Frank Miller on Batman, Superheroes, Etc..

[NK1988]

So I saw in the Eisner Award nominations there was a book called Frank Miller's Daredevil and the Ends of Heroism. I know Miller's reputation - both good and bad - but as I planned to read The Dark Knight Returns for the first time ever, I thought it be good to know the context in which it was written. A lot of writers make their comics a commentary on the time and place they were written. You can appreciate the story all on its own of course but it can't hurt to have some look into the writers' psychology or ideology.

The book is, as the title implies, ostensibly about Miller's legendary DD run but it's also more generally about Miller himself. What he was trying to craft, not just in DD, but other comics as well, like Ronin or TDKR or his newer, more controversial stuff.

I figured people here might be interested in reading choice snippets from the book that discuss both Batman specifically and Miller's overall ideas.


I would just post it all here but it's rather long....

http://m.uploadedit.com/ba3s/1493846201454.rtf

If you just care about the Batman parts...

Miller would probably have incited comparisons to Batman in the fan press simply by transforming Daredevil into a grittier, more deterministic series, but Miller openly stressed the parallel in his Daredevil-era interviews. In 1981, Miller draws an explicit contrast between Daredevil and Batman: “Daredevil . . . operates on a basic motive of love for seeking out justice. . . . [Batman] is punishing those who killed his parents. Batman’s focus is on the criminal, Daredevil’s is on the victim.”27 Critics picked up on Miller’s concern with Daredevil’s motives, as well as the productive task of measuring them against those of the Batman. Reviewing Miller’s work thus far in the Comics Journal in 1982, Ed Via wrote that Miller had made Daredevil “first and foremost a moralist, a person with a strong sense of fairness and . . . compassion, someone whose actions were as directly in line with his convictions as humanly possible.”28 Even Daredevil’s scuffles with criminals differed from Batman’s in that they were performances rather than acts of vengeance:

“I see Matt Murdock as being a grown man and Daredevil as almost being a boy. . . . He believes in everything he’s doing and he works very hard at it, but part of him just gets off on jumping around buildings.”29 “I’m also trying to develop him as a guy with a terrific sense of humor, who scares criminals and has a great time doing it. Like [Steve Ditko’s DC character] the Creeper, he laughs and laughs and laughs, and thinks [to himself], ‘Jeez, they’re buying it!’”30

Miller’s favorite means of exposing his hero’s antic side was to send Daredevil to Josie’s Bar, a fictional dive where New York’s entire population of petty thieves seems to turn up every night. Digging for clues to various cases, DD inevitably sparks fights that trash the place, hurling thugs through the front window while Josie protests (for the umpteenth time) that she just had it repaired. Sometimes he even orders a drink first, but as Miller points out, it’s always a glass of milk. The milk (and the milk moustache it leaves behind) comically telegraphs Matt’s wholesomeness compared to the hardened types guzzling whiskey and beer all around him, but it also underscores Miller’s description of DD as Matt’s boyish side, the inner child that “comes alive” while playing superhero.31

Ultimately, however, the contrast Miller once drew between the borderline psychotic Batman and the psychologically healthy Daredevil sounds like an overstatement of the argument, fronted by the Village Voice in 1965 (and echoed in Esquire the following year), that “Marvel Comics are the first comic books to evoke, even metaphorically, the Real World.”32 By those lights, “real world” referentiality meant that Marvel heroes dealt openly with persecution, neuroses, and family squabbles and turned out to be their own worst enemies nearly as often as protagonists did in postwar literary fiction.

By contrast, DC didn’t raise any schlemiels, with the possible exception of Clark Kent, whose inferiority complex is all an act to keep people from noticing that, but for the eyeglasses and the hunched shoulders, he looks exactly like Superman. DC stories followed the logic of such classical storytelling modes as the epic or the chronicle, where decision making is an exponent of action instead of a process inflected by character subtleties and every action thus taken is world-historical in importance. Its editors exiled strong emotion, anxiety, mortality, and other everyday complexities to the infamous imaginary stories of the fifties and early sixties.

This means of distinguishing Silver Age Marvel heroes from those of DC hits a snag, however, when we stack Batman’s origin up against that of Spider-Man or Daredevil. The emotional crux of all three is the Spidey triumvirate of all-too-human gut reactions: guilt, shame, and a desire for revenge. Indeed, the most obvious precedent for Daredevil’s origin is the first version of Batman’s origin story in DC’s Detective Comics #33 (December 1939), in which an anonymous street thug robs and shoots Bruce Wayne’s parents before young Bruce’s eyes. Batman’s origin sets underexamined precedents for many origin stories from Marvel’s Silver Age: dead parent, angry child, costume chosen to strike fear into what the Batman of 1939 touts as a “superstitious, cowardly lot” of evildoers, an initial state of helplessness igniting the desire to bulk up and do right. Not unlike the death of Jack Murdock in Daredevil’s case, Bruce Wayne’s extraordinary childhood loss forges Batman’s determination to avenge that loss on all criminals everywhere forever after and to transform himself into a steroidal, bat-eared Sherlock Holmes.


