AV Club vs Frank Miller vs Occupy

The Onion's AV Club does quite a good job examining the weird world of Frank "Dark Knight" Miller's view on the Occupy movement:

Comic book crank Frank Milller’s political philosophy has become as angry—and jagged, and messy—as his drawing style pretty much since 9/11, when Miller first began turning his grim, nihilistic viewpoint into an all-out war against terrorism, then put his money where his mouth was and boldly joined the front lines by drawing superheroes punching Muslims right in the face. And yet, while Miller puts himself out there, on the wall, every single day to defend our freedoms by making hyper-violent wish-fulfillment cartoons, there’s a whole generation of people who are wasting their time on meaningless, masturbatory exercises.

For example, Occupy Wall Street, which Frank Miller recently excoriated in an exceedingly Frank Miller manner via a lengthy blog post titled “Anarchy,” which takes OWS protesters to task for not contributing in any meaningful or intelligent way to solving the nation's problems. Like killing Muslims, or at the very least, drawing a guy with a giant fist killing a Muslim. And Frank Miller has had it with this pointless movement that has yet to kill a single Muslim. He's had it, he says!

Frank Miller sure is pissed off about Occupy Wall Street

• [Amy L Sacks]

  Q: What’s the difference between Frank Miller and the average armchair “patriot” who posts to Yahoo or Fox News [sic] sites?

  A: About five paragraphs.  Oh, and Frank, to his credit, has heard of Spellchecker.

  [yawn]

• [teufelsdrochk]

  Frank Miller was a troll before trolling was cool.

• [Warren_Terra]

  This thread can use a link to David Brin’s excellent essay on Frank Miller’s perverse view of history and citizenship.

  Not to mention a link to Scott Eric Kaufman’s essay on Miller’s view of Batman as Islamophobic thug.

• [liquidstar]

  Actually wasn’t aware of Frank’s views until recently.  It was kind of cool to discover his recent blog post on OWS as I’ve disliked his work for years (specifically his draughtmanship;  the man can’t draw) – which is usually tantamount to blasphemy within  comic geekdom.  He seems to have made the crucial error of identifying with his character protagonists to the point of losing himself, something that is usually more of a danger within the acting profession.  Of course his real sin (heh) was destroying Will Eisner’s legendary Spirit character in his awful movie of the same name.  His blog post is a venomous rant lacking any facts or arguments – it amounts to “I hate (X)” and nothing more.

• [Rotwang]

  Having read The Dark Knight Returns years ago, Miller’s views came as no surprise to me: a hatred of hippies and the young, and a belief in a justice system based solely on punishment.

  Good and evil and no shades of gray.

  • [bibulb]

    A number of people keep referring to Miller as “the former liberal artist” who the left’s turned against, and I’ve been baffled as to how they came up with this. Did they read a different Frank Miller’s Dark Knight or other comics back in the ’80s?

    I mean, they were still great works, but they weren’t lefty propaganda by a long shot.

  • [Mister44]

    How can you lead your statement with “having read The Dark Knight Returns”, and end up with “a hatred of hippies and the young” and “Good and evil and no shades of gray. “?

    In the DNK the hippies and young (Green Arrow & Robin) triumph over the stodgy mindless patriots of Reagan and Superman. Batman is all shades of grey in that book. Superman is the one with the “with us or against us” attitude.

     As someone else mentioned, his Daredevil run was full of liberal story lines. So for people to paint this guy as Glen Beckian nuts is probably an over generalization. He may be old and pissy – and probably ill informed over who is participating in the OWS protests.

    That or he’s just in the 1% now and wants  the kids to get a job and make it like he did.

    ETA – he is a New Yorker, and so I find his distaste for Islam understandable. Probably something he needs to move on about or divert his energy elsewhere, but understandable.

    • [Guest]

      “he is a New Yorker, and so I find his distaste for Islam understandable.”

      understandable (agreeable) or understandable (in context but still revolting)?

    • [Brainspore]

      ETA – he is a New Yorker, and so I find his distaste for Islam understandable.

      Most New Yorkers I know haven’t spent the last decade fantasizing about beating the crap about of Muslims. I’m sure some have, but it’s hardly a defining trait of New Yorkers as a group. Hell, the locals seemed less riled up about that so-called “Ground Zero Mosque” than the Palin-worshipping folks from the Real America™.

