Stylistic Aspirations: Frank Miller (sort of)

I don't know how the bastard did it, but in a career generally characterised by some of the shittiest comic book writing ever.

Frank Miller is 'the beatles' of comics. I remember reading an interview with Les Clapool (apparantly conducted within ear shot of Larry 'Ler' Lalonde) where the interviewer asked Les who his influences were and Ler turned around and said 'dude, just say the beatles' then Les talked about the beatles for 10 minutes and how the were unavoidable as an influence.

So too do I recall listening to an english radio station in Japan and the hosts introduced this new Bri'ish band whose name I can't remember but they listed their influences as 'Pink Floyd, Lead Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, Radio Head etc... but NOT the Beatles' then they played a track and afterwards the hosts said 'sounds like the Beatles' and it was true.

Most of the Beatles tracks are candy pop that seemed hardcore back when you had Chuck Berry and Elvis as just about the only rock and rollers on the planet (Frank Sinatra was considered hard-core and schoolgirls got wet over him back then) but these days it's been done and doesn't need doing again, but was done again by the Monkees and then Oasis.

All that said amongst all the candy-pop theirs offerings like 'Helter Skelter' the first Heavy Metal track or at least the precurser to all Metal, and then theirs subject matter of Maxwell Silver's Hammer, Bungalow Bill and even 'Octopus's Garden' I've heard refers to fingering a girls pussy. Great concepts executed as pop tracks that the Spice Girls could cover.

So too is Frank Miller, 300 is incredibly idealistic and poorly written, Ronin is one of the worst comics ever written, Sin City is a big ball of cliche, The Dark Knight Returns again is poorly written, The Dark Knight Strikes Again is all over the place, and Allstar Batman and Robin is considered some of the most attrocious writing ever to grace the comic book world. There are even competitions where scans have been made of Jim Lee's Allstar Batman & Robin artwork to see if you can write a better dialogue/story than Frank Miller.

But amongst all this Batman: Year One is one of the seminal defining works in comic book history. As Sale says all Batman writers owe the grim-dark-loner image to Miller. He reinterpreted the pipe smoking Billionaire playboy into traumatised kid dressing up as a bat because he can't deal with his grief.

This more than anything else characterises Miller as a writer, he has brilliant, revolutionary ideas that can provide quantum leap developments to staid and tired characters like Batman and yet... he just can't seem to execute them.

Really from the earliest I have cringed at how bad the dialogue is. If you want a demonstration go see Sin City. Every single fucking character talks in a gravelly noir voice that you almost think 'what terrible direction, all these characters are one dimensional, who made that bonehead decision' and then go read the Sin City comics and you realise that 'Frank Miller made that decision' because that's exactly how every character is written.

So too with Batman: Year One, and even more so in Dark Knight Returns and Dark Knight Strikes Again. All the shouting in 300 is exactly how its written, and Alan Moore does a hilarious stab at Frank Miller's Daredevil.

So to me, like the band I heard in Japan I would never set out to create something 'milleresque' but would be almost happy if I did. He does do some things well, even if dialogue isn't his forte and his real quantum leap for any character is just to take an existing one and make them dark and gritty, or in the case of Allstar Batman take a dark and gritty character and make them darker and even grittier.

Here is what one can take from Frank Miller and be proud of:

1. Pacing
2. Composition

1. As Alan Moore says in his 'Writing for Comics'

A fast action scene, maybe a fight scene, would very possibly work better if it moved as fast as possible. Compare some of Frank Miller's silent fight scenes - which move very fast, flowing from image to image with the speed of a real life conflict, unimpeded by the reader having to stop to read a lot of accompanying text- and the fight scenes of lesser writers where any sense of movement in the scene is undercut by the antagonists mouthing huge chunks of dialogue at one another.

Which is true and correct, Frank Miller is often noted for the fact that you can read one of his comic books in ten minutes. He will use four pages to demonstrate someone busting down a door and goes lavishly on the visuals.

None of which is a bad thing, after all the whole advantage of comic books is that it is a visual medium.

I happen to think for action sequences and pacing Takehiko Inoue's work in Vagabond probably makes Miller almost entirely redundant. Except that Miller doesn't have long philosophical flashbacks in the midst of fight sequences, where Vagabond does this all the time.

That said Vagabond is all about the inherant interest of conflict, so it kind of makes sense, but man was Dragonball Z painfully drawn out in this regard. Before any punch was ever thrown you had to spend a week watching whatever spectators of any match give their lengthy contemplations of power levels until the reader dropped dead from starvation and the fight scene never occured.

So yes, Miller is a very good example for pacing and visual storytelling from the western perspective if you want to avoid Japanese cliche.

2. Miller isn't a great drawer, he uses fine lines to draw chunky images and then a lot of play between light and dark. You can see how he is influential on Tim Sale in this regard.
That said it is actually a lot like me thus far, my lack of drawing ability being apparant my style is recognisable whereas someone who has mastered the art of 'How To Draw Manga' for example has no style of their own and their work will be generally unrecognisable. Much like I wouldn't be able to tell Eichiro Ooda's work on One Piece from whatshisface's work on Naruto just by looking at pictures of characters.

Although kids consider manga exciting and probably superior in drawing style to the western comic world, it is objectively speaking, really boring and staid. So Frank Miller's compositions are quite painterly without the style, Sin City probably captures this element more than any other.

Scenes like Marv with his women in the first Sin City novel and all the textures being cut from black and white are incredibly good. And then reversing the image so you just see these lips floating on a matt black face.

By restraining himself and embracing his limitations he pushes further than other artists of the era. Much like the Beatles restrained themselves with Ringo Star.

Overall I'd prefer to draw like Frank Miller than like Jim Lee, Todd McFarlane or any of the really busy artists.