Miller brought the Punisher, then Marvel’s most homicidal lead character, into the comparison to develop a pet point about Daredevil’s singularity: his duty to the legal system, for better or worse. In 1981, when Richard Howell asked Miller point blank, “Is Daredevil Marvel’s Batman?” Miller answered that, no, “the Punisher is Marvel’s Batman.”33 Miller argued that, unlike the Batman, whose parents’ murder catalyzed every major life decision he made from then on, the death of Battlin’ Jack did not have as “big an effect on [Matt] as his father’s life, and he is his father’s son, being a natural born fighter.”34 The Punisher, by contrast, shares not only Batman’s desire to murdered loved ones but also his will to stop killers and drug dealers in their tracks. He exceeds Batman’s mission only in that he executes the bad guys on the spot.

The Punisher, Miller tells Howell, is “Batman without the impurities. The side of Batman that makes him spare the criminals is something that’s added on. It’s not part of the basic concept of his character. . . . Daredevil’s basic concept is very dissimilar. I see Daredevil as someone who operates on a basic motive of love for seeking out justice.”35

This was not to say, however, that the Punisher’s use of deadly force made him less heroic to Miller than Daredevil or Batman were. The Punisher is a hero, Miller says, but “I don’t consider him a role model. The main difference between him and Daredevil is Daredevil’s sense of responsibility to the law. The Punisher is an avenger; he’s Batman without the lies built in.”36

The “lies” Miller mentions refer in part to Batman’s vow never to kill; he wields a gun only two or three times in his entire first forty-five years in print, due in each case to editorial inattention. While the no-kill rule probably helped keep Batman out of trouble with parents worried over comics’ influence on young children, it exacerbated the tension between his desire for justice and his sense that the legal system is inadequate to the task of collaring mass murderers and rooting out corruption. If Batman’s prime motive is to champion justice in the legal sense, to quash anarchy and restore social order, then why does he have such contempt for the police and the legal system except insofar as they can help him achieve his goals?

[NK1988]

Continued...

Slowly and steadily, Miller was maneuvering out of Code territory into the world of frankly adult themes and pressing harder and harder on the contradictions on which a traditional concept of heroism depends. Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns steps even further into that world even as it sets up new “walls” to push against, namely, the postsixties culture of liberal humanism and so-called moral relativism. Miller’s Batman has all of Daredevil’s desire for justice but lacks any of DD’s concern for the civil rights of the alleged perpetrators; indeed, if Daredevil’s primary concern is with the victims, as Jim Shooter taught Miller, then Batman’s primary concern is with crushing the perps. And he gets called on it throughout The Dark Knight Returns by loads of liberal-sounding talking heads who claim that Two-Face and the Joker were actually turned into supervillains by Batman’s example, that even convicted homicidal maniacs deserve a second chance, and so forth.

What Miller has done is to take Daredevil’s line of legal thinking regarding the rights of criminal defendants, the same line that made him save Bullseye from being mashed on the subway tracks, and put it in the mouths of comic-relief characters such as the brain surgeons and psychologists who try to make Two-Face a productive member of society again. Miller’s Batman, by contrast, is an epic hero who refuses to mistake good for evil or vice versa, and he gets to define on his own what each term means. Miller’s Matt Murdock refuses such a metaphysical view of good and evil as all-or-nothing opposites on idealist grounds of a different sort. Matt believes that obscured innocence and hidden guilt have to be brought to light intellectually by finding proof and testing it, while Batman, who was at one time represented as a detective at heart, relies entirely on instinct when Miller has the reins.


To be fair, Miller presents the crudeness of Batman’s worldview as a serious problem and has even done so in the midst of a conflict that seemed to many Americans to draw the brightest possible line between the national Us and a foreign Them. DC had already published the first issue of Miller and the colorist Lynn Varley’s Dark Knight sequel, Batman: The Dark Knight Strikes Again!, when al-Qaeda operatives commandeered the planes that destroyed the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, an event that, Miller told Groth, made it impossible to leave Batman’s catchphrase about “striking terror into the hearts” of evildoers unannotated. As I’ve mentioned, Batman’s dialogue in The Dark Knight Strikes Again!—even the dialogue written before 9/11—makes the ugliness of his philosophy unmistakable: “Striking terror. Best part of the job.”

