Frank Miller Week: Green Lantern-Superman: Legend of the Green Flame Cover

Everything that makes Frank Miller’s art iconic is featured on this cover: fat meaty paws in place of hands, awkward chunky anatomy and the over-use of negative space (or possibly a calculated under-use of color would be more accurate). With a style more recognizable than Jack Kirby’s, Miller knows he doesn’t need all the pieces of the puzzle to tell a story, with bare, trace facts he can build his narrative and make us believe whatever story he'd like.

Superman’s “S” logo, curl and cape are the three traits about him always used to identify the character, and that's all Miller needs--literally nothing else but a body frame is drawn. More time was spent detailing the giant bird claw that is piercing both heroes than on the heroes themselves. It’s about the curiosity of what could kill both of these men, not that they are even characters in the story. They're symbols.

As mentioned in Monique’s post, Miller draws the clawed leg coming from the left side of the image, the beast largely unseen, pulling our eyes slowly to the right. While he uses this trick again to direct us along the picture, his intentions are different, it tells a story in itself, forcing us to ask what the beast is, where it came from, and how did Superman and Green Lantern come to be in it's possession?

Less bad-ass than the majority of his work, Miller's ability to instill fear is showcased here: the horror of the blackened, presumed dead Justice Leaguers close to the center of the page, while the actual events are taking place elsewhere. The best and maybe the most affecting aspect of the image though, is Superman's cape ripped to shreds with and the Green Lantern's ring still glowing from the fight. Even in a single-image, Frank Miller can make the action intense and very real and maintain his balance of the mythic and gritty.

Frank Miller Week: "Lance Blastoff" Panel-By-Panel

Here's the thing about Frank Miller's politics. If my rambling, non-commital piece from Monday didn't already say it without saying it, the dude's worldview is pretty nuanced and complicated. And really, the best way to parse it out is through um you know, actually reading the work. This "Lance Blastoff" story from the very strange Dark Horse-released one-shot Tales To Offend is a good place to start figuring out what the deal is with Frank Miller.

Thankfully, The 4th Letter did the scanning for me and did some of their own reading of the story already. Author of the piece, David Brothers notes that "Lance Blastoff" is "one of the relatively few times he’s done an out and out humor book," and indeed, it's basically broad satire, but it's appropriately Miller-like in that it's multi-directional in its satirical targets. It's not quite the sledgehammer-subtle parody of the American action hero that it may at first seem. I mean, it is that, but it's also an attack on P.C sensitivity and liberal hypocrisy...or something? Let's take a look at this twisty turny, brilliant, retarded comics short...

While this title-sequence-like panel is a parody of Golden-Age superhero comics, it isn't that far from Miller's usual stylistics. That's to say, this is ironic but it isn't a total corrective or anything. Miller loves this style and next to Richard Corben, I can't think of another comics artist as in love with basic, visceral comics grammar. But yes, this still introduces "Lance Blastoff" as something absurd. Even the dialogue, "Here's a beefy little yarn--with an important message for you kids!" reads a bit like yeah, a parody of old comics, but a parody of Miller's stunted, noir-tinged writing style too.

So this panel is just beautiful. What's with Miller and dinosaurs? He has some weird ability to draw them as kinda awe-inspiring but also massive and horrifying. And that's the tension going through this panel and the source of its satire. We have the female character talking about the dinosaurs from an "enlightened" environmentalist perspective: "My friends witness nature in perfect balance." The joke of the panel is they're neither scary as expected (yet) or all that elegant. They're more like overgrown cows or something, just munching on grass. Already here though, Miller's satire is shifting its focus or at the least, kinda corralling in an opposite point of view to also take a big shit on. This female character is an idiot too.

Here, we're closer to revealing that this character is indeed, a woman. And you know, she's in good company in terms of strong, wise female characters in Miller's work: Elektra, Martha Washington, many of the females in Sin City. Really though, the main point here is the ratcheting-up of the female character's rhetoric. Her all-too-common liberal condescension: "Unsullied by fast-food restaurants spewing forth burnt animal flesh to fill the bloated bellies of sweaty, obese people." Sounds like a lot of people I know after they read Fast-Food Nation.

