StevieStitches on DeviantArthttps://www.deviantart.com/steviestitches/art/Frank-Miller-s-Political-Satire-of-Republicans-504086921StevieStitches

Deviation Actions

StevieStitches's avatar

Frank Miller's Political Satire of Republicans

Published:
2.5K Views

Description

This is a collage tribute to Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Strikes Again (2001-2002) and Holy Terror featuring political satire of conservative talk radio host Don Imus and Republican Vice President Dick Cheney and Republican President George W Bush, and a rebuttal to ignorant accusations that Frank Miller is a right-wing Republican. Those accusations began in the '80s, due to the Clint Eastwood Dirty Harry influences on Frank Miller's Daredevil and Batman writing. It's reported in The Comics Journal #112 (1986) that on July 5th 1986 during a debate with Gary Groth at the Dallas Fantasy Fair, Frank Miller defended Batman: The Dark Knight Returns from accusations that it was neoconservative. Frank Miller expanded that he doesn't see Batman as a right-winger. "I think he's very much a radical," he said. "I don't quite understand how the idea of a vigilante is considered a right-wing idea to begin with. It's not exactly law and order." Miller said that the series was written to express not a political view, but rather an emotional one. He admitted taking "shots" at the "pretenses and bullshit that both right-and-left-wing people are guilty of." Frank Miller called Reagan "a horrible president."

Of his politics Frank Miller said in 2014, “All I can say is they are my own and they don’t really fit into any neat category.”
www.nytimes.com/2014/08/17/mov…
Frank Miller said about Trump, "You can't come up with a greater buffoon than Donald Trump. The fact that he thinks he can be President of the United States is one the best jokes I've read in a long time. At least I hope it's a joke."
www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat…
Frank Miller said about Clinton: "There is only one candidate and I am voting for her"
twitter.com/FrankMillerInk/sta…

Frank Miller said about the Republican preachers in The Comics Journal #118 (1987), "I do have a terrible problem with Ed Meese and Jerry Falwell and all the rest of them. I believe they're genuinely evil people. I do believe that you have to make your decisions. And when you see something evil, you've got to identify it as such. These are evil, evil people, and I believe that as a force in our country they should be fought tooth and nail wherever they appear. They want to take my freedoms away from me. They couldn't be more clearly the bigots and would-be dictators they that they are if they wore Ku Klux Klan robes. They stand against art and science and everything else that I can think of that makes humanity worth it's place on the planet. Ed Meese and the evangelists and everybody else were working to dismantle the constitution, I take it personally, because I've got a vested interest in having it there. One of the efforts coming from the liberal camp towards censorship right now are based on the attempts by liberals to play parents to all of us. In particular Women Against Pornography. Which is clearly a pro-censorship organization. It brought about one of the strangest coalitions in politics. When you find Jim Bakker and feminists on the same side of an argument, it's a very rare thing to witness. But censorship appeals to special interest groups. And we really live in a time when almost every political group has become a lobby group." 

Frank Miller said in 2001 about The Dark Knight Strikes Again, "I have the opportunity to show heroism from different points of view, politically and otherwise. With Ollie Queen I have a left-wing radical. With Bruce Wayne, if anything, he's a bit of an idealistic anarchist. I'm gonna use The Question, and it's gonna be Steve Ditko's Question. No Denny O'Neil/Alan Moore- I'll-use-this-guy's-own-creation-against-him approach here. I want to have Ditko's Ayn Randian point of view as part of my story. Meanwhile, on the Establishment side, I'll have Superman."  
www.comicbookresources.com/?pa…

Frank Miller said about The Dark Knight Strikes Again, both Republican George W Bush and Democrat Al Gore in Frank Miller: The Comics Journal Library (2003), "Both candidates came across to me like computer-generated images. Their debates were the most bizarre I’ve ever witnessed. And I remember watching one of them thinking that I was expecting one of them to digitize, to pixilate in front of me. That’s where that gag came from. So I came up with a generic president who was named after the president in a truly horrific old DC comic called Prez (Prez: First Teen President (1973))."

Frank Miller said about Republican President George W Bush in Frank Miller: The Comics Journal Library (2003), "Somewhere during the whole election fiasco, people were calling it a coup. All I could think was, 'No. It’s a hostile takeover.' So as much as a bromide as it is, there had to be a corporate villain here, so that the president really was just a puppet. Come on– they’ve got Lex Luthor, why not?"

Frank Miller said about Republican John Ashcroft in Frank Miller: The Comics Journal Library (2003), "Look, we’ve got John Ashcroft as attorney general. You can’t make this shit up. John Ashcroft shows up. Excuse me. This guy’s the attorney general? I mean, he’s straight from central casting." 4thletter.net/2009/04/sons-of-…

Frank Miller said about Republican President George W Bush in Frank Miller: The Comics Journal Library (2003), "What I couldn't stand was that I was all of a sudden hearing the president talk about a crusade. That's medieval thinking. And I don't think that you can answer religious fundamentalism with the same thing and get a good result. I'm an atheist." 

Frank Miller said about political satire at the 2006 WonderCon comic book convention, "As far as the role of political satire and parody in comics, it seemed to me that we were just missing a big bed. Every time I opened a newspaper, unless it was the New York Times, you see an editorial cartoon, and could see how comics could play against current moments and current issues. I felt that we should be in the middle of that game with all the rest. Everybody else talks politics, why can’t we? I composed Dark Knight Returns when Ronald Reagan was president, and very silly things seemed to be happening, and I wanted to satirize them, but they just kept topping me. So I played the media as a Greek chorus, but as a Greek chorus, I don’t know…on drugs or something. They were constantly…jumping ahead a bit…Monica Lewinsky? We have people out to slaughter us, and we’re talking about Monica Lewinsky? So, I wanted to play the media very sarcastically and to show how, particularly television, only hits the surface of the issue, and only gives you issues focused on an hourly, or daily basis, not the in-depth understanding that events should have – especially in a historical context." convergingtoacenter.blogspot.c…

Frank Miller said on the documentary Masterpiece: Frank Miller's Batman: The Dark Knight Returns (2013), "I contrasted Batman with the utter silliness of the world. I'm a TV news junkie, and to me, the world is a pretty funny place on TV. To have Batman in that world would cause many reactions, that frankly, I thought were funny. A lot of Dark Knight was done with me laughing out loud. I mean, a psychologist wearing a button saying, 'Hey, I'm ok.' That kind of thing."

Image size
1302x1901px 554.66 KB
© 2015 - 2024 StevieStitches
Comments3
Join the community to add your comment. Already a deviant? Log In
ghffff's avatar
i didn't know frank liked hilary. Most people said he loved trump