Frank Miller took Daredevil to New Heights/Depths

Daredevil: Gangwar! – Frank Miller (1981)

            These times of pandemic sequestration and isolation give a great opportunity to re-discover old favorites unread for too many years.  While digging through my older comic books I came across Daredevil: Gangwar!, a trade paperback from the mid-1980’s that collected a Frank Miller-penned and illustrated run of Daredevil issues which have since become iconic, and from which much of the current Daredevil lore is drawn, including the interesting but flawed television series of a few years back.

            These issues were published between 1981 and 1982.  Until the mid-80’s it was very uncommon for Marvel to reprint comics as trade paperbacks.  I am glad they did, because it makes for great reading when an entire story arc is bound in one volume.  I found this in a bookstore sometime around 1986, and I remember vividly how brutal and raw the story was compared to the other comic books I read at the time which consisted of large, operatic stories involving whole galaxies or the destruction of the Universe.

Daredevil’s world was much smaller, dirtier, and scary.  It was a gritty dose of realism in a world of archetypal superheroes. I was maybe 13-14 years old, and Frank Miller’s take on Daredevil and the world he inhabits made a big impression.  At the time I did not know who Frank Miller was.  I had yet to read his seminal Dark Knight Returns comics.  All I knew was that the artwork in these Daredevil issues was something visually new, and that the writing was hard-boiled in the extreme.

Daredevil is a local crime-fighter.  He patrols a dilapidated area of New York called Hell’s Kitchen, seeking to protect the vulnerable and innocent from the ravages and horrors to be found in poor and neglected areas of wealthy cities.  He defended them by day in his alter-ego of Matt Murdock, attorney at law.  At night he would use his abilities to do what he could, with the constant knowledge that it was likely a futile effort.

In these comics, Frank Miller expands Daredevil’s scope, and his world, by introducing him to one of the most iconic enemies in the Marvel comics universe, The Kingpin.  Daredevil’s work was largely under the radar of the powerful and amoral Kingpin of Crime, Wilson Fisk.  He was normally concerned with much larger issues and situations than Daredevil.  However, once you come into the sights of someone like Wilson Fisk, there is no turning back. 

Daredevil has always been one of the more morally conflicted superhero titles at Marvel Comics.  He does not have the luxury of flying in, saving the day, and then leaving just as quickly.  He lives where he works.  He interacts with those he protects, and with those he fights, regularly.  He knows Hell’s Kitchen, having grown up there, better than anyone else.  If he cannot help people in his costumed form, he does so as a lawyer.  It is an exhausting life full of morally grey choices.  Gangwar! contains several such dilemmas, and it is to Frank Miller’s credit that his dark take on Daredevil is the one that has stuck in the public consciousness and guided the book for the past decades.  I highly recommend this to anyone who enjoyed the Daredevil TV show but wants to get to the real deal, or for anyone who loves a good hard-boiled, gritty story.

Grant Morrison ran out of steam before finishing the Invisibles

The Invisibles Omnibus – Grant Morrison (1994-2000)

            The Invisibles Omnibus collects all the issues released of the Invisibles series which ran from 1994 to 2000.  Compiling comic books like this can be an issue as many are created to be open-ended, allowing the story to continue with new writers and artists indefinitely.  In the early 90’s a wave of comic book writers started to break away from the corporate comic book structure, in which anything created is the sole property and responsibility of the parent company.  They wanted to control, to “own” the content they were creating, without having to resort to the comparatively limited publishing and distribution capabilities of small presses and underground publishers.  This allowed some of the industry’s top people to set up deals with the big publishers, where they would hold the rights to the material and essentially have free rein as to what stories they wished to craft, and where the stories would lead to and ultimately end.  Neil Gaiman took this and ran with it in the Sandman series.  Alan Moore did so as well with a sequence of amazing titles.  One of their contemporaries was Grant Morrison, the British writer that penned the entire run of the Invisibles for the Vertigo imprint.

