BEHOLD THE GRIMACE: The Frank Miller Poll

what are we voting for? Best? Worst? Last non-total-shit one?

Also Bad Boy is a couple of Sin Cities too late

art? writing?

i mean cmon man, tighten things up here

I apologize for any confusion. I think general personal favorite.

Decided to do the poll after finally getting around to DK2 and falling in love with it.

My favorite is Elektra: Assassin, but that's because of Billy the Sink not him. Looking at the list reminds me how much I like his collaborators; Mazzucchelli, Darrow, Gibbons, Simonson, even JR jr. did some of his best work with Frank. I'll have to think a bit about whether to vote for one of these or to pick the first Sin City or Dark Knight Strikes Again.

snap judgement is the man w/o fear but that's because i was 12 and loved romita jr

still have never read hard boiled, which is sorta crazy because the snippets ive seen of it would suggest that id go bananas for it. loved what i've seen of gibbons hyperdetailed ish

A cursory glance at Elektra: Assassin did my head in; a casualty of circumstance probably. I've gotta get back to that eventually.

Elektra is a bit of a glorious mess, a screaming id on the page. I was 16 when it was first collected and it made a serious impression on my young mind. When I read it now I still see it through those eyes.

Hard Boiled is Darrow, not Gibbons

it is FANTASTIC except for the word balloons, which are toilet

Geoff Darrow's Watchmen would certainly be a wonderfully odd thing to see, though.

Elektra Assassin is almost good in spite of Miller, but in the end what he brings does help it work. Big Guy & Rusty can't manage being good in spite of him. Year One is probably the only one where he and his collaborator really create a proper gestalt together (Born Again is great in parts, but clunky in others, and plummets off a cliff with the Nuke stuff at the end), and The Dark Knight the only really great piece of comics he does solo*

WTF at ALL of Martha Washington being one entry but seven different Sin Cities? Why not put the Sin City shorts in as their own buttons too?

*obv the collaborators do a lot of work there, esp Varley, but he's the cartoonist on it

He had a pretty golden run for a while there, between DK and Give Me Liberty. I want to vote for Hard Boiled, but for the fact that Darrow's the star pulling Miller along for the ride (imo). Ditto, Elektra: Assassin and Sienkiwicz. I guess it comes down to the best book that he wrote and drew, so Dark Knight or The Hard Goodbye, which I read in floppies in Dark Horse Presents before it had a name other than "Sin City".

I guess I'll vote for The Hard Goodbye, since it was the only one that inspired me to blow up a panel on a photocopier and turn it into a t-shirt using fabric paint and a lightbox. (He grimaced at it and had no other comment when I showed it to him at the San Diego con.)

If I recall my wiki-research done beforehand, all those Sin City shorts are collected in Booze, Broads, And Bullets. I opted for the MARTHA WASHINGTON omnibus released a few years back because it seems the very likely way that story will continue to see the light of day - as one single graphic novel. I'm going by their current form, which is bound to be problematic.

Also: should I have divided Daredevil into, y'know, Visionaries Vol. 1, 2, and 3? I mean, that first volume is obv. inferior and, taken as a whole, should dilute the votes it'll get. And where the hell does Daredevil: Love And War go? - I'm guessing when it's taken into consideration, it'll be enfolded into his longer run proper. And really, should I have given BORN AGAIN it's own place on the poll - it was released as Daredevil singles after all. But I don't buy that and neither does anyone else, I suspect - it's all relative and I'm grasping at the air.

If I recall my wiki-research done beforehand, all those Sin City shorts are collected in Booze, Broads, And Bullets.

what if you just want to vote for The Customer Is Always Right?

Hard Boiled is Darrow, not Gibbons

shit i knew that

This is a tough choice... Elektra: Assassin looks pretty, but Sienkiewicz's art also makes the story quite hard to follow, which is not my ideal of a great comic book. The Darrow collabs have, of course, brilliant art, but the plots are rather thin. (And like others have said, Darrow is the true star of those books.) A lot of Miller's solo work I find politically and morally dodgy (Dark Knight Returns, 300, some of the later Martha Washington stories, etc). The first Martha Washington mini is still quite good, but since you included the omnibus I'm not gonna vote for that, as the quality of the sequels varies. The first Sin City mini (wasn't it originally called just "Sin City"? when was the "Hard Goodbye" bit added?) was mindblowing when it first came out, especially the bold chiaroscuro art, but 20 years later its impact has been diminished by the increasingly shitty sequels.