The female character's revealed. Giving a weird, didactic tour to a bunch of like Cro-Magnon alien freaks or something. Now, Miller's really got her going though. Lots of "nature's perfect and peaceful", dime-store Rousseau going on here. This kind of idealized, loving sense of the world isn't just a point of contention with pseudo-tough guys like Miller though, it's precisely the kind of self-important, self-deluded, vanity that all your classic satire's based upon. Just this silly, satisfied sense that the world would or could be a better place if not for us awful humans and our damned civilization.

Lolz! What the comic's so clearly setting-up: The ideal, gentle, untainted dinosaur goes for the humans. This is the punchline panel. Since it's pretty obvious, let's focus on Miller's world-building here. So, we've got a future where we can visit the dinosaurs somehow, and spaceships look like bad-ass fifties cars. Going along with what I said about the first panel of this story, this is Miller mocking the signs and signifiers of old-timey comics and being totally in-love with him. The strange combination here (dinosaurs, nice cars, post-feminist space tour-guide) is exactly the kind of weirdness you'd see in some cheapo 1950's space pirate tale.

The unfortunate realism after the punchline. Bodies are flailing, limbs are floating through the air. That "CHOMP" will be important later.

Miller gives you a close-up of the horror. The female character is kinda making eye-contact with the reader here, like she's realized how goofy and just plain wrong her idealized view of the dinosaurs is and she's reaching out to someone, anyone, to give her some comfort in what'll obviously be here final moments of life. More "CHOMP"s.

Some artful, McCloud Understanding Comics type time-between-the-panels shit. Now, the female character has landed on the ground, having escaped the T-rex's "CHOMP"s. She's also totally shifted her view on the creature at a very convenient time. Faced with death, she respects and is seemingly taken by the raw brute desires of the dinosaur. It's a comment on the shifting values of the liberal idealist.

Notice Miller's visual economy here. Lance Blastoff shows up, but because everything in this story's cut to the bare essentials, he doesn't get a build-up or an extended introduction or anything, he's just there all of a sudden. The byproduct of this is perhaps something a bit mock-heroic or anti-climactic about his arrival. He's also delivering a kind of mealy-mouthed action hero "one-liner" that's stretched into two panels because it's so complex and rambling, which is pretty funny.

The satire shifts here to Lance. The female character is speaking reason or perhaps I should say, "reason". She's basically pointing out that a basic trope of comics heroes is pretty silly: That it isn't enough to simply save the person, the villain or aggressor must be decimated. Miller mocks Lance Blastoff's excess.

Lance is just an unaware, macho douche here. His reasons for killing the T-rex are to eat it apparently. Perhaps something of a joke on the justification many hunters make for killing animals ("I'm going to eat it"), which is respectable but also pretty dopey because like dude, it isn't the caveman days, you're just feeding your ego playing hunter/gatherer. The really funny stuff in this panel though is the bizarro sound effect ("Spam"?!) and the fact that Lance is like, shooting a mini-WMD into the dinosaur's mouth. The female character's attitude is once again shifting to hystericism: "You fiend! You monster! Stop!"

The T-rex exploding in a very awesome comic book way. But again, there's a sense of reality to it, as the T-rex is contorting in pain. Miller's playing the classic comics grammar game but he's twisting it subtly, hedging the ra-ra blow-em-up stuff a bit.

Miller as Douglas Sirk here. Look at those expressionistic colors and crazy shadows as she cries into her arm. Then, there's Lance, off of the page, unfazed by the woman's emotional outburst or really anything, telling her once she tastes dinosaur meat, she'll change her mood. Lance is the obnoxious dad at the 4th of July BBQ mocking his newly-vegetarian goth girl daughter.

Notice that Miller's economy stops when it comes to more sensory type stuff. The dinosaur biting the car, the dinosaur blowing up, and now, the woman smelling the cooking dinosaur meat takes up multiple panels.

More Sirk. She perks up, her tears and worry and supposed values are slowly floating away and the smell of fresh meat takes over.

The red and black color scheme, the attention to her breasts, her hands near her crotch, it seems like Miller's adding some like, weirdo sexual attraction to this bizarre turn of events. This is basically confirmed in the story's climax, with groan-inducing references to "real meat."

With that "CHOMP" a parallel's drawn between the dinosaur's base desires and the female character's here. This is the conceit of the comic really, that the female character's denying the universe's immutable thirst for violence and will-to-power.

