Deviation Actions
Description
Frank Miller's had the story idea for a third Dark Knight for years now. In 2009 Frank Miller said on moebiusgraphics.com, "I've got a whopper of a Superman story I'd love to tell--a third DK, in fact, and it'd involve Wonder Woman and Lara--but I think I've already pushed DC to their limit. These are multibillion-dollar franchises, after all--they have to protect them from pirates like me.
But who knows? ANYTHING can happen.
FM"
Looks like it can. www.bleedingcool.com/2014/12/f…
ComicBookResources: "I think Dark Knight Strikes Again was a tremendous departure from Dark Knight Returns…"
Frank Miller: "Damn straight." convergingtoacenter.blogspot.c…
Frank Miller said back in November 1981, "If I am to have a long and very successful career, I hope that it is like Bob Dylan’s. He had a very successful act for years, then he decided he wanted to do something else and when he played his new music, he was booed off the stage for it. But it didn’t stop him." grantland.com/features/frank-m…
Frank Miller's friend and editor Bob Schreck revealed, "With almost every project with Frank, when we started The Dark Knight Strikes Again, first thing Frank did when he called me, first thing he said was, 'Hey, Schreck, wanna go on a suicide run?' Why? Because he knew that they wanted The Dark Knight Returns (repeated), and no matter what he did they were not gonna be happy. As an artist you just have to say, 'Well, I did that. I did that 14, 15 years ago. I'm done. This is what I wanna do now,' and you take your hit. There was a lot of controversy on that one. People didn't want new greatness, they just wanted to be reminded of past greatness. They didn't want anything new."
video.comicbookresources.com/c…
With The Dark Knight Strikes Again Frank Miller was trying to evoke the sci-fi classic Ray Harryhausen monster movie feel of the cosmic Silver Age superhero comics, trying to bring back that sense of fun, moving away from the grim and gritty trend that Batman: The Dark Knight Returns unfortunately influenced.
Frank Miller explained, "I felt that in the midst of all of this sturm and drang (grim and gritty), we’d (the comic book industry) lost some of the central joy of the heroes. I wanted to get right back to the bone and break it all down, and show you that the Flash was cool because he’s really quick, and I don’t give a damn about his marriage. The Atom’s cool because he gets really little. The way I chose to make that cooler was instead of showing him getting smaller; I showed everything else around him getting bigger (from the Atom's perspective). But again, I don’t care about the Atom’s love life. One after the other, I was looking at the characters and getting back to what made them so cool at their core."
convergingtoacenter.blogspot.c…
Many readers and even writers felt comic books had also gone overboard with the overly dark, grim and gritty trend by the '90s with Ron Marz turning Green Lantern Hal Jordan into a mass murderer (Green Lantern: Emerald Twilight (1994)), etc. The companies and stores were caught with huge over-ordered print runs that were no longer selling. Even Dick Giordano said, "The Dark Knight Returns additionally helped start the grim and gritty trends in comic storytelling that still exist today. That was an unintended result, and I am truly sorry it happened. Comics are much too dark today. Er – in my opinion ...I miss the heroes of yesteryear." www.thestar.com/entertainment/…
Alan Moore said, "It seemed that the existence of Watchmen had pretty much doomed the mainstream comic industry to about 20 years of very grim and often pretentious stories that seemed to be unable to get around the massive psychological stumbling block that Watchmen had turned out to be, although that had never been my intention with the work. When I found myself working, even remotely, under the auspices of DC, I had very different intentions. Well, maybe they were the same intentions: to do progressive comics that adults could enjoy. But by then I'd become very tired of the wave of grimness that seemed to have been unleashed by Watchmen. It was never my intention to start a trend for darkness. I'm not a particularly dark individual. I have my moments, it's true, but I do have a sense of humor. With the ABC books I was trying to do comics that would have perhaps appealed to an intelligent 13-year-old, such as I'd been, and would still satisfy the contemporary readership of 40-year-old men who probably should know better. But I wanted to sort of do comics that would be accessible to a much wider range of people, and would still be intelligent even if they were primarily children's adventure stories, such as the Tom Strong books."