  • [Sean McKibbon]

    I’d always kind of hoped he was doing that all tongue in cheek in the Dark Knight Returns. It works pretty well as satire, but now you are telling me it’s unintentional satire. Oddly the psychologist television interview in the Dark Knight comic seemed to me to be the template for the plot of Iron Man II, in which tony Stark draws villains toward himself and is basically the source of all conflict in the movie. This is also the basic theme of Marvel’s Ultimates series — that having super powers makes others fear, hate and attack you. Miller just can’t get away from unintentional irony. 

    • [semiotix]

      I’d always kind of hoped he was doing that all tongue in cheek in the Dark Knight Returns.

      What, are you dense? Are you retarded or something? Who the hell did you think Frank Miller was?

      ;)

• [Guest]

  I keep saying, Batman is the 1%

  • [Philip Hades]

     You’re thinking of Bruce Wayne.

    • [Moriarty]

      Batman and Bruce Wayne are both aristocratic ideals. Batman is the lone figure, accountable to no one but himself, who uses his vast personal resources to unilaterally enforce order on a domain that falls into chaos without him. Batman is like propaganda for a feudalistic society.

      • [Guest]

        What he said. like, exactly. 

• [Rob Beschizza]

  He stamped the brand of dumb on his own cause, handing himself to its enemies as a kind of golden straw man.

  • [querent]

    Nicely done.

• [zilberna]

  Seriously? What a f***wad.  I don’t know about anyone else, but I certainly won’t be putting any of my money in his pockets. 

• [PhosPhorious]

  I have to admit, I’m deeply unsettled by Miller’s descent into rabid Glenn Beckery.  The Daredevil of “Born Again” was a deeply moving portrayal of heroism, and his Kingpin was an incisive condemnation of exactly the criminal mixture of corporate interest and government corruption that OWS stands against.  At his best, Miller was truly great.

  Now he’s a lunatic, and part of my childhood has died.

  Major bummer.

• [akbar56]

  Bruce Wayne is hardly of the 1%.  Wayne Enterprises is a major employer of Gotham City. Wayne himself didn’t care about profit and directed the entire company to switch gears to rebuild Gotham after a major quake. The Wayne Foundation is a major philanthropic organization. Wayne Enterprises actually has LESS lobbyists in Washington than the Girl Scouts do.

  • [Guest]

    I’ve seen the movies. God gets him his coffee. He’s the 1%.

    • [akbar56]

      No, no…God runs his company after being promoted up from R and D. Jack Carter gets his coffee

  • [Spriggan_Prime]

    You do realize Batman is a fictional character right?

• [Brainspore]

  Doesn’t surprise me, Miller’s take on Batman never seemed big on the idea of grassroots political protest. Remember how liberally he used those high-caliber machine guns on the Batmobile in The Dark Knight Returns? (“Rubber bullets. Honest.”) He made the Oakland PD look like hall monitors.

• [Jim Nelson]

  I enjoyed Sin City (scratched my misanthrope itch perfectly) but it’s kind of interesting how that worldview has metastasized into a full-on Old Man Syndrome before his time. He’s never been about people power – always been hung up on the “one person to solve the problem” idea, which is why he did Batman so well. Unfortunately, he’s trying to apply that to the real world, and getting really angry when the real world refuses to provide him with a superhero that will fix everything.

  I mean, seriously, if you took most of the superheroes out of comics and put them in the real world, you would have some cross between fascists and utter madmen. Look at the few “real-world superheroes” that show up – they do precisely dick before getting crosswise of the law (provided they don’t get shot on general principle). We love our fantasy, but once it gets to real-world crime fighting, a good salary, streetlights, and after-school programs are gonna do a lot more to clean up a neighborhood than some caped psychotic getting into fights.

  But that would make his work… less important. And it seems that he has a bit of a messiah complex – that he is doing this for a Greater Purpose. At least he’s so inept at it he’s just going to putter off into obscurity.

  • [Sean McKibbon]

    I love comics and superheroes in comics. But it’s pure fantasy. I covered courts for years and one thing that stayed with me is how ridiculous all of the adventure stories involving fighting are. 