More "CHOMP"s. Lance standing proudly as the female character's is head inside of the T-rex's leg (which is like a chicken leg) and she lets out some orgasmic moans of "yes...Yes!" Despite Miller creating a fairly complex or atypical female character here, he's shifting into pretty basic, painfully obvious parodies of feminism and feminists: That they deny their desires, that they've asexualized themselves, that they just need a good man to change them. Miller's aware he's doing this and parodying that attitude, but he's not exactly deconstructing it. I think Miller knows why that's problematic, but think it's true or closer to true than the wimpy counter perspective.

Look at how Miller changes her whole look in this panel. She's kinda stoned-looking and evil. She's turned into a femme-fatale (Miller's favorite image of a woman it seems) and she's rejecting all the ideals she spouted in the previous panels. It's at this point that Miller's satire sorta goes off-the-rails or rather, it enters pure Frank Miller territory where it stops making sense or loses all of its nuance and is just sorta malicious and dumb. The strength I think of the story is the satire of the female character's blindness towards reality (seeing the dinosaurs and nature as pure and untainted, even when it attacks her), but Miller turns it into like, worldview-confirming, dream-fulfilling weirdness by having the female character not only be dead wrong about how the world works, but ultimately, on the same page as Lance. She isn't just incorrect, her core being is in-tune with Lance Blastoff.

More kinda sexual imagery. The romance comics-esque embrace, the red and black, the anti-feminist declaration, "a real man."

Miller kinda saves himself with this final panel because it's just so goofy and hilarious and once more, shifts the satire to Lance Blastoff's moronic moralizing and over-simplication. This was hardly a comic about why kids should eat lots of meat, right? It's kinda tacked on which is really funny. Also, it did nothing to confirm the benefits of meat or whatever, it just takes them as a given and spends most of its time mocking a wimpy, tree-hugging-ass bitch who eventually comes to her sense and loves um, "real meat". Miller's aware of this and he's kinda having it both ways, mocking Lance's sloganeering and over-the-top macho, but finding just as much, and maybe a bit more wrong with the character that's the antithesis of Lance.

Frank Miller Week: Miller and Gravity's Rainbow

If I had been involved in the decision making which resulted in Frank Miller's commission to illustrate the cover for a new edition of Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, Miller's would likely not have been the first name to come to my mind. Rick Veitch, whose Maximortal, like Gravity's Rainbow, considers some of the dangers inherent in the use of comic book heroes as propaganda, seems an obvious choice. Robert Crumb is another. But sometimes the obvious is not the best, particularly when dealing with a writer as intentionally diversionary as Pynchon.

But leaving aside for the moment Miller's suitability for the job, it is important to point out that comics are really central to what Pynchon does in Gravity's Rainbow. The book is too damned long and complicated to get into an extended discussion of what happens, but it is enough to know that it largely takes place in Western Europe during the final months of the Second World War and is concerned in varying degrees with the German V-2 rocket program, race and imperialism, with a healthy dose of scatology and buggery mixed in.

The novel's ostensible hero, Lt. Tyrone Slothrop, discovers that a map that he keeps of his sexual conquests in and about London matches precisely with a map of sites targeted by German rockets—Slothrop always comes before the bombs. This leads him to discover that he may have been programmed at birth by a secret cabal of Fascist occultists, known as PISCES, to play some part in the creation of the Raketestadt (Rocket State). Along the way he temporarily assumes the identity of Rocketman, instrument of Raketestadt propaganda, then joins the quixotic quest of the Floundering Four, heroes of the preterite, and is eventually deconstructed and left to languish in a sort of postmodern version of the Negative Zone.

Miller's decision to rely on minimalistic, negative imagery nestled in a wildly entropic background is pretty much dead on. Pynchon employs images of sexual violence and scatology in order to convey Nazi propagandists' version of the threat posed by inferior races. Moreover, he does not shy away from the phallic association of rockets—they are more or less the massive steel penises with which the Raketestadt buggers the degenerates of the world. Thus, Miller's stark rocket stenciled into a background of Pollock-y drips and smears conveys pretty succinctly Gravity's Rainbow's barrage of great white dicks smearing about in shit, semen and the ashes of bombed-out cities.


