ago where he spoke of Miller's ideological changes briefly and attributed them to his reaction to the attacks on 9/11. Not sure if that fully explains the shift, but it seems even former collaborators see the changes in the once great artist. The whole thing makes me sad.
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Post by Carade on Apr 24, 2015 20:47:54 GMT -5
I read an interview with Geoff Darrow awhile ago where he spoke of Miller's ideological changes briefly and attributed them to his reaction to the attacks on 9/11. Not sure if that fully explains the shift, but it seems even former collaborators see the changes in the once great artist. The whole thing makes me sad.  |
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Deleted
Deleted Member
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Post by Deleted on Apr 24, 2015 21:31:31 GMT -5
I'm hesitant to comment because I haven't read his Daredevil stuff, really just his Batman stuff, but with that in mind I'm in the "always sucked" camp. (I think the reasons Dark Knight Returns was memorable/influential have little to do with quality)
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Post by Lone Locust of the Apocalypse on Apr 25, 2015 9:52:43 GMT -5
TDKR was well drawn, I'll give him that.
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Pickle
Newbie
ticklish
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Post by Pickle on Apr 25, 2015 13:56:00 GMT -5
The only Frank Miller I keep in my bookcase is Daredevil.
I used to enjoy The Dark Knight Returns, but it lessened with every re-read, I think because my comics vocabulary grew in the interim periods.
I liked the early Sin City books and 300, but I'd hesitate to return to them. I don't know if they would hold up - more enjoyable in my angsty teenage years, I suspect.
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Deleted
Deleted Member
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Post by Deleted on Apr 25, 2015 21:58:29 GMT -5
He was excellent............and I could probably stop at that.
His influence just seems lessened now that every comic book writer and artist has borrowed his ideas over the last 30 years but the stuff he was doing back then was so ahead of its time. Its a shame that the great early stuff that he did gets tarnished by his later works.
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Deleted
Deleted Member
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Post by Deleted on May 9, 2015 14:05:18 GMT -5
OF KOKK
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Deleted
Deleted Member
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Post by Deleted on May 9, 2015 14:44:33 GMT -5
 well, at least one man, which in a vacuum would be funny, but i guess the implication is that a matriarchal supe is just a misandrist full of pointless cruelty aimed at hapless pencil-necked geeks like frank miller. in the universe as laid out for me by excerpts i've seen (not a supe comix collector), that is really the only sane choice for a woman character. everything left is not great, frank. @patrickbatman, that's funny-- the goetz thing-- i never thought of that. i used to always say that batman's superpower was money. but the goetz thing is particularly cruel-- accurate and cruel-- b/c it takes some fancy persecution complex for an upper-class wealthy scion to channel the ptsd of a lower class victim of street violence. and the execution of that goetz-like acting-out might be peculiar to miller, but the genesis of batman himself is a weird fantasy of street crime touching the hem of the garment of "our betters." i went through a batman literary origins phase a few years ago and wound up getting a dvd set of Judex (right before they aired the whole thing on TCM -- i'm a sucker), and Judex has his own poor little rich boy origins. from wikipedia:and in between there was the Shadow, who, from what i gathered online, was originally a war veteran, and later playboy Lamont Cranston. knowing what Feuillade was going for from the 1st clipped paragraph, i get why Judex was brought into existence, but it still has to be difficult to root for Richie Rich. the "villainous banker" is heh, to quote io9, "This... this will not end well." |
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Post by Baramos on Jul 6, 2015 22:26:30 GMT -5
I'm in the "got terrible" camp, or at least "got unbearable". Obviously his Daredevil run was seminal and quite impressive from a storytelling and art perspective but he also was the guy who made Karen Page into a junkie prostitute who sells Daredevil's identity for a single hit of smack, so his "whoreswhoreswhoreswhoreswhoreswhoreswhores" mentality must have been existent at that point.
The Miller who wrote The Dark Knight Returns was to me more of an anarchist or libertarian than the full-on neocon that he became post-9/11, as evidenced by his willingness to mock Ronald Reagan. Or maybe that was just because in the '80s it was still possible for a conservative to mock Reagan instead of treating him like the second coming of Jesus, I don't know. But there seems to be not only a distaste for liberalism but also a distaste for authority and jingoism as represented by his caricature of Reagan gleefully running off to a fallout shelter and leaving us all to our demise, or the symbolism of Superman's blind patriotism and need to give into authority leading him to take on the protagonist of the story, Batman.
Anyway, the fact that we can at least talk about TDKR I think shows that, again, he was at least bearable at that point, creating works of art that were worthwhile for discussion and interpretation. Not absolute trash like Holy Terror which might be the worst thing ever created by a human being since Birth of a Nation.
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