Frank Miller rescued a failing Daredevil, then remade Batman as an aging vigilante
In 1979 Daredevil was selling so poorly that Marvel kept talking about cancelling it. A young penciller called Frank Miller saw promise in a sightless hero living in a visual medium, took over the scripts as well, and sales rose so quickly that the comic went monthly again within three issues.
Miller was born on January 27, 1957, in Olney, Maryland, and was raised in Montpelier, Vermont, where his mother worked as a nurse and his father as a carpenter and electrician; he was child number five of seven. As a teenage fan he got a letter printed by Marvel in 1973. After moving to New York he showed his samples to Neal Adams, who critiqued them, gave him informal lessons and recommended him to Gold Key. His first confirmed credit arrived in Weird War Tales No. 64 in June 1978.
He started drawing Daredevil with issue No. 158 in May 1979, finishing a storyline scripted by Roger McKenzie. Miller disliked those scripts and almost walked away, until the new editor Denny O'Neil reassigned McKenzie and let Miller write. From No. 168 in January 1981 he handled both words and pencils. That issue introduced Elektra in full, a ninja mercenary who later got her own 2005 film, and Miller gave the hero martial arts training, a blind sensei named Stick and a rival clan called the Hand. The monthly pace forced him to lean on inker Klaus Janson, and by No. 185 he was sending only rough layouts.
The tone kept darkening. In No. 181, dated April 1982, the assassin Bullseye kills Elektra. Miller bowed out with No. 191 in February 1983, the issue he said he was proudest of, then launched Ronin, his first creator-owned series, at DC. In 1986 came The Dark Knight Returns, four squarebound issues on heavy paper in which a retired Batman, now 55, returns to a violent future Gotham, with inks by Janson and colour by Lynn Varley.
Miller describes his style as a cross between film noir and manga, arguing that American comics carried too many words and Japanese ones too few. Sin City followed in 1991, and he later shared directing credit with Robert Rodriguez on its screen version and wrote RoboCop 2 and RoboCop 3. The Will Eisner Award Hall of Fame inducted him in 2015.
Source: Frank Miller