What is doubly interesting about this illustration is that it turns out that Miller returned to the image of a rocket, nosecone down and foregrounded by Superman, on the variant cover of All-Star Batman & Robin the Boy Wonder #4, thus implicitly associating that maligned series with Pynchon's almost universally praised novel. Bizarre though that may sound, when considered in this context, it goes a lot to explain Miller's conception of Superman and the relationship between Superman and Batman in this and his other Batman books. Superman, though ostensibly subjecting himself to the rules and norms of his adoptive planet, is not of our world and is in a position of superiority over humans in pretty much every sense that matters. He thus aligns quite neatly with the propagandistic hero of the elect as envisioned by the psychopaths at PISCES. Batman, on the other hand, is the hero of the preterite. He spends his time in Gotham's slums, wrestling with pimps and defending prostitutes. His day job as billionaire playboy Bruce Wayne is nothing more than a distasteful cover, which allows him to live his real life, wallowing about in the city's piss and shit, unmolested.

But while Gravity's Rainbow is perhaps the incredibly cumbersome key to this portion of Miller's oeuvre, this is still the guy who is ostensibly going to launch Holy Terror! on the world. Though, as with much of Miller's more controversial work, this is perhaps not as contradictory as it might seem. While Pynchon was clearly aware of the potential dangers of comic book propaganda, he was also demonstrably anti-Fascist and it would be difficult to argue that he would have opposed the propagandistic aims of many World War II-era comics.

Frank Miller Week: Jurassic Park Cover

"To the left, to the left" is where Beyonce is going to move all your shit when you do wrong. Why left? Most human left hands are non-dominant and religions often revere the right hand/side of the body. So, I guess the left is the less significant side. But we read from LEFT to right. This Frank Miller cover for Jurassic Park plays on our reading from left to right, but because this is such a minimal cover, I feel it's also using the left side to increase the scare-factor. When you first look at the cover, your eyes impulsively go left and follow the dinosaur body down to the human body in its mouth. Your eye hits the body last, as its not even the center point of the image. The right always gets the last word when we're reading, it's where our eyes stop or pause and this cover suggests: Dinosaurs: 1. Human Race: 0.

To texturize the skin of the dinosaur and to shade the human, Miller employs chunky, sharp-edged sections of black. This kind of sectioning-off reminds me of Miller disciple Mike Mignola's work more than Miller's own work, but it's a clever trick to the eye, as the same blocky shading/texturizing is present on the back of the dinosaur and the human (the wrinkles in his clothes are especially well-done and strange). The background is a little cheap, using a muted contrast with variations of orange and green in the dinosaur (rather than red), while also looking like a wall your mom decided to sponge-paint back in 1994. Perhaps it's the result of an old veteran like Miller having to confront digital art and computer coloring.

But the most annoying aspect of this cover is the blocking lines around the edges of the picture. These would work to better balance and improve composition of the image if they were on the right rather than on the same side as beginnings of the T-rex body. I guess the lines may be there for a textual reason on the completed cover. Like most work from Frank Miller. it's complex and conflicted, nearly schizophrenic and despite its flaws, the cover remains a success because it doesn't look traditional (which is eye grabbing) and it serves its purpose: to make the dinosaur the focus and not the humans--which is what Jurassic Park is all about.

Frank Miller Week: Miller's Gummy Politics

Kinda bouncing off what David said about Miller and Moore--or even, Miller vs. Moore--one of the most baffling aspects of comics fandom and comics criticism (which are more of less, one in the same) is the unquestioned love of both Frank Miller and Alan Moore, often by the same people. If you're actually reading these works, there's really no way to be "a fan" of both of them.

Sure, one can appreciate both artists and enjoy reading their stuff, but I've met too many people that list both of these guys as their favorites and don't really seem to grasp the themes, ideas, and politics behind the work. Moore is your kinda classic bohemian liberal, tinged with the nihilism and knowingness that many aging left-leaning idealists have. Miller's essentially a hard-line Libertarian and in recent years, especially post-9-11 (which is something that's really infected his rhetoric in pretty much every interview) perhaps something of a nutty, FOX News-style Neo-Con. The only thing they have in common is a very fashionable cynicism.

Last year, Sean T. Collins over at Robot6 "Frank Miller, conservative comment-thread commentator" pointed out Miller's comments on a Conservative message board. This was interesting not only because it was a quasi-private discussion in public from a comics legend, but because it's a tangible confirmation of where Miller "stands". If you read them, he's sometimes nutty, sometimes smart, usually conflicted--and that's great.