Basically my choice boils down to the early Daredevil ninja stories, Ronin, or Dark Knight Strikes Again. In those Miller is just doing some fun and cool stuff without his personal tics and mannerisms getting on the way. I think I'm gonna vote for Dark Knight Strikes again, because it felt like a breath of fresh air to see Miller doing some colourful, thrill-powered DC superhero stuff after years of boring "hard-boiled" comics, plus Lynn Varley's colours in that book are gorgeous. Also, I think DKSA has some really cool Silver Age style ideas, like the explanations to what happened to The Atom and Flash.

The first Sin City mini (wasn't it originally called just "Sin City"? when was the "Hard Goodbye" bit added?)

First Sin City mini was A Dame To Kill For; the original series ran in DHP and was collected sub-title-less before ADTKF was serialised; I think it became A New Hope The Hard Goodbye when they were tankōbon-ised before the movie, but am not sure, I got off the Miller train well before

i threw a bone to Hard Boiled

man without fear LOOKS fantastic (romita knocked it out of the park, especially the period detail) but it feels like a year one retread to me and also has a bunch of crap in it that's only interesting if you're familiar with the daredevil mythos, which im really not... it doesnt fully pay off as a self-contained story imo

the first sin city book is one of the best things he's ever done, but i can do without the rest of the sin city books... that yellow bastard's alright too, actually.

i have a soft spot for 300 and i think it might be his best looking work ever - feel like it's probably lynn varley's best work too. i always thought he took himself a lot less seriously than most people seem to think... i remember there being a very spirited discussion the letter pages of 300 (that spilled over into the letter pages of the next sin city mini!) about homosexuality in the ancient greek world that seemed v revealing about his intentions to make 300 as gay as possible... i think people see his worst excesses as unintentional self parody, but im pretty convinced that it's intentional most of the time

i never liked ronin much

Decided to do the poll after finally getting around to DK2 and falling in love with it.

wow, I thought that me and Mrs Real Dirty Vicar were the only people in the world who liked this. It's got lots of great bits - of which the Flash powering the entire eastern seaboard is a particular favourite.

james kochalka is also a big fan! i quite liked some of the big chunky artwork on DK2, but the script seemed fairly typical incoherent late(ish) miller

voted Daredevil, 'cos for a while it really was the most exciting monthly comic book in the world, and the miller/janson combo meshed so beautifully (up to the point that janson was doing more and more of the actual drawing).

i only read the first issue of DK2, but i sorta loved it for its pop sensibility and its cantankerous determination to not be the grimy and mean DKR sequel that fans would've eaten up

kind of an ugly book though

Btw, what the heck is "Bad Boy"? I've read almost everything else on the list, but I've never even heard about that one.

i didnt know what it was until i googled it and saw the cover and instantly remembered... one-shot he did with simon bisley in the mid-late 90s

http://i.imgur.com/qwtOV.jpg

does this jog your memory

I think I've boiled it down to Batman Y1 and DK2. I might have to read them both before I vote.

I think reading DKR as a 12-year-old probably destroyed my childhood innocence even more than finding out Santa Claus didn't exist (and I'm JEWISH).

Uh, anyway, I'm going for Batman: Year One, as I actually like Frank Miller when he's relatively restrained, which I wish he'd tried more often. Or, you know, more than once.

DK2 is terrific fun, but the lack of Klaus Janson is a little heartbreaking.

I always found it a bit unsatisfying that the big climax scene in BY1 does not feature Batman in the Batman costume.

DK2 is terrific fun, but the lack of Klaus Janson is a little heartbreaking.

Actually, I think the sheer chops Janson brings to anything he touches run completely counter to what Miller and Varley we're trying to pull off (and largely did) in DK2. It's probably one of the most homemade comics released by the big two in the last decade (along with, maybe, the Lethem/Dalrymple Omega series).