Groth even points out to Miller that one Batman speech, in which he refers to American capitalists and the federal government as “tyrants” and promises that he and his team will “strike like lightning and . . . melt into the night like ghosts,” sounds uncannily like “the point of view of radical Islamists” toward the United States.13 Miller doesn’t take such a crack at the obvious bad guys, however. Rather, he immediately pounces on the political reaction to the bad guys and how the George Bushes, Dick Cheneys, and John Ashcrofts of the world use crises like 9/11 for their own purposes. They stand in for the heroes we think we need in tumultuous times but slip the bounds of law at every turn—and Miller attempts to reduce our sympathy for them. This Miller, chastened by the 9/11 attacks but ever the shrewd critic of the media that deliver such disasters to us, digs into the fascistic politics of superhero comics, the news media’s role in sensationalizing global politics and inciting fanatical nationalism, and the real-world politics of vigilante justice all at once. He claims comics as a space to explore what “heroism” means—and not necessarily to him but rather to contemporary US culture. If the one who “saves” us from tyranny, even the tyranny of our own leaders, claims he has to act like a terrorist to do it, do we even want to be saved?

At the same time, both Miller’s comics and his interviews have long scrutinized the insolubility of the paradox—heroism is necessary to restore order, but it’s also authoritarian in its purest form, even fascistic—as a necessary evil. Batman seems the purer Miller “hero” in that Batman’s sense of justice is unencumbered by any complicating factors. He metes it out as he sees fit, on the basis of an Old Testament version of righteousness: you take my eye, I’ll take yours, score settled. This hero is no model for quotidian life, but as in such classical Hollywood Westerns as John Ford’s The Searchers (1956), the frontier will remain forever a chaotic wilderness without him. Only Ford’s half-wild hero Ethan Edwards (John Wayne) can save his niece from hostile Comanche in post–Civil War Texas, but his intense race hatred makes him a relic, unfit to cross the threshold into the orderly world of law, family, and home that his very wildness has helped bring to the western frontier.

The civic-minded Daredevil would be welcome in any such home, but for the later Miller especially, that taste for civilization and its rules reads as an “impurity,” a liberal-humanist streak within traditional superheroism that Miller once talked about strictly in terms of character type (it’s the difference between Batman and his “purer” doppelgänger, the Punisher) but that lately he describes as a moral fault, without any of the irony he mustered up a decade ago. There are signs dating back to 1986’s Batman: The Dark Knight Returns that this irony was ambivalent anyway, considering the extent to which Batman adopts the Western hero’s ruthless stance when taming the “frontier” of racialized criminals, right down to trading in the Batmobile for a horse.

Howe shrewdly characterizes Miller’s use of secondary characters as a kind of misdirection: “Daredevil’s dastardly supporting cast allowed Miller to have it both ways by making Daredevil’s barrage of kicks and punches look reasonable in comparison.”25 The bleak view on Miller’s career would paint it as a slow but momentous roll past such apologies for superheroic vigilantism and into the stark light of the Fixer’s gleeful, openly sadistic rampages, a development that Howe connects to Miller’s personal victimization by crime prior to plotting Batman: The Dark Knight Returns:

"As Miller’s career was taking off, the everyday violence in Manhattan at the time was taking its toll. “New York is no longer fit for human habitation,” Miller told one friend. After enduring three robberies in the course of a month, he and [the colorist and his then-girlfriend Lynn] Varley decided to escape to LA. While she went out west to search for a home, he stayed behind to set up more work to get them out of debt. He had a check in his pocket when, once again, someone tried to rob him. “Frank just went berserk on the guy,” Varley says. “He didn’t hit him or anything, he just went so berserk the guy backed off and ran away. We were on edge."26

Such anger floats to the surface of his work with a bang in 1986, the year I graduated from high school, with not one but two smash-hit stories about characters that didn’t belong to him: Batman: The Dark Knight Returns and Miller’s most lauded Daredevil story, Daredevil: Born Again, his 1986 return to the Daredevil series, penciled by David Mazzucchelli.