Now no one's surprised that Miller's something of a conservative, but that point is often ignored or used as part of the comics nerd in-joke that Frank Miller's essentially, over time, lost his fucking mind. To contrast with his supposed right-wing turn, we're reminded of Superman as Reaganite goon in The Dark Knight, Miller's work with the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, or black feminist superheroine Martha Washington. And his conservatism's used to explain why All-Star Batman is retarded. And to parse-out the roots of the movie 300's propagandistic qualities. And to mock the apparently no-longer having much to do with Batman, "superhero vs. Al Quaeda" comic Holy Terror!.

The thing is, these two supposed "sides" of Miller say more about the way many perceive the right, than anything about Miller. Like Christopher Hitchens, who took a supposed "right turn" after 9-11, it's more the result of readers reading what they wanted to read in the guy's work and assuming a grand, over-arching political understanding because of some key issues in common. Indeed, Miller's work has always been informed by a rarefied mix of Nationalism and Libertarianism. Miller's a smart guy, he's hardly a knee-jerk like most actively liberal comics artists, and he's well aware of the full extent of his politics, and is comfortable taking them to their logical, complex, sometimes not-so-pretty end. With superhero comics, that's pretty much always the uneasy attraction and repulsion we have towards vigiliante-ism. This is something I'm going to work out in some longer pieces later on, but I'd encourage everyone who's been so skeptical of Miller's recent work, to go back and look at his older work and finds the connections.

Frank Miller Week!

Why Frank Miller week? Why not. Though we usually try to wrap our theme weeks around some current comics event, it seemed appropriate to tackle the quasi-grizzled, bat-shit crazy, mainstream comics game-changer without thinking about it too much. Miller is also of course, the big, looming figure over smart-dumb comics and there can never really be enough analysis and argument about his work. The guy's both incredibly overrated and incredibly underrated. Loved by "entry-level" comics fans and enlightened fans surrounded by whiteboxes of 70s Marvel, and fundamentally misread by both of those groups, Frank Miller's exactly the kind of figure we're all attracted to over on this blog. So, all this week we're going-in on Frank Miller. Should be fun. Use that "comment" button and join in, and provide links to any pieces you've written (or end up writing) if you're moved to do so.

Powerful Panels: Corpse Debris in Big Guy & Rusty

You read Big Guy & Rusty quick. In part because it's brevity kinda dares you to gulp it down in one sitting and in part, because it's basically an extended action sequence, with a ton of incidental dialogue. It's easy to read. It could be a word-less comic and work just fine.

And art-wise, Geoff Darrow's obsession with detail, has the strange effect of making you actually move through it faster. You trust Darrow's detail and though you could stop and stare into any of the pages for twenty minutes, you totally don't have to, to get what's going on. The details work on a subliminal level, they're not messy or confusing, so you like, absorb them by osmosis.


So, on an initial reading of Big Guy, you might whiz by the panel above, stopping to read the comic book villain declaration ("FOOLS!") and register the image as an explosion of debris--the accidental result of a bunch of maybe too forward-thinking scientists (there's Miller's Conservativism for you) recreating "the primordial ooze"--and leave it at that. But what you'd be missing is that a significant amount of the debris flying through the air are indeed, human bodies.

Besides it just being a particularly gruesome detail, it's a very realistic one. Giving some visual time to the carnage often passed over in those old Godzilla movies and in big, Hollywood action/event pictures..and the news when it's covering real-life violence and devastation. Darrow's clearly a nut--in the best sense of the word--and obsessed with the fun and insanity comics can create, but his eye for not only detail, but near-photo-realistic detail moves even his most comic book work into something very grounded in the real-world. The image, humans as debris, flying through the air no different than the pieces of building, invoked the specific, in-the-moment, broadcasted on TV horrors of September 11th...and the subsequent, sincere though problematic focus on those horrors.

Though it often leaned more towards rubbernecking, the insincere sincerity of "the human interest story", there was indeed, a heart-felt attempt by the nation at-large to feel empathy with those stuck in the buildings. To put ourselves in their shoes even though we knew there's just no way to grasp even a tenth of the confusion and everything else going on that morning. Frankly though, most of these attempts, on a public scale failed miserably. News reporters and journalist forcing narratives and melodrama onto a situation that was sheer chaos if you were in the buildings or on one of the planes. The movie United 93 is a particularly self-righteous, quasi-"objective" example. The interest with the 9-11 "jumpers" is another.