Agreed -- at least I appreciate what you mean conceptually, but I guess I'm just a KJ fanboy.

Irrelevantly, I think I'd pick the new Omega series over any of Frank Miller's comics! (Possibly I'm worn out on them due to overreading -- and Sin City always struck me as comics for non-comics fans (he said snootily)).

Irrelevantly, I think I'd pick the new Omega series over any of Frank Miller's comics!

Not quite, buy it's very close to the case for me too! The last issue of that series was probably one of the best single issues released in the past few years. If only we could get Lethem on an, I dunno, INHUMANS mini or something.

Ronin is his best, by a very VERRRRRY wide margin

really? what do you like about it? it always felt like a minor work to me

(honorable mentions for DKR2 and Elektra Assassin tho, the latter of which is some truly next-level weirdness)

xp

admittedly, I got off the bus around the time of the first Sin City stuff and have not read a lot of his subsequent work, much of which I just find irritating and stupid at the conceptual level (to say nothing of the movies he's gotten himself involved in).

But Ronin seems to really stand apart for me - I like that it's its own little universe and not just a boring re-tread of other genre tropes (noir, superheroes, ninjas). It's a mixture of some strange elements - Lone Wolf and Cub plus I dunno, some Heavy Metal sci-fi guys I probably can't name, plus some mystical po-mo mumbo-jumbo. His rather clumsy and often-loathsome politics/racism/sexism recede pretty far into the background. It was a major leap forward in terms of the artwork, it's much more abstract and expressive. It has a strangeness and mystery that I find persistently appealling.

The whole Moebius-manga fusion/remix was way ahead of the curve. It's kinda the most weirdly influential thing he's done - it's a precursor for like, I dunno, all the most interesting stuff being put out on Image right now.

ELEKTRA by eleventy billion. Utterly and completely unhinged. One of my favorite comics ever.

Now, if you want written and drawn by Miller, HARD GOODBYE or DAREDEVIL, just plain Daredevil.

But I'd warrant that RONIN has more of a lasting impression and DKR utterly dominated comics for 10-15 years after it was released.

im gonna reread ronin and get back 2 yall

Elektra in first round TKO. Then Daredevil and Ronin.

Shout out to his completely batshit screenplay to Robocop 2. Too bad the movie never quite fulfilled its promise.

Batman: Year One is amazing, maybe more due to mazzucchelli

^^^yeah that one is really good

just pretty impressive that it doesn't look dated at all. at least to me -- i'm kind of a lapsed comics fan these days.

i remember convincing my mom to buy me elektra lives again when i was an 11 year old ... and that is not a comic for an 11 year old. thanks mom!

Year One is probably the "sensible" choice for me, I mean it's very cleverly plotted, the dialogue is quite naturalistic, given the genre, it's very re-readable.

I voted for Elektra:Assassin though, that is some vibrant, insane shit, and it's not all down to Bill S' art, the dialogue easily lives up to it. The bit I particularly recall is where the bad guy is being refashioned into this cyborg killing machine at s.h.i.e.l.d. HQ, and there's this disembodied head suspended in a network of wires etc, and it's saying to the techs who are building the body - "guys, hey....getting any?" just fucking totally nuts & out there, I should pick it up again and read it, I haven't looked at it in years. I remember when it got up to the 2nd last issue, the anticipation for the last one was something big, how the hell would he resolve that lot? But he did.

I went to a signing that Sienkiewicz did at this comic shop in Newcastle, he had a portfolio of original art from the series, which was NOT for sale. I, no shit, mentally calculated what I could raise if I sold all my synthesizers and recording gear and offered it to him for one of the cover pieces, thanks but no, he said. Sienkiewicz was a real nice mellow guy, somewhere I have a real nice pen sketch of "Chastity", the female SHIELD agent he did for me for 10 UK pounds, in passing he dropped into the conversation that he'd based her on his girlfriend. Wow.

Sometime around "Hard Boiled" I kind of got the feeling that Frank Miller had turned to self-parody, unwittingly or otherwise, IDK, I lost interest.