[NK1988]

Final relevant quotes:

Less than five years after Daredevil #191, however, Miller tries to reconstruct what he so thoroughly demolished. Batman: The Dark Knight Returns begins, cautiously, Miller’s long celebration of superhero fantasy as fantasy, for its own sake. Upon the publication of The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen in 1986, Miller told Groth twelve years later, they were “falsely believed to [represent] a revival of the superhero,” when to him, they “look[ed] more like the end of something than any kind of beginning.” He recounted joking with Alan Moore that Moore’s Watchmen was an autopsy of the already-dead superheroic dream, while The Dark Knight Returns was its “brass-band funeral.”29

If that’s so, then The Dark Knight Strikes Again! is its full-blown resurrection. Everything silly about men and women in tights that creators from Englehart, Gerber, and Starlin to Moore, Miller, and Grant Morrison had forced readers to confront has been boiled down to its essence once again. The figures have hands as big as their heads, women are all angles, and in general, Adams-style realism has finally, completely disintegrated in the name of returning to basic, fun, fantastical questions raised by more-than-human characters: what would it be like, exactly, to shrink oneself down to the size of a molecule? Miller’s introduction of the Atom, which begins with a primitive-looking man (the Atom himself) fighting off monsters many times his size, seems to have bounded out of a Twilight Zone–ish Ditko story from Amazing Adult Fantasy, where the twist always involves concealing some irregularity in the story’s world until the very end. He reduces all the characters to their most brutal political-epic elements: Green Arrow is a hippie/commie/anarchist court jester, Superman is even more a shill for the US government than he was in The Dark Knight Returns, Wonder Woman finally looks and sounds like the ancient god she was always suspected of being and has rough (though not explicit) sex with Superman in midair.

oday, to Miller, getting back to basics seems to mean revisiting not the original creators’ treatment of the characters but rather following his own instinct regarding their essences, which are effectively feral versions of themselves. Certainly one could interpret these caricatures as critical portraits drawn by taking the essence of each character and exposing its ugliness by exaggerating it, reducing the character to nothing but a machine for expressing that essence.


From this perspective, Batman is a villain, not a hero. But how can one deny that Batman is the intended hero of Batman: The Dark Knight Strikes Again! or of any other book that bears his name? Structurally at least, we’re rooting for him. Miller can make us question the rightness of “right” here, just as Hitchcock does, according to Robin Wood, by exposing that “bourgeois ‘normality’ is empty and unsatisfying, everything beyond it . . . terrifying.”31 When the law comes to put everything right at the end of a Hitchcock film, we’re left with a lurking sense that the good guys didn’t necessarily win, that Guy Haines of Strangers on a Train was a killer at heart rather than the innocent victim of Bruno Antony, and that Guy’s own struggle with anger and violence remains unresolved. The characters haven’t necessarily learned to respect one another’s rights, only how to avoid punishment by keeping their contempt for each other a secret. All that has changed by the end is that the playing pieces have been returned to their proper squares—which is to say, nothing has changed at all, and the audience is made to feel this in the form of a lurking anomie or even disgust.


There are flashes of that sort of nuance here and there in Miller’s twenty-first-century work, though you won’t find them in Sin City or 300, which both draw the differences between good and bad more starkly than even the Batman stories do. They provide little evidence of the kind of double reversal that Miller told Groth he was pulling in The Dark Knight Strikes Again!, in which we (might) suddenly realize that we’ve been tricked into identifying with a reprehensible idealism about crime and punishment.

Richard Rosenbaum has recently made the compelling case that Miller’s Batman, even the universally reviled “I’m the goddamn Batman” Batman of Miller and Jim Lee’s unfinished All-Star Batman and Robin miniseries (2005–8), resonates deeply with the contemporary conservative moral mind-set to the point where it manages to analyze that position better than just about anyone else, certainly better than most conservative pundits and politicians. What Miller recognizes, Rosenbaum argues, is that Batman is afraid, that he understands that only fear will cause his fellow do-gooders to make the hard choices necessary to protect their constituencies from havoc.

"Batman is afraid because he knows exactly what is out there in the world, he anticipates every possibility in order to prevent or counter it. Batman’s viewpoint is fundamentally a conservative one: Batman needs order and control; he wants to personally ensure that the only people who get hurt are the ones who deserve to... Miller, a conservative, understands this probably more than any other modern Batman writer, but he needs to exaggerate Batman’s neuroses more and more to make the point as we become more and more accustomed as a society to Batman, his motivations and his modus operandi: Batman’s foes are not alien warlords or evil interdimensional clones—they are people who take advantage of other people, people who cause the innocent masses to live in fear. His perspective on crime is fundamentally conservative because he doesn’t believe that going after “root causes” of crime is good enough; Bruce Wayne operates orphanages and donates beyond generously to charity, but in the final analysis Batman believes that what will stop criminals is only the fear of being caught and punished. He’s no “bleeding heart” like Superman or Green Lantern. He’s a “law and order” type. He knows that criminals are a cowardly, superstitious lot. He knows that criminals will respond to fear, because he responds to fear. Does that make you uncomfortable? Should it?"