A kind of sicko web meme, the story of those that chose to jump instead of burn or be crushed is deeply moving and cuts to a kind of core, awesomely horrible issue of contingency and morality that we rarely have to face; a choiceless choice. Death or death. Still, the interest in the jumpers was putting a human face--or really, human body--onto what was more likely, a giant mass of faces and bodies...and metal and stone and steel. Darrow does a similar thing, taking the time to insert flailing human bodies into a explosive, destructive action scene.

The difference though, is of course 9-11 really happened and honing-in on certain images and events, didn't magnify the tragedy, it dulled it. Focusing on the jumpers seemed to be a kind of coping mechanism--an intellectualized, particularly extreme example that's therefore understandable. 9-11 in a single photo, but not the obvious photo (of the buildings blowing up) we're much too cool for that. The falling man was taken to even greater extremes when Jonathan Safran-Foer, a fairly loathsome twee-hipster author, culminated his 9-11 novel Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close with a flip-book of one of the jumpers, the sequence of images reversed, so that the jumper leaps upward. Ugh.

Darrow's panel here helps erase the intellectualized over-contextualization of the 9-11 and 9-11 jumpers and all that, bringing the visceral images and horrors of the event--and the specific like, sub-horror of the jumpers--back to their no-words, "can you even fucking imagine it" simplicity. That it comes from a comic made six years before the event is a healthy reminder that the sort of horrors of September 11th, though sometimes less politically loaded, occur all over the world all the time...even in Frank Miller's cartoonized vision of Industrialized Japan.

It's oddly appropriate that there's a distinctly "September 11th"-invoking image in a comic as fun and aggressively violent and American and jingoistic as Frank Miller and Geoff Darrow's Big Guy & Rusty the Boy Robot. Reading this along with 300, you're reading Miller in his final steps of transition--from a kinda cynical, skeptic Liberatarian to a Limbaugh/O'Reilly-esque right-leaning nihilist.

Remember that pill-popping, Nam' vet psycho Nuke from Daredevil: Born Again? Well now, it seems like Miller would write that character without the satire. It's symbolic that his 9-11/terrorism comic Batman: Holy Terror! is forever-delayed--the politics of the Right since 9-11 have been bouncing up and down and all around, twisting and turning, retro-fitted to the latest spin or flat-out lie. By the time it's drawn and written, who knows if the spiel Miller's giving readers will still align with the G.O.P's.

All that said, Miller's still a total legend and because there's a weird tension between satire and sincerity in a lot of his work, there's a great deal to unpack and figure out. Especially in Big Guy, which has all the xenophobia of 300 but frames it in a more fun and self-mocking style: Bubbling over with Darrow's insane art and wrapped around an updated Godzilla movie conceit. A strangely perfect comic to wrestle with 9-11 through...

Head Shots: Hard-Boiled & Sgt. Rock

When it comes to violence, there's very specific kind of superficiality at-hand in even the best and smartest movies that usually doesn't apply in comics. This is maybe best exemplified in the image Jesse talked about in his Powerful Panels post, the back-of-the-head exit-wound, the kind of violent image that can pretty much only be done in comics.

Explicitly, there's a cap on how much and how gruesome violence can be in a movie. Violence can be shown and violence can be shown realistically to a certain point and that certain point often stops at the all-too-real exit wound. There's a jagged kind of beauty to the slow-motion violence of Peckinpah or the infamous shoot-out finale of Arthur Penn's Bonnie & Clyde, but it still works within the constraints of not making the violence too-much, too-real, as to remind viewers too much of their innate fragility and morality.

Psychologically too, there's probably something in our brains that makes it more immediately rewarding and gratifying to see images related to entrance (or let's be obvious about it: penetration) than to exit. Also, damage to the face is especially disturbing because that damage alters our most "identifiable" feature and the blowing-out of the brains strips the person or character of their capacity for personal thought, another thing we hold dear and maintain, makes us an individual.

There's also a kind of conventional film grammar violation when the back of a person's head is shown. Movies have certainly shied away from the old Hollywood era of constant close-ups, but films are still about faces, even when they're shown punched up with bullets. Rarely ever will a movie reveal a bullet's exit from Otomo's angle, in part because it's particularly gruesome and also logistically, it's a rather hard thing to pull off, even with special effects. And so, doing what Otomo did in that panel violates the rule of how far violence can go and the more immediate rule of conventional dramatic impact rooted in audience identification with the character.