[url]blogs.suntimes.com/scanners/20…
I didn't really enjoy Watchmen. I find Alan Moore's Watchman a pessimistic downer. And in Watchmen we see Sally Jupiter, whose character is defined in terms of victimhood. Now as an old woman she's pretty pathetic and does nothing but dwell on her sad past. She was beaten and almost raped by the Comedian, whom Hooded Justice then beat up (woman-victim/man-protector stereotype, and Sally is a superhero herself who couldn't defend herself against a man), and then as she's bleeding, Hooded Justice coldly tells her to "Get up. And, for god's sake, cover yourself."
I'm glad the characters were changed to the Comedian, etc. Watchmen would have been treating Peacemaker and Peter Cannon: Thunderbolt particularly terribly with Peacemaker guilty of beating and attempting to rape the original Nightshade, etc. and Peter Cannon: Thunderbolt guilty of mass murder. Alan Moore had intended on Watchmen being the Question, Blue Beetle (Ted Kord), Peacemaker, Captain Atom, Nightshade and Peter Cannon: Thunderbolt characters from Charlton Comics that DC had acquired. It was DC Vice President/Executive Editor Dick Giordano that wouldn't let them use the Question, Blue Beetle (Ted Kord), Peacemaker, Captain Atom, Nightshade and Peter Cannon: Thunderbolt in Watchmen. Alan Moore explained, "When Dick Giordano had acquired the Charlton line, Dave Gibbons and I were talking about doing something together. So, Dick had purchased the Charlton characters for DC, and he was looking for some way to use them, and Dave and I put forth this proposal which originally was designed around a number of the Charlton characters. I forget how much of the idea was in place then, but I think that it would start with a murder, and I pretty well knew who would be guilty of the murder, and I've got an idea of the motive, and the basic bare-bones of the plot—all of which actually ended up being about the least important thing about Watchmen. The most powerful elements in the the final book was more the storytelling and all the stuff in-between, bits of the plot. When we were just planning to do an extreme and unusual super-hero book, we thought the Charlton characters would provide us with a great line-up that had a lot of emotional nostalgia, with associations and resonance for the readership. So, that was why we put forward this proposal for doing this new take on the Charlton characters. Something like that, and I forget the details—it was such a long time ago—but I remember that at some point, we heard from Dick that yes, he liked the proposal, but he didn't really want to use the Charlton characters, because the proposal would've left a lot of them in bad shape, and DC couldn't have really used them again after what we were going to do to them without detracting from the power of what it was that we were planning." www.twomorrows.com/comicbookar…
Frank Miller said, "Those of us who wanted to test the boundaries of what a superhero comic book could do, unfortunately broke those boundaries and the results have not all been very good. We pushed against the old walls, and they fell-but nothing much has been built to replace them. And now the roof is leaking and the sewer's backing up. I've seen all these characters of my childhood fall into disarray. Things have gotten so dreary. The heroes have gotten so ugly that even their muscles have muscles. The elegance of Gil Kane is gone. You don't see the sheer joy of Green Lantern's power ring. The magic of somebody like the Flash-somebody who's able to move so fast that you can't see him move-is gone. There's no sense of the basic wish that any of these characters have. Allow me a disclaimer: I'm talking about the overall direction I see superhero comics going, not damning each and every title out there. I'm sure there's some good stuff going on that I just haven't seen. But the trend is depressing, and dumb. Why Green Lantern became a drunk driver (Green Lantern: Emerald Dawn (1990) by Keith Giffen) when he can fly always loses me. And I'm told they turned him into a mass murderer as well (Green Lantern: Emerald Twilight (1994) by Ron Marz). The fun's gone out of it. I want to try my hand at bringing it back. Perhaps there is a touch of nostalgia in this, and if so, I'm not ashamed about it."[url]www.comicbookresources.com/?pa…
John Byrne said, "The real problem with 'Grim and Gitty' -- or, as Dave Gibbons has observed, 'glum' -- is that it became pretty much the only game in town. Marvel went thru a 'monsters' craze in the 70s, but every title didn't become a monster title, and the Beast is pretty much the only casualty that remains from that period. But both Marvel and DC went All Grim, All the Time."