"Elektra Lives Again" was a bum-out when I got it. v dissapointing.

kind of an ugly book though

― xX_420_GoKu_ChRiStWaRrIoR_Xx (Princess TamTam), Thursday, December 16, 2010 8:17 AM (7 hours ago) Bookmark

totally. i guess i should reconsider DK2 but i just remember being kinda wtf at the whole thing (being, of course, one of those fanboys who was expecting a rehash of DKR). plus i'm a reader that really prefers lots and lots of little panels and not one splash page after another of characters w/improbably huge clown feet

have never actually read "300" though, not sure if i should if its more like DK2 (it is, right?). glad to have confirmed that the homosexual overtones are intentional, though---i always had a tough time believing that miller could have such a huge blindspot.

still sorta hoping that 300 the film gets elevated to some kind of weirdo fanboy/camp classic, because i think it would be hilarious to have a 300 drinking game/screening where 300 beers must be consumed by the time the movie's over

im gonna reread ronin and get back 2 yall

don't bother! shakey has rose-coloured memory glasses.

one-shot he did with simon bisley in the mid-late 90s

it was a strip in GQ originally, not a one-shot [uncoincidentally around the same time that Hewlett did Meet The Freebies in The Face IIRC]

Surprised at the DK2 love here. That was awful--slapped together, crappy script, really lazy will-this-do art.

don't bother! shakey has rose-coloured memory glasses.

entirely possible! I haven't seen a copy of Ronin in like 10 years.

tbf I haven't looked at anything Frank Miller's done in around 10 years, except for maybe DK2. someone lent that to me a couple years ago.

I thought I'd voted for Year One, but obviously I forgot.

always wanted to read ronin, plot sounds cool and liked what i've seen of the art.

is it worth £15?

no

yes

(says the guy who doesn't own a copy)

I only paid like twenty american dollars, so I don't know what to tell you.

Have seen plenty of library copies of Ronin in Scotland, might be worth ordering?

not miller, but over xmas at the parents' house i found my old copy of batman year two. it is terrible for the most part.

(says the guy who doesn't own a copy)

would you pay 15 quid for a copy?

Whoops, I thought I voted for Year One, but I guess I also forgot. So maybe it should get "3" counting me and also-forgetful Chap.

Is Year 2 the Barr/McFarlane thingy with the baddie who looks like a Warhammer figure?

Yeah, it is. The only redeeming bit is the first issue was drawn by Alan Davis. I always liked Davis' Batman.

yeah davis' art is great -- mcfarlane's is really terrible. not even just in a mcfarlane way, but kind of in an inept way.

^^^in batman year two i mean

In McFarlane's defense, it's pretty early in his career;he'd done a year or two on Infinity Inc and maybe an issue of Hulk. All I remember from it is how "Cape Crazy" he made Batman - that panel at the graveyard with the forty feet of cape and cowl flowing out in front of him is burned in my mind.

I probably would have voted Year One too, if the poll had been clear enough

xpost, yeah, mcfarlane's proto-spawn batman is cool looking, i just have grown to hate the way the dude draws faces tbh. and this is coming from someone who as a preteen loved the hulk/spiderman stuff he did.

McFarlane is not a completely bad artist, but his style influenced so much shitty 90s art (Liefeld & co) that he kinda gets damned by association.

Agree that his faces always look kinda weird and inhuman, and the way he drew Mary Jane's hair in Spider-Man is pretty ridiculous too.

would you pay 15 quid for a copy?

I don't even know what 15 quid is so yeah sure

I'd pay 15 squid.

But I think Ronin's kinda shit, honestly.

Matt Fraction on Ronin

You’ll see Japan in these pages, you’ll see France.

yeah, that's what struck me when I was flipping through it the other day - he's always been a pastiche guy, but there's a metal hurlant feel to it that you never really got from him anywhere else and it's pretty startling.

he's kinda wrong about the story not mattering though, because it's flat out boring to read. i'll stand by that.

I don't even know what 15 quid is so yeah sure

you're forty years old and you've never heard of other countries having different currency to yours?

anyway the fact that you've not paid $7 less than list on Amazon for it in the last ten years makes me disbelieve that you'd pay $4 over list for it today, pwned

what's a country

who's a Black Sheep

Bit bored by the first Daredevil Visionaries so far. Can I just skip straight to the issues when Miller's writing, or will I miss something important?