Rosenbaum takes a generous leap of faith when he suggests that Miller is simply doing what Miller has always done, which is to give an intransigent point of view to a character and then follow it through to its logical conclusion, whether Miller agrees with that perspective or not. I’m just not sure whether I can attribute Rosenbaum’s reading of All-Star Batman and Robin to Miller’s brilliance as an artist so much as to a mounting intolerance that his stories express toward anyone who doesn’t fit his definition of the true hero. The ideal Miller hero rejects the rule of law, follows his own moral code, and disregards the rights of all others, up to and including their right to exist. What Miller considers heroic thinking at present looks a lot like narcissistic personality disorder to me, and that kills my appreciation for his recent work.

[the illustrious mr. kenway]

Its an interesting read. thanks for posting.

[Milton Fine]

The Punisher, Miller tells Howell, is “Batman without the impurities. The side of Batman that makes him spare the criminals is something that’s added on. It’s not part of the basic concept of his character. . . . Daredevil’s basic concept is very dissimilar. I see Daredevil as someone who operates on a basic motive of love for seeking out justice.”35

Hmmm disagree with this. I think of Punisher as a nutcase without morals not the more pure version of Batman.

[Scott Taylor]

The Punisher is psychologically damaged due to having everyone he loved taken from him and because of what he witnessed during wartime. Batman isn't like that. The only thing they really have in common is that they both seek justice. Almost everything else they do is different.

[NK1988]

The Punisher is psychologically damaged due to having everyone he loved taken from him and because of what he witnessed during wartime. Batman isn't like that. The only thing they really have in common is that they both seek justice. Almost everything else they do is different.

Batman isn't psychologically damaged due to watching his parents being murdered?

[XanatosVanBadass]

Hmmm disagree with this. I think of Punisher as a nutcase without morals not the more pure version of Batman.

Frank Miller has always seen Batman's one rule as a weakness.

[batnbreakfast]

I'd say Frank is a man who deals with trauma and vengeance as a grown-up who isn't a billionaire (not that he's right), while Bruce deals with it like a kid would do: the vow, scary costume, no killing etc. He managed to hold on to the idea of dealing with trauma he had as a kid first. Well I probably became a fan of Frank becuse I always loved Batman and Punisher is like an Elseworlds take on him.

[borntohula]

Good read. Thanks

I'm fond of the idea that each Dark Knight book has been very influenced and "powered" by Miller's own traumas in life. Getting mugged one time to many made him write DKR. 9/11 happened outside his window when he was working on DKSA. Scripting DKMR (with the help of Azzarello) while working his way back from a severe sickness.

[Scott Taylor]

Batman isn't psychologically damaged due to watching his parents being murdered?

He learned to cope with it by becoming Batman. In doing so, he has figured out a way to work through it and counter-act the damage.

[NK1988]

Good read. Thanks

I'm fond of the idea that each Dark Knight book has been very influenced and "powered" by Miller's own traumas in life. Getting mugged one time to many made him write DKR. 9/11 happened outside his window when he was working on DKSA. Scripting DKMR (with the help of Azzarello) while working his way back from a severe sickness.

Yeah it's all very interesting to me as well. Miller has a very unsavory reputation in comic book fandom nowadays, some of it no doubt deserved, but reading this book has helped humanize him for me. I'm very interested in reading all of his work now precisely because of that new-found empathy.

Also, it does seem like Master Race is one of DC's best sellers, in spite of everyone's supposed hatred for"modern Miller." I gotta pick that book up.

[Nite-Wing]

Hmmm disagree with this. I think of Punisher as a nutcase without morals not the more pure version of Batman.

Punisher began doing what he does because his loved ones were killed

Just like Batman began when Bruce's parents were killed in the alley.

The point Miller is making is that they are punishing criminals and acting out based on the wrong done to them whereas Daredevil loves Justice and genuinely cares about the victims

[sunofdarkchild]

Thought I'd throw this in. Chuck Dixon also spoke about his views on the similarities/differences between Batman and the Punisher.

In Batman/Punisher, the Joker pretty much articulates my take on the characters. Batman is the zealot driven by childhood trauma. Thus, a costume and all the toys and the sense of the romantic. He also has a code of fair play and strict rules of engagement. Punisher was traumatized as an adult, so he becomes an exterminating son-of-a-bitch using any weapon that will get the job done. He recognizes no rules.

Source: http://thebatmanuniverse.net/chuck-dixon/

This idea that Batman has a romanticized notion of crime-fighting I think has some merit. Even the titles he's called, the Dark Knight, and the Caped Crusader, have this romantic ring to them. The same goes for his no-killing code.