    In court (in Canada) the violent crime cases you get to see almost always involve: 

    people who know each other 
    people with some combo of disadvantages (monetary, educational, cognitive, psychiatric)
    often some combo of intoxicants, stress of some sort, fatigue

    The other common element is that the violent crime is very often completely unpredictable to law enforcement or a bystander with the power to intervene. You really would need a superpower to be in the right place at the right time.

    Fights that end up in court as “crime” are generally over very quick and usually aren’t fights per se, but ambushes, or bizarre flashes of rage or so unbalanced in terms of who is fighting who that they bear no resemblance to what you see in comics or movies.

    Evenly matched fights that do happen tend to not end up in court because they are consensual. They happen in a hockey game or a boxing ring or maybe on the street, but with little in the way of injuries and generally the combatants going their separate ways.

    Police and courts are very reactive, because they don’t have super powers and can’t be right at the right place at the right time except by chance.

    If you could have a superhero who could do that they likely  would spend most of their time telling people “Hey buddy go home and get some sleep.” Or offering marriage counselling. Or teaching people to read. Or getting their patients the exact right dosage of psychoactive medicine.

    Which is what we all do every day in our own ways trying to make life work. Superpowers, aside from the ability to predict the future, are basically useless.

• [Brainspore]

  This is my favorite part of Miller’s screed:

  “In the name of decency, go home to your parents, you losers. Go back to your mommas’ basements and play with your Lords Of Warcraft,” he wrote.

  Big words coming from a man who DRAWS COMIC BOOKS for a living.

  • [Martijn]

    I read that as “Go back to your mommas’ basements and read more (of my) comic books.”

• [Maggie Koerth-Baker]

  In conclusion: Whores whores whores whores whores. 

• [Oliver Schmieding]

  al quaeda blah, blah, rant? get up and kill some desert commie blah blah? 
  naaaah, come on, dude….
  imagine the headaches on this one when, some day in the not too distant future,he’s going to realize that the puppets he’s using to project all his hatred really are nothing but puppets – and that the government of the “home of the righteous vigilante” was pulling wool over the eyes of its citizens. *heh*  which will serve him right, by the way – it seems that with great drawing power there does NOT come great ethical insight.

• [estragon_nyc]

  Miller isn’t a New Yorker.  He was born in Maryland and raised in Vermont.  He’s lived in New York a couple of times, yes, and in Los Angeles, and a few other places as well.  Don’t blame him on New York!  His gutless cowardice and ranting bigotry are entirely his own choice.

• [Halloween_Jack]

  I’ve written about this a couple of other places, so I’ll just say that Miller is just sad. He’s not as bad as Dave Sim, who went to truly Herculean lengths to justify his misogyny and homophobia, but that’s the very definition of damning with faint praise. At least this should put a cork in the people who thought that Miller was just taking the piss when he’d edge into this sort of territory.

• [Joe Maynard]

  I always found his work juvenile, violent, mean-spirited, and shallow. It doesn’t surprise me at all to find that his political views have similar characteristics… -shrug-

• [Traska]

  (Replying to Maggie)

  Leo and Aeris give you a gold star.

• [BarBarSeven]

  Outside of the pitch perfect timing of Dark Knight Returns, he’s a hack writer.  And in the great scheme of things, the Dark Knight Returns might have kick-started the dying comics industry back in the 1980s, but in the big picture he spurred the destruction of “fun” in comics. It’s all dark and dour now and we all have to thank him for being on the leading edge of that grey-hued dystopian wave of crap.

  I say the next comic/sci-fi revival will have to be optimistic to counteract loons like him.

  • [Halloween_Jack]

    I’d make a case for both Daredevil: Born Again and Batman: Year One (the latter had a big influence on Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins) as being better than TDKR; they’re much cleaner and tighter stories. (Perhaps not coincidentally, they’re also both drawn by David Mazzucchelli, who’s since become a respected artist in his own right.) Also, Alan Moore has publicly taken partial responsibility for the so-called “Dark Age” of comics, although again, his Watchmen holds up much better than TDKR.

• [bjacques]

  That screed of his marks him out as the worst of armchair patriots, the ones who crapped their pants on 9/11 and chucking the liberalism they formerly professed in order to cheer on neocons making “tough” decisions like invading Iraq or–like Alan Dershowitz and Tony Blair– countenance kidnapping and torture as policy. It’s the Brown Badge of Courage, and if your own underwear, go and wear a white feather while you’re at it.