Not much, if memory serves.

And when I'm re-reading those, I often skip all the text but for the dialogue. And sometimes I even skip that.

Note that by the end, Miller was only doing breakdowns and Janson was largely responsible for the rendering.

The Elektra cycle is the big story in Miller's run.

That said, I always dug the issue in the McKenzie written issue's where Matt Murdoch gets totally clobbered by the Hulk. I think it is always a good Marvel trope to have someone battle where the characters fight where it isn't a usual matchup. I think the Spider-man rumbles with Firelord and the Juggernaut are popular and fun for the same reason.

Re-read Ronin - still excellent. Probably the most "mature" Miller ever got - questioning escapism/fetishism rather than leaping headlong into beloved tropes to the point of overindulgence. Not that they're abandoned - the ending is easily read as accepting them for the sake of empowerment - but it's interesting to see it acknowledged.

Plus it's got a fantastic beat.

ALSO: Odd references to big two heroes throughout - Storm, that green clad lady with one arm sleeveless who used to pop up in X-MEN (I think?), Captain Marvel. That's always bugged me.

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/27w11e/i_am_frank_miller_artist_cartoonist_creator_of/

Oy at the OWS subthread.

Also that weirdly rambling answer about his feelings about Superman as a character.

Sigh. I really loved this guy's work once upon a time.

Same. Probably would've voted for E:A or DKR.

Ronin is the correct answer

i haven't read miller in years but will always look at any book he draws.

I'd say Holy Terror has special significance, though I doubt anyone would have voted for it.

I wonder if I voted in this? Probably would've gone for Year 1.

I recently reread both Dark Knights and Year One, and Born Again for the first time. Also bought a used Ronin tpb - I read that as it came out and then gave up on comics for my teenage years before the final issue came out - haven't cracked it open yet.
Of those I would have voted for DK1. I really like his artwork at that period. In DK2, he's just finessing it.

Jack Kirby was originally Jacob Kurtzberg, Stan Lee was Stanley Zeiber, and Bob Kane (who created Batman), his real given name was Eli Katz.

It's Stanley Leiber, and Bob Kane's real given name was Robert Kahn - Eli Katz was Gil Kane's real name.

I can't help but think it would be a different world today if he'd been called Stan Zee.

Born Again, for me.

I really like his artwork at that period. In DK2, he's just finessing it

First time anyone's ever used the word "finesse" to describe the DK2 art ^

Born Again is p good but so much of that is down to Mazzuchelli imo. DK2 is fun in a silly way, which makes it preferable to po-faced DK1.

The part in DK2 where Batman is cheering on hyper violence in the service of vengeance is always o_O and kind of liberating at he same time

Saw a story yesterday that Ben Wheatley and Tom Hiddleston want to do Miller/Darrow's Hard Boiled. I hope that one never gets out of development hell.

That'd be impossible to do justice too at less than an NC-17 rating.

But they could do a live action Big Guy & Rusty.

Reading through some of Miller's comics again, I lean that Ronin was as far out as he went. It was pretty strong to merge together two totally disparate comics influences in mixing Lonewolf & Cub with Moebius in such a story. The thing that caught with me on the last read is how well that Ronin fits into the 80s cyberpunk science fiction that was also going on.

hard boiled is the best example of batshit crazy violence and darrow's ultra-detailed style and it'd be such a waste as a movie unless it somehow had crazy detailed sets and some sort of visual gimmick that hasn't been done before
the actual story is deliciously thin and dissolves in art and the moments of "aw, shucks" dialogue

Agree with Earlnash, Ronin shows that Miller had the potential in him to develop cool sci-fi ideas into innovative graphic stories, which is why it's such a shame he later lost himself, at first, into noir pastiche macho bullshit, and, later, into Bat-shit insanity. Shades of his this potential can still be seen in Martha Washington, and the bits in Dark Knight Strikes Back that show us what happened to the old members of the Justice League, but Ronin is no doubt the most fully realised sci-fi comic he ever did.