Think of how often older Westerns--the ones that actually are racist, not the ones people misread as racist--often show the Native American characters from the back; it's a trick done in jingoistic World War II movies as well. As a rejection and attempt to complicated film grammar,New German cinema director Werner Herzog, when questioned on placing actress Isabelle Adjani away from the camera for a particularly emotional scene, simply said: "I don't want to see the actress cry. I want to see the audience cry." A rejection of Hollywood and its melodramatic techniques.


To show the back of a character's head--as Herzog does--and to show a bullet exiting the head--as Otomo does--is something of an affront to many things we hold dear about self and identity. The exit-wound head-shot is gruesome and scary and because it's so often eschewed in films, it's shocking. This is of course, what that scene in Akira is all about, Kaneda's shocked at Kei's ability for violence, Kei shocked at her own capacity for violence, and it's all driven home in a frame that highlights the shooting precisely by not looking like every other "guy being shot" comic frame. The simple but for some reason almost-taboo act of reversing the angle does the trick.



In this iconic image from Frank Miller and Geoff Darrow's Hard Boiled, the head shot's taken to outrageous extremes but still, there's a kind of core, gut-level shock of emotion and recognition that comes with staring at that frame. Only a few moments into staring at it does one realize that it's the back of the head and then all the gory details set-in. Sure, it's fun and delightfully over the top, but it also has the same effect of seeing a particularly mangled deer carcass on the side of the road. You're okay when it's just a dead lump, but if like, a lot of blood or some rib-cage sticks out, it's way more disturbing. Darrow's picture reminds any thoughtful comics reader that flesh can be torn open quite easily, that our brains will drip, and our teeth just sit dumbly in our mouths. Darrow also adds a kind of meta level to the image, as the viewer is the one Nixon speaks to, through the hole in the guy's head and the "Sorry, I'm late." line is a kind of apology to readers that waited much too long for the oft-delayed third issue of the series.
Kyle Baker's cover to Special Forces #2 is an obvious homage to Darrow's classic image but also a kind of one-upping in terms of shock value. The head with the gun blast hole in it is Mickey Mouse's and while this has less of the immediate reality that we're flesh and bone feeling to it, it fucks with us on the level of this iconic hero of our childhood's just been blown up. Baker even flirts with Darrow's highly-rendered, mortality-realizing detail by giving us the blood edges around the blast but nothing more, presumably because Mickey's a cartoon character.
In a return to relative subtlety, there's this image from issue #3 of Joe Kubert's Sgt. Rock: The Prophecy series. Sergeant Rock has been captured by Nazis who quickly realize conventional interrogation isn't going to work, and so, in hopes to get him to talk, he's smacked with the butt of a rifle in one frame and then, held down and punched in the next few. In the second to last image on the page, Kubert reverses the "angle" as Rock's being pummeled and reveals a rather disturbing gash--the result of the rifle butt--on the back of Rock's head. Kubert does the odd but somehow perfect effect of covering the light red specks of blood with a violent slash of black ink, drops of it splattered down to Rock's neck. The black ink doesn't make any realistic sense here, but it's the perfect choice for jarring the reader into the reality of Rock's current situation. While analogous in some ways to the Otomo image, it's also significantly more self-conscious and over-the-top than Otomo and in that sense, has some connection to Darrow and Baker's images.

While I began this piece with a rather disparaging discussion of film and the conventionality of film grammar, I'd like to end it by looking at what may be the film equivalent of comics' head shots: blood on the the lens. Realistically, it's pretty impossible for a movie to show an exit wound without the aid of CGI, but the odd effect of having some blood splatter onto the camera might be the closest thing. It's an easy trick that gives the illusion of a bullet's motion and impact and like Darrow, Baker, and Kubert, because the self-conscious act is so over the top, it actually makes image more emotional and more real, even as it calls attention to the artificiality of itself. A particularly fascinating use of this effect is in Andrew Dominik's The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.


The scene's crucial to the character of Robert Ford because it is the first person he kills and will in many ways, mirrors his murder of Jesse later. The blood on the lens turns the scene a little surreal and marks it as particularly significant or transcendent for the character.

Better Than List Pt. 2 Batman: Year 100 > Batman: The Dark Knight Returns

When Batman: The Dark Knight Returns came out, it was an instant success. It changed the way people look at the Batman character and comics in general. It solidified Batman as a dark character closer to his 1930s incarnation, and helped usher in the era of "dark and gritty" super heroes. Other than it’s importance to the history of comics though, Dark Knight just really isn't that good. The story telling is blunt and Miller focuses too much on needless narration. Batman: Year 100 has many of the same themes but complicates them further.

