Immutable Daredevil and the (Possibly Tragically Delayed) Frank Miller Ascendency

Walking out of an afternoon showing of Wall-E last weekend, I noticed some big cardboard movie displays advertising The Spirit, a forthcoming movie based on the classic Will Eisner comic book series, to be written and directed by Frank Miller. We're clearly living in a Frank Miller heyday, and it's been a long time coming. The comics artist and writer burst into prominence in the early 1980s with a seminal run on Daredevil before creating in 1986 what remains his most famous and influential work: Batman: The Dark Knight Returns. After breaking with mainstream comics publishers over his objections to industry self-censorship, Miller spent most of the 1990s creating a gritty crime series for Dark Horse Comics called Sin City along with a personal project rooted in a childhood obsession with Spartan warriors, called 300. The latter was, of course, adapted into a phenomenally successful and profitable 2007 film of the same name, grossing close to half a billion dollars worldwide on a $60 million budget. Coming on the heels of Robert Rodriguez's successful 2005 Sin City adaptation ($158 million gross, $40 million budget), it's little wonder that Hollywood is suddenly green-lighting all things Miller. 

In some ways, it's strange that it took so long. Miller's approach to comics has always been intensely and purposefully cinematic; Sin City is pure film noir on paper and even the early Daredevil work featured moody establishing views and rigorous visual coherence. Rather than feature his heroes in exaggerated comic-bookish poses, Miller carefully planned story sequences shot by shot. I bought Daredevil #181 the day it was published, and the double-sized story of Bullseye murdering Daredevil's nemesis/ex-lover Elektra, only to be defeated by Daredevil in an epic battle that raged across the rooftops of Hell's Kitchen, still stands as one of the greatest single comic book issues ever made, and defined the Daredevil character in perpetuity.* 

Much of that material was incorporated into the 2003 Daredevil move adaptation. Yet that movie was mediocre at best, and in retrospect the reason is clear: the film-makers used Miller's stories and characters but failed to take advantage of his single greatest strength: his genius visual style. Rodriguez and 300 director Zach Snyder, by contrast, translated Miller's comics nearly shot for shot, essentially using the panels as a storyboard, and the results speak for themselves. After years toiling in the relative obscurity of comics (and several failed attempts at the movies, see Robocop 2 & 3 (actually, don't)) Miller is finally getting the resources and recognition he deserves.

And yet...it must be said: Frank Miller hasn't done anything good in years. Ten years, to be precise--the 300 mini-series was released in 1998. Looking back, it was clearly his artistic apex, and the resulting fall has been steep. His post-That Yellow Bastard efforts on Sin City were repetitive. He spent years working on a Dark Knight sequel that I frankly can't remember a panel of. And for the the last three years he's been slowly releasing new issues of All-Star Batman and Robin the Boy Wonder, pencilled by Jim Lee. It's shockingly bad. So much so that I seriously wonder whether Miller has suffered some kind of mental break/total artistic collapse; it might be the worst high-profile comic I've ever read. It's badness is all the more painful in contrast to Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely's simultaneously-released Eisner Award-winning All-Star Superman, which will probably go down as one of the ten or so greatest Superman stories ever told, and, even worse, Miller's previous re-conception of Batman's early years, the four-part 1987 Batman: Year One, illustrated by David Mazzucchelli, which in some ways has been just as influential as The Dark Knight (its traces are all over the new Christopher Nolan Batman films). 

There's still some great stuff from Miller's earlier years to tap: another Sin City adaptation is on the way, and someone really ought to make a movie out of the Martha Washington sci-fi series he did with Dave Gibbons. For all its flaws, Ronin could be terrific in the right hands. Heck, even an adaptation of Elektra: Assassin,  goofy and probably unfilmable though it is, would have been way better than the painfully inept cheap-o Jennifer Garner flick of which the less is said the better. 

But to be honest I'm worried that Miller's descent into over-stylization and self-parody, both visually and verbally, is too deep to reverse, and that he'll end up crashing and burning at the very moment when decades of influential work are finally bringing him fame and fortune.

*One of the interesting things about superhero comic books is the total lack of character development in the conventional sense. Because the iconic characters need to last forever for economic reasons, they can't ever change in any significant way. They have beginnings, but never end. As a result, the artistic challenge for the comics superhero creator is less to tell a story than define a situation, a particular combination of character circumstances and external environment within which other writers and artists can explore essential themes. 

Some characters get there right out of the box--the unchallenged big three, Superman, Spider-man and Batman, haven't changed in any truly significant manner since their very first issues. Each was perfect in its own way, and it's not a coincidence that those characters remain vital decades later (and have spawned the most successful movie franchises). Others take longer--the X-Men didn't become the X-Men we know today until Chris Claremont and John Byrne took over the book around the same time that Miller made Daredevil his own.  The Punisher was created in 1974 and was a reliably popular if second-tier anti-hero for years afterward, but there's simply no imagining any other version of the character now that Garth Ennis is finishing up his MAX run and accompanying pre- and postscripts.

And some never get there. As durable and mildly famous as she is, there's never really been a definitive run on Wonder Woman, a fact that Joss Whedon lamented when he was (unsuccessfully) trying to adapt the character for film. The iconic Avengers story turned out to be The Ultimates, which reached its heights even as the Avengers themselves were being disassembled. History suggests that it's actually really difficult to achieve that combination of compelling origin, motivation, personality, powers and milieu that all the great characters have. 

The interesting thing is that once a superhero character is truly defined, it exerts a gravitational force on all future stories that is all but insurmountable. Superman is who he is: alien, noble, decent, powerful, incorruptible, always alone. There are always new ways to explore those qualities--see All-Star Superman, it's really good--but there's no way to change them. That means that while the stories themselves can be moving and gratifying in all the ways good stories are, they rarely have any permanent significance vis a vis the characters themselves. You can, for example, read Miller's Daredevil, which wrapped up in 1984, put it down and then start reading Brian Michael Bendis' Daredevil, which began in 2001, and lose virtually nothing for having missed the hundreds of issues published in between. Bendis isn't continuing the Daredevil story; he's retelling the Miller-defined Daredevil myth. That's why there are few things more absurd than a comics fan complaining about some inconsistency in "continuity" on a major hero; the whole idea of a linear, irreversible chain of time and causality runs counter to the essential logic of the characters and the industry. It's also why the large majority of the best superhero comics published in the last decade came when writers and artists were given the chance to step away from the so-called "regular" books and re-tell the stories with total freedom, i.e. the Ultimate and All-Star lines at Marvel and DC respectively or thinly disguised facsimiles like Alan Moore's Supreme, Kurt Busiek's Astro City, etc.