www.byrnerobotics.com/forum/fo…
Mark Waid said, "We're sick to death of heroes who are not heroes, we're sick to death of darkness. Not that there's no room, not that Batman should act like Adam West, but that won't be the overall feeling. . . No more we screwed each other and now we must pay the consequences. No, we're super-heroes and that's what we do."
www.monitorduty.com/2005/09/al…
Mark Waid said, “The grimness is just absurd. It’s ‘how do we out grim each other, how do we out violence each other.’ Don’t get me wrong. I’m not offended because I want comics to be like they were when I was a kid. I don’t care. I don’t want comics to be like they were when I was a kid because I still have my comics. If I need that I’ll go look at those. What I need is for comics to not cheapen out and just do what they think a bunch of bloodthirsty 15-year-old fans want. Stop trying to gross us out with blood and violence. It’s just cheap. It’s bad storytelling. I’m not offended on a moral or ethical level, I’m just offended on a creativity level. There are other ways to create tension and drama than to have somebody stabbed through the back with a sword.”
robot6.comicbookresources.com/…
Frank Miller explained, "At the very least, it's not a repetition of the first Dark Knight. It uses the first one as a springboard to a new story. If Dark Knight was a ripping down-a deconstruction of the hero, as many said-which I don't really believe it was -this is much more of a building up. I've seen all these characters of my childhood fall into disarray. They've become neither fish nor fowl. Those of us who wanted to test the boundaries of what a superhero comic book could do, unfortunately broke those boundaries and the results have not all been very good. We pushed against the old walls, and they fell-but nothing much has been built to replace them. And now the roof is leaking and the sewer's backing up. So I'm taking this romp through the material again and showing just how spiffy this stuff is. I'm doing it without cynicism and giving my best. I'm also having a very good time. The wave of nostalgia spoke, I suspect, to a crying need from longtime fans wondering where the hell their heroes have gone. I am responding to that and I'm hoping to do new things with these characters. I'm not out to simply do a reprint of stuff from the sixties. What I want to bring back to superheroes with this project is a sense of play. Things have gotten so dreary. The heroes have gotten so ugly that even their muscles have muscles. The elegance of Gil Kane is gone. You don't see the sheer joy of Green Lantern's power ring. The magic of somebody like the Flash-somebody who's able to move so fast that you can't see him move-is gone. There's no sense of the basic wish that any of these characters have. I think anyone who's working on a superhero comic should be obliged to write down in one sentence what the central wish is of the character. Every story has to play to that theme. "Adolescent power fantasies" isn't just a tired clich; it's too broad, too crude. There's more than that to these characters, the good ones, anyway. As it is, I don't know who these characters are anymore. I don't know why they do what they do. Why Green Lantern became a drunk driver (Green Lantern: Emerald Dawn (1990) by Keith Giffen) when he can fly always loses me. And I'm told they turned him into a mass murderer as well (Green Lantern: Emerald Twilight (1994) by Ron Marz). The fun's gone out of it. I want to try my hand at bringing it back. Perhaps there is a touch of nostalgia in this, and if so, I'm not ashamed about it. When doing a character like the Atom, for instance, you find there's a million things that have never been done with him. For instance, nobody's ever actually told a story from his perspective; where, from the viewer's eye, rather than him getting tiny, the world gets bigger. When you do that, you start seeing all the surreal details that exist in something as simple as the bottom of a shoe. That's just one example. I've been playing around with a number of them and ways I can portray them. I'm also exploring the simple notion that superheroes should be heroes. Now we have ugly people fighting uglier people and the guy with the most guns wins. The fundament of a superhero is the guy in tights saving innocent people from bad things. It's amazing how infrequently that seems to happen in superhero comics these days. Allow me a disclaimer: I'm talking about the overall direction I see superhero comics going, not damning each and every title out there. I'm sure there's some good stuff going on that I just haven't seen. But the trend is depressing, and dumb. On this project, 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, who's in a very compromised position, to say the least." www.comicbookresources.com/?pa…