In many ways Year 100 is almost a direct response to Dark Knight. Year 100’s title is a reference to Batman: Year One, another Batman work by Miller. The cover of the trade paperbacks are also strikingly similar. There are visual cues mimicking Dark Knight like panels of lightning strikes and Batman hanging from wires and ropes. Pope probably meant these to be an homage to Miller but the book's themes and style are closer to a critique than a homage.

The critique begins with how the two books deal with Batman and Bruce Wayne. Dark Knight has Bruce Wayne as a man who is deeply disturbed to the point of insanity. It’s an easy route to take with the character. Of course, someone who suffered such trauma as a child and dresses up like a bat must be insane. Realistically, Miller is probably right, but he plays it for a gimmick and handles it poorly. He shows Wayne constantly having bat-related flashbacks and has him talk about exactly what he is feeling through internal narration.


Miller tears down the myth of Batman by making Bruce Wayne's psychology the central focus of the story and by pinning his psychological problems all onto the pains of the past. Wayne's response to a flood of emotional pain is to become Batman again, and as Batman, Wayne goes looking for physical pain to dull the emotional. Miller ignores Batman’s roots as a detective and has him only focused on the next fight or stewing about his personal demons. Pope uses Batman the detective as an integral part of the story and celebrates his intelligence.

Instead of focusing on the psychological aspect of Batman, Pope looks at the meaning of the Batman mythos in our culture. Pope takes Bruce Wayne mostly out of the equation. In every panel where Batman isn’t wearing his mask, Pope obscures his face. He makes it obvious that it's an intentional choice by going almost to Austin Powers-like lengths to do so. He makes Batman look thirty-something and perform outrageous physical feats but at the same time, he implies that he’s over a hundred years old. It doesn't matter who is behind the mask. What matters is Batman the icon. He's someone that can never get old and remains entirely a mystery in a future world where everyone's life history is stored in a database.

Pope doesn’t focus on it, but the psychology of the character shines through. He makes it clear that Batman doesn’t feel comfortable without his costume on and takes a joy out of putting in fake teeth and looking grotesque. The big difference between their psychologies is that Miller’s Bruce Wayne is focused on himself while Pope’s is focused outwardly. When Pope’s Batman makes demands of Robin and his support team, it’s always on what he needs to get the job done and not because of the trauma of his past. Batman even meditates in a scene in Year 100 and when he does, it's not to calm his spirit but to recall events of the crime scene that he's witnessed.


Miller seems concerned with taking-on and destroying all aspects of the Batman continuity. He shows us all the minor Bat characters and how they’ve become old, cynical, or dead. Even Superman makes an appearance as a poster boy for the United States government. Each comic deals with the character of Superman in a different way. In many ways, the treatment of Superman symbolizes the thematic core of each book even better than Batman. Dark Knight takes the stance that one might argue in middle or high school: "Superman is lame because he can never be hurt and Batman is cool because he’s a real guy like you and me!". It takes a kind of smug, fanboy glee in seeing Superman defeated and outmatched at the hands of Batman.

Although he doesn’t have a large role, Year 100 shows Superman as an icon of hope. A child hands Batman a toy of Superman seemingly passing that hope along as Batman is left speechless by the gesture. Having Superman appear as a child’s toy still subtly hints that maybe the character is a little childish and that Batman makes a more interesting character, but this is a secondary point to Pope's point that Superman is a symbol of hope unlike Miller whose interest is cynically tearing-down Superman.

The books are opposites when it comes to layout and design. Dark Knight tends to read more like a book than a comic and is a mess of words and panels floating in space. It’s layout and verbosity makes it difficult to read, something non-comics readers tend to confuse with depth. It uses language to pretend to be intellectual and confuses a dark tone with complexity. Its pretensions to intellectualism are a big reason why it’s popular with critics and fans that were desperate for more complicated super hero comics. Pope knows how to use the page layout to his advantage and doesn’t use excessive text to slow down his stories. The first line of dialogue isn’t spoken until page seven. He uses a cinematic style that shows the reader just as much as pages of dialogue could. Miller's layout calls attention to itself being needlessly dense and heavy handed much like his writing. Pope makes his layout focused on the art and simply shows you the images and lets you decide where to stand.