Frank Miller: Turning weird men in tights into Modern Mythology (interview).

When Frank Miller talks about comics, he does not sound like a man discussing disposable entertainment involving brightly dressed people punching one another through walls. He sounds more like an archaeologist who has discovered that the gods of Olympus were wearing capes underneath their robes.

In this wide-ranging interview with James Altucher, Miller discusses storytelling, mythology, creative determination and the long campaign to persuade the world that comic books could occasionally address subjects more complicated than whether Superman could lift a particularly heavy bus.

Miller’s great contribution to comics was not simply making them darker, although he certainly turned down the lights and then removed the bulb for safekeeping. His real achievement was treating their apparently preposterous characters with complete seriousness. Batman was no longer merely a millionaire detective with an unusual approach to leisurewear. He became an elemental figure driven by trauma, fury and an almost industrial need for control.

For Miller, Batman is not obsessed. He is possessed.

The distinction matters. An obsession might be cured by therapy, medication or taking up model railways. Possession suggests something ancient has climbed inside Bruce Wayne and begun operating the controls. The murder of his parents leaves Batman with a wound that can never heal. As a powerless child, he watched chaos destroy his world. As an adult, he responds by attempting to control absolutely everything, including Gotham City, his own emotions and presumably the precise position of every ornamental cushion in Wayne Manor.

Miller argues that Bruce Wayne is actually the disguise. The genial billionaire philanthropist is the invented character, while Batman is the authentic personality underneath. Bruce Wayne puts on a dinner jacket and pretends to be normal. Batman puts on pointed ears and finally relaxes.

This approach reached its most influential expression in The Dark Knight Returns, the 1986 work that divided superhero comics into a before and an after. Miller wanted to drag the medium from what he calls its “eternal childhood” and push it towards adolescence and adulthood. It went reluctantly, complaining about bedtime and demanding to know why all the cheerful primary colours had vanished.

The interview also provides Miller’s pocket guide to superhero mythology. The greatest characters, he suggests, can be reduced to a central idea. Superman is hope. Batman is vengeance, justice or sheer human effort. Spider-Man is guilt, wearing a mask and trying desperately not to miss another appointment.

Superman descends from the heavens as a creature of light. Batman rises from beneath the city, apparently having frightened several sewer engineers on the way up. One offers reassurance. The other promises that whoever stole your bicycle will shortly reconsider every decision they have made since infancy.

Miller believes these characters endure because they have escaped their original stories and become myths. Their costumes, origins and supporting casts may change, but the central emotional engine remains recognisable. They are modern gods built from ink, newsprint and licensing agreements.

There is also a practical reason so many heroes are orphans. Parents, Miller observes, are a problem for storytellers. They worry. They impose curfews. They ask where you have been and why the family car is embedded in a laboratory wall. Luke Skywalker, Peter Parker and Bruce Wayne can rush into danger because there is nobody at home telling them to put on a coat.

Miller’s storytelling philosophy is equally direct. Writing and drawing are useful skills, but comics require something else: the ability to create energy through images placed in sequence. A story should work through the shapes and arrangement of its panels before the dialogue has done any heavy lifting.

A huge Batman spread tells the reader that Batman has become immense within that moment. A cramped procession of narrow panels can accelerate time, restrict movement or make the reader feel trapped. The page is not merely a container for the story. It is part of the machinery.

Miller places himself within what he calls a tradition of revolution. Jack Kirby broke open the page with spectacular double-page images. Neal Adams allowed figures and movement to burst through panel borders. Each generation inherits the wreckage of the previous generation’s rules, then decides which remaining walls deserve a determined kicking.

This does not mean breaking conventions merely to demonstrate that one owns a hammer. Miller’s innovations serve the narrative. The panel boundary, page layout and visual rhythm should all bend towards the needs of the story. When the rules stop helping, they become scenery waiting to be demolished.

His work has also been fuelled by an enthusiastic collision of genres. On Daredevil, Miller mixed street crime, martial-arts cinema, Japanese samurai traditions and Greek tragedy. Elektra did not arrive from a neat marketing calculation. She emerged from several cultural streams meeting at speed without exchanging insurance details.

Miller also brought the New York he knew into Daredevil. Hell’s Kitchen became more than a convenient name printed beneath an establishing shot. It acquired grime, menace and the uneasy feeling that somebody behind you had just crossed the road for no innocent reason. Daredevil stopped spending quite so much time battling space aliens and concentrated on criminals who might plausibly know where he lived.

With Ronin, Miller combined the influence of Lone Wolf and Cub with the European science-fiction imagery of Jean Giraud, better known as Moebius. This willingness to splice distant traditions together became central to his work. Purity is all very well for bottled water. Stories tend to become more interesting after several incompatible ideas have been locked in the same room.

Perhaps the most useful part of the interview concerns determination. Miller is suspicious of the romantic idea that talent descends upon the chosen few in a golden beam. He describes his early drawing as poor and his writing as rudimentary. What carried him forward was stamina and the absence of any sensible alternative.

There was no Plan B.

This is not necessarily financial advice. It is, however, an explanation of why some creators survive the years when their ambition is considerably more impressive than their work. Miller regards creativity as a test of wills. You return after rejection, criticism and professional disappointment. Then you return again, partly because you are determined and partly because you have foolishly failed to train for accountancy.

He draws an important distinction between egoism and egotism. Egoism gives an artist the strength to protect an idea, withstand criticism and refuse to have an original concept politely removed by a corporate gatekeeper. Egotism convinces the inexperienced artist that there is nothing left to learn, usually shortly before everybody stops returning their telephone calls.

Miller’s advice to new creators is pleasingly contrary. Do not chase the biggest success in the marketplace. Do not immediately attempt to become the next X-Men. Find the loser instead. Look for the neglected character, failed title or badly executed idea. Work out why it failed, then do it properly.

There is liberation in working on something nobody important currently values. Expectations are lower, executives are looking elsewhere and the artist has room to smuggle in dangerous ideas. Miller’s own career repeatedly demonstrates that the neglected corners of popular culture are often where tomorrow’s mythology is hiding.

He remains wary of the modern comics industry’s corporate nervousness. Vast media conglomerates have produced more managers, more approvals and more people whose principal creative contribution is asking whether the hero could be made slightly more suitable for a global lifestyle brand. Bold work becomes harder when every decision must survive a committee armed with audience data and reusable water bottles.

Yet Miller remains optimistic. Comics have been pronounced dead with impressive regularity, surviving moral panics, collapsing distribution systems, cultural revolutions and the occasional film in which nobody involved appears to have read the source material. The medium adapts because creators keep discovering new things to do with pictures arranged on pages.

His latest work, Push the Wall, returns to the central idea running through this conversation. Creativity is not a mysterious vapour inhaled by naturally gifted people. It is machinery. It is built from craft, discipline, influences, failures and the willingness to continue when good sense has already left the building.

Here at SFcrowsnest, we are naturally sympathetic to anybody who believes that strange stories should be treated seriously, even when their protagonists wear their underpants in a highly visible location. Frank Miller’s lesson is not simply that artists should break rules. It is that they must first understand what the rules are doing, decide when they have become useless and then break precisely the right one. Preferably across two pages, with Batman looming above the wreckage.