As to Frank Miller's changing drawing style, he was freeing himself of the Neal Adams conventions, he was developing his own drawing style. As Kelley Jones said, "One of the things that always really made people cut the mustard was developing a style is the single most difficult thing to do and in developing a style you have to develop your mind, so..Yeah, and it's hard to do. It's hard to do. If you just find that, well, this guy is doing this, and people seem to respond to it, I'll just do that, too. Well, after a while you have fifty guys all doing the same thing and it's wallpaper. Seen it once, seen it all." www.comic-art.com/interviews/j…Frank Miller said on the documentary Masterpiece: Frank Miller's Batman: The Dark Knight Returns (2013), "In the course of drawing Batman, he's transformed across the (Dark Knight Returns) series. He starts out as kind of a Neal Adams Batman. And he ends of being more like the incredible Hulk or something. I felt by the mid-point of the series I really found my Batman."
Frank Miller, Comics Interview # 31 (1986): "I base my Batman on Jerry Robinson's and Dick Sprang's. The strongest presentation of the character to date has come from the Forties. There was something in the art back then that made him look huge."
Frank Miller explained on the documentary Masterpiece: Frank Miller's Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, "In Dark Knight, we (Frank Miller and inker Klaus Janson) began to drift apart creatively, because I was into all of the European stuff and the Japanese stuff, and all of that, and he was still very much in the tradition of DC (Neal Adams-esque). There was one issue where I redid a bunch of it because I wanted a certain look."
"I try to adapt my style as I go,” Frank Miller explained. “You’ll see Sin City looks nothing like Ronin. 300 doesn’t look like anything I’d ever done before. The work I’m doing now is very much its own thing. It’s a matter of an artist adapting to the material.” Pretty ballsy. www.nycgraphicnovelists.com/20…
Frank Miller explained in Frank Miller: The Comics Journal Library (2003), "By the way of Alley Oop (1932 comic strip by V.T. Hamlin), again, I was trying to make the (superhero) stuff less formal. I wanted the superheroes to build up the parts of them that I thought would make them look the most heroic. In the case of Batman, I went big shouldered and big formed and obviously gigantic hands and feet. It was a variation on what I do, for instance, with the women in Sin City, where they break down to a few curves to evoke. It was an attempt at something, because I thought everything had gotten too damn realistic. I like to enjoy what comic books can do that film can’t." 4thletter.net/2009/04/sons-of-…
In Amazing Heroes # 102 (1986) Frank Miller congratulated David Mazzucchelli for trying to develop his own art style on Batman: Year One. "David is, I believe, a realist, but he's also a cartoonist. David's work is not photographic in the least, but he does his best to make his work believable. His work is becoming more direct, less decorative, less deliberately pretty. Step by step, he's freeing himself of a lot of the post-Kirby (Neal Adams) conventions of the '60s and '70s that have almost swallowed up comics, and he's moving into work that I think is closer to his own heart. His work is finding it's own place, going directly back to the era of Johnny Craig, and even further back to the era of Alex Toth."
Frank Miller explained in Frank Miller: The Comics Journal Library (2003), "I'm getting cartoonier. My feeling is that we can really not compete with films, and we might as well do what we do better. Also, I'm turned on by the stuff that guys like James Kochalka are doing. Because it's reminding me of why I got into drawing comics. The absolute personal nature of it. When I read a Kochalka book, I feel like I did when I was an 8-year-old kid with some folded-over typing paper stapled in the middle and I was just drawing. It's deliberately unprofessional. I like that aspect of it and feel the energy of that is something that has to be recaptured."