  But while Miller and his ilk have stood watch at their desks keeping the West from coming under sharia law, OWS are out in the streets pointing out that the US and UK have been under shareholder law for decades, with the EU soon to follow.

• [ripley]

  the idea that New Yorkers have some particular reason to hate Islam is pretty weak.

  Most actual New Yorkers are too smart to fall for some weird jingoistic Islamophobe crap that was shoved on us by the Bush crowd. Something about growing up (or living for years) in a multicultural city where you can’t avoid people from all backgrounds without serious effort… also lots of New Yorkers are Muslim (some even worked in the towers, inside of which there was a freaking MUSLIM PRAYER ROOM – check what I said again about a multicultural city). Government and police targeting of Muslims is not something that most New Yorkers have much stake in.

  Also Miller is not a New Yorker. Hey, maybe that explains it!

• [angusm]

  @boingboing-a5f4dff89e47e074fc5530989e1a4d39:disqus wrote: Batman is the lone figure, accountable to no one but himself, who uses his vast personal resources to unilaterally enforce order on a domain that falls into chaos without him.

  Now I really want to write an Ayn Rand-goes-to-Gotham pastiche called “Batman Shrugged” but I may be too late. I would bet that there’s already been at least one superhero storyline in which a superhero decides to stop fighting crime until the ungrateful peasants beg him to come back.

  • [Felton / Moderator]

    Interestingly, Miller actually did a version of Atlas Shrugged, sort of.

• [negativepotential]

  Miller’s comic work was always lower-middlebrow fare, even the “critically acclaimed” stuff. 

  It’s the sort of thing adolescent boys read and think they’re reading something really mature.  Material like TDKR is what we *thought* mature comics should be when we were all 10.

  On the spectrum of comics, there are legitimate literary comics (Crumb, Pekar, Clowes, Spiegelman) or comics made specifically for children, that have the quality and sense of wonder of great children’s literature (Carl Barks, Ditko and Kirby superhero comics). 

  But the whole 1980s trend of “grim and gritty” comics spearheaded by Miller et al. — and anticipated in some sense by the histrionic soap-opera interactions of Chris Claremont’s X-Men of the 70s and 80s — has done much to set back the cause of comics as art, because it is the dominant genre of comic fandom, crowding out both legitimate art comics and legitimate children’s comics.  Instead, we have comics that exhibit all the depth and seriousness of a fan-cult TV series scripted by Joss Whedon.

  So really, the maturity of Frank Miller’s political commitments matches that of his art. 

  • [tristan eldritch]

    “On the spectrum of comics, there are legitimate literary comics (Crumb, Pekar, Clowes, Spiegelman) or comics made specifically for children, that have the quality and sense of wonder of great children’s literature (Carl Barks, Ditko and Kirby superhero comics)”.

    Wow, spoken like somebody who clearly neither likes nor understands comics.

    • [Steve Taylor]

      > spoken like somebody who clearly neither likes nor understands comics.

      WTF? Sure, disagree with him all you want, but how does that sound like someone who doesn’t like or understand comics? Is it the lack of mention of your favorite superhero comic?

      • [tristan eldritch]

        It sounds like somebody who doesn’t like comics because the comment clearly implies that comics are only legitimate and have value in so far as they resemble print literature ( “legitimate literary comics” “have the quality and wonder of great children’s literature”) so this is someone who clearly doesn’t have any respect or fondness for comics as a medium in their own right, but only in far as they remind he/she of the supposedly superior medium of literature.  Look, I’m not trolling, but come on.  Kirby and Ditko were great because they fully exploited the potential of a new, kinetic, painterly, cinematic medium, not because they evoke children’s books (which I’m not even sure they do, on any level.)  The comment implies that comics are divided between legitimate, literary comics, about stuffs like the Holocaust and real life, and quaint stuff for children.  That’s a whole heap of bullshit.  IMO.

• [96mouchoirs]

  Its a call for attention/readership… Frank’s Holy Terror sales are slumping (maybe he should have put the batman horns back on the hero)… and plus his mom is on her deathbed right now.  When you are an objectivist, as frank is, this is how you react… like a babe.

