“I don’t want to wipe out chapters of my own biography. There are places where it is bloodthirsty beyond belief.”ĭoes he have any regrets? “I don’t want to go back and start erasing books I did,” he replies. When I look at Holy Terror, which I really don’t do all that often, I can really feel the anger ripple out of the pages. “Whenever I look at any of my work I can feel what my mindset was and I remember who I was with at the time. “My stuff always represents what I’m going through,” Miller says today. Maybe, between bouts of self-pity and all the other tasty tidbits of narcissism you’ve been served up in your sheltered, comfy little worlds, you’ve heard terms like al-Qaida and Islamicism.” Miller was again branded a reactionary. America is at war against a ruthless enemy. That same year, Miller went on a tirade against the Occupy Wall Street movement, describing it in a blog as “a pack of louts, thieves, and rapists … Wake up, pond scum. In one scene, the hero tortures a suicide bomber as his Catwomanish girlfriend observes that she’s “OK with that.” It’s just one of the book’s many other acts of gory revenge on Miller’s Muslims, who stone and behead people and scream, “Praise Allah!” Readers and critics responded with bafflement and anger one critic called it “one of the most appalling, offensive and vindictive comics of all time”. In 2011, he published what he called “a propaganda comic”: Holy Terror, a gory tale of a caped superhero taking on al-Qaida. Miller’s politics seemed to become more eccentric as his drawing did the same. He bagged another deal, with Netflix and Simon & Schuster, for an Arthurian-themed project called Cursed.įrank Miller in New York, 2018. In March he signed a five-project deal with DC Comics that includes penning a new Superman graphic novel. After a long absence from the public eye, he is suddenly everywhere again. But in conversation he is very clearly not a sociopath: in fact, he is a little anxious and very friendly and eager to talk about all his titanically influential works: Sin City, Batman, Daredevil.
In photos, Miller scowls heavily into the camera, the very image of the kind of grizzled tough he might have drawn in Sin City. “I declared to my parents that I was going to do that for the rest of my life.” He’s wearing a black T-shirt with a drawing of Benedict Cumberbatch as Sherlock Holmes and the words “high-functioning sociopath”, a white beard that makes him look older than his 61 years, and a near-constant smile. “I decided that I wanted to make comic books when I was five years old,” the cartoonist says. A s far back as he can remember, Frank Miller always wanted to draw a gangster.