UGO's 300 A to Z

Frank Miller is The Man. Not in the "oppressive whitey" sense, but in the "booze, broads and bullets" sense. This is why we like The Man.

Born in Maryland, raised in Vermont and most likely fed nothing but comic books and noir thrillers until his late teens, he moved to the Big Apple and started schlepping around town for work. Frank Miller A self-described teller of yarns, he started out as an artist - perhaps fittingly his first published work was in The Twilight Zone in 1978 - and moved on to some random fill-in work and cover art. After he did a couple of issues of "Spectacular Spider-Man" that guest-starred a certain other red-clad superhero, he was on his way to becoming pretty much the only reason anyone gives a damn about Daredevil today.

Daredevil had been relegated to Aquaman status at the time - popular enough to merit his own book, but not enough to actually sell copies of it. So it was easy for Jim Shooter, Marvel's Editor-in-Chief at the time, to take a chance on letting Our Man Frank become the regular artist. It paid off immediately. Giving Daredevil his noirish style, it was received so well that it's become synonymous with the character nowadays. That was only reinforced once Miller took over full-time writing duties ten issues later. You can't tell shiny, happy Daredevil stories anymore, because they don't exist. Dare Devil His first solo issue of Daredevil also brought us Elektra Natchios, the Mexican appetizer/Greek assassin that would eventually be the touchstone of Miller's Daredevil. She quickly became popular, which made it all the more potent when he decided to kill her off.

By the end of his run on Daredevil, Frank Miller had arrived. He handled the art chores for the first Wolverine solo miniseries, with then-X-God and current X-Oh-God! Chris Claremont writing, and that took off. DC Comics then let him do the manga-inspired Ronin, his first creator-owned project, before he got a hold of Batman. Things would never be the same.

1986. The Dark Knight Returns. No looking back.
The Dark Night Returns It was a critically adored re-imagining of Batman, who at that point was mostly Adam West, as the grim and gritty Dark Knight, coming out of retirement to take on a Gotham City overrun with crime and a Superman that's become a government stooge. Zowie! It's constantly referenced in the same breath as that other 1986 masterpiece, Alan Moore's Watchmen, as the two projects that turned "comic books" into "graphic novels." They completely shattered the preconceptions of what the art form could be, and they inspired a cavalcade of awesomeness right alongside a colossal avalanche of godawful knockoffs.

Miller followed this up with Daredevil: Born Again, which reinvented the enmity between the Man Without Fear and the Kingpin, and then Batman: Year One, which reshaped the origin for the Caped Crusader. That would be the last work he did for DC for years, though, after a brouhaha over the Comics Code Authority. Censoring Frank Miller is just a bad idea, kids. Read your Archie Comics and leave him alone. Elektra After finishing up the Elektra: Assassin miniseries, he went to work with Dark Horse Comics, and this became the breeding ground for all his personal projects. He'd still dabble with Daredevil and Elektra, but Dark Horse was his home. Thus came Hard Boiled, which was pretty much an over-the-top violent satire of all of the aforementioned godawful knockoffs that were prominent in the deluge of bad 90s comics sadly claiming to be inspired by Miller and Moore. Give Me Liberty and the subsequent Martha Washington stories drove the point home that it takes more than giant guns, ugly headwraps and an overabundance of pouches to tell a good, poignant story. Robocop One cannot speak of Frank Miller without speaking of Robocop. He wrote the scripts for both Robocop 2, an entertaining sequel to the original masterpiece, and Robocop 3, an appalling travesty. This experience completely soured him on Hollywood, and he swore it off after having far too much studio interference with his work. Welcome to Tinseltown. The bright side is that, over a decade later, his original Robocop 2 script was adapted to comic book form, and you can now read Frank Miller's Robocop. There's a lot of cleavage in it. Sin City would eventually change Frank's mind about the whole thing. He spent most of the 90s spinning yarns about life in the seedy underworld of Basin City in his stark black and white übernoir style, and the stories slowly became more and more bombastic in content. Robert Rodriguez dragged Miller back to feature films after showing him that it was possible to make a movie that was true to his vision, and the result was Mickey Rourke covered in silly putty and Jessica Alba playing a stripper who wouldn't take her top off. But other than that, 'twas visually arresting and pretty damn true to the books.

300 came about in 1998, and is such an epic story of testosterone-fueled war drama that it seemed tailor-made for him. With the success of the Sin City film, he was apparently cured of his Hollywood-phobia, and thus, there's an extremely faithful movie version now with a similar overtly-stylized tone. 300 Miller has gone on record as not liking too much reality in his comic stories. This could explain what he did when he finally came back to Batman. Specifically, The Dark Knight Strikes Back, the long-anticipated and critically-disappointing sequel to The Dark Knight Returns. The tone is much more flamboyant and unbelievable, and he's currently taking that a step further in his All-Star Batman and Robin series, which is ostensibly "year one" of the Batman he established in DKR, but really must be a form of self-parody. Or so one hopes.

How else can you explain Dick Grayson, having just seen his whole family die in front of him, ask Batman who he's supposed to be, and having the Caped Crusader respond "What, are you, dense? Are you retarded or something? Who the hell do you think I am? I'm the goddamned Batman."

The fact that his next comic project is supposed to be Batman vs. Al-Qaeda is a bit disconcerting. However, his next film project (outside of the planned Sin City sequels) might give more reason to hope. He's signed on to write and direct an adaptation of Will Eisner's "The Spirit," a 1940s detective who fights crime in a suit, a fedora and a domino mask. It has the potential to be smack dab up Miller's alley, and chances are he has enough respect for Eisner's work that he won't go too far over-the-top with it.

In the meantime, however, enjoy the hell out of 300, the best two hours a straight man can spend watching shirtless musclemen fighting each other in elaborate costumes, outside of Monday Night Raw.