• [m z]

  If you read up on Legendary Productions…you’ll see why Miller is so opposed to OWS. Basically just  defending his investors…

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legendary_Pictures

  BOYCOTT LEGENDARY & FRANK MILLER

  *thanks Mr.44

  • [Mister44]

    You meant boycott, right?

• [Teller]

  Well, he got that off his chest.

• [Lurking_Grue]

  I think Miller’s Batman and Robin is a work of comedic genius.

  http://www.i-mockery.com/comics/longbox7/

  That is assuming he meant it as comedy. 

• [negativepotential]

  Tristan, your response to my statement has some odd reasoning.  If I profess my love for Hitchcock and Welles, but my absolute disdain for Michael Bay, does that mean I also don’t love cinema?

  Loving a medium doesn’t imply loving all the work done in that medium.  The vast majority of work in any medium is either blah, or just crap.  Truly great works are rare.

  What makes Clowes and Spiegelman great is not that they remind me of print literature, it’s because they’re masters of the medium in a formal sense, and they have some truly great content to express in that medium.

  And it’s weird how you regard my comparison of Ditko and Kirby to children’s literature as some kind of diss.  Some children’s books are masterpieces.

  I think you completely missed by broader point, which was that the whole 1980s trend of trying to make the superhero genre “grim and gritty” and “adult” just led to some painfully embarrassing middlebrow work.  At the worst end of the spectrum is the paper-thin histrionics of Claremont’s X-Men.  At the slightly better end of the spectrum, you have bright guys like Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, and Grant Morrison basically slumming by ostentatiously dropping in references to their own erudition in what are otherwise paint-by-numbers spandex fantasy stories.  Alan Moore had the integrity to leave the superhero genre and concentrate on great work like From Hell.  Gaiman went on to become a fantasy writer, but Morrison continues to slum by phoning-it-in to the fanboy demographic.

  • [tristan eldritch]

    I don’t think your cinematic analogy is not quite apt.  Both your posts express a strong disdain for superhero comics as an entire genre.  So, it’s not the same as saying I don’t like Michael Bay because he’s a crappy asshole (which of course he is), what you’re saying is more akin (metaphorically) to saying I don’t like action movies full-stop, they’re adolescent, they’re dumb, they’re not intelligent.  To which I would be saying what about Sergio Leone, what about Peckinpah, what about Michael Mann, action movies can brilliantly utilize the language and grammar that is distinct to cinema, as opposed to that which is distinct to novels, or plays, or whatever.  To which you would respond (to tortuously continue the analogy) No, I don’t really respect cinematic language on its own terms, in its purest forms, I prefer it when it reminds me of proper, legitimate art-forms like novels, plays, and so on.

    Here is where I guess our opinions diverge completely.  I think superheros are the quintessential comic book genre.  They are the great, individual mythological invention that comic books created by themselves, which didn’t appear in any other medium prior to comics.  There is something about them which only really works in the medium of comics – they are based around the power of visual iconography and kinetic motion that comic story-telling particularly facilitates. 

    The reason I regarded the children literature comparison as a diss was not because I don’t respect children’s literature, but because what Ditko and Kirby were doing had nothing to do with children’s literature.  First of all, Marvel Comics in the sixties weren’t made specifically for children – they were read by teenagers, college students, and hippy visionaries like Ken Kesey.  These comic books were a distinct thing – they were Greek gods and monsters reborn in surreal modern Pop Art guise sagas – I don’t really see any connection with children literature at all.  What exactly did you have in mind?

    I didn’t care for the grim and gritty phase either.  But Chris Clearmont’s run on the X-Men had very little to do with that – apart from as a wholly unintentional precursor – and the Dark Phoenix Saga was probably the best run of mainstream comics since Kirby’s cosmic heyday.  (Alan Moore and Grant Morrison certainly admired it.)  Of the three writers you mention at the better end of the spectrum, Morrison has the greatest understanding and respect for comic books as distinct pop art medium in their own right, with their own language and conventions.   I think Alan Moore is a total dude, but have you read Watchmen lately?  The dialogue is as wooden as Long John Silver pissing against an oak tree.  I don’t know too much about Gaiman’s stuff.