            Both Moore and Morrison are fringe thinkers, interested in the esoteric, occult, and mysterious in the world we exist in.  Both draw from the mass of occult literature and their own personal studies into the weird to write their stories.  Whereas Alan Moore’s work has a serious, intellectual feel to it, as if you are being told a preposterous story by the world’s wisest man, Grant Morrison’s work is like spending a month with a LSD-addled speed-freak who wants to share everything they have heard/seen/read/experienced regarding the Occult and esoteric, and whose narrative cannot be fully trusted due to the disjointed, haphazard nature of his mind.  It is an odd difference, and one which has divided the two writers.

            The Invisibles is an exciting book, for the most part.  It is an interesting tale, for the most part.  It is clever and witty, for the most part.  Perhaps it would have benefitted me to read just one issue’s worth of it every month like comic book fans have to do.  Since I do not have that luxury of time, I had to read it over the course of a month.  The story, like so many others, builds and builds as we meet new characters, explore their lives, both past, present, and future, and discover countless conspiracies, secrets and horrors, until it comes at you like an onrushing tsunami, unstoppable and violent.  It really does “fry your brain” at times with the vast amount of freaky conspiracy and magic, all with double and triple meanings and outcomes. This tempo and intensity are not sustainable in a work of literature of this length.  The book drags heavily around the ¾ mark, and the ending is nowhere near as inspired as the earlier parts of the book.  Perhaps, having aged many years since he began the work, Grant Morrison’s anarchic sensibility was tempered by time and wisdom.  Who knows?  All I can say is that for all the wild information contained within, I do not see how anyone who was not already deeply familiar with the weirdness presented in this book would enjoy the story, which is the standard “secret society exists to fight another secret society, both of which are mortal enemies of each other, or ARE THEY?”  Boring.

            The Invisibles is one of those works where the creator decided to throw everything including the kitchen sink at the page and see what sticks.  While I was entertained mostly, and informed very slightly (I already knew about nearly every aspect of weird that Morrison details in this book), I was left with an empty feeling.  There is no real substance behind this book.  I do not think it will hold up well as the years go by.  It in fact becomes a tedious read toward the latter parts.  Part of this is due to the inability of Morrison to craft an ending as satisfactory and weird as his beginning and middle, and part of it is due to the lack of cohesive focus in the way the story is presented.

            The very best work is crafted by either an individual or by equal partners who see things through from beginning to end.  The Invisibles did not use the same artist for the run of the comic.  In fact, many issues have 4-6 different illustrators drawing the story, which to me distracts from the tale being told.  Art and the decisions made in the process of making Art require purpose, actual purpose.  Neil Gaiman’s Sandman epic did not use the same artist for every tale, but it did use the same artist for all the cover art, and the same artist for each complete “chapter” of the stories.  This adds a cohesion that is absent in the Invisibles.  The book suffers from this greatly.  Comic books are the ultimate combination of Art and Words.  The very best of the genre is created by dedicated teams.  The Dark Knight Returns was a masterpiece, and it was only helped by the fact that the same writer (Frank Miller), artists (Frank Miller, Klaus Jansen), and colorist (Lynn Varley) handled every panel of every page of every issue.  Alan Moore’s The Watchmen also benefitted greatly from the partnership of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons.  Having the artist and the writer share in the design, layout, and creation of any comic greatly improves it.  

            While there are many cool things in this comic, it never captured me, and I never felt any affinity to any of the characters involved.   Much of it seemed overly complex, and disjointed, for no discernible reason.  Every two pages the story flips from one sub-plot to another, creating a very shitty reading rhythm. It’s like Grant Morrison tried to create magic through a comic book and did so purely by regurgitating every single occult and conspiratorial idea he had ever run into, but without the humor and intelligence of The Illuminatus Trilogy for example, or the deep exploration of history found in Alan Moore’s From Hell, a far more disturbing and beautiful book.  Oh well.  Live and learn.  On to the next book.

(This book can be purchased here:  The Invisibles Omnibus  )

A Sequel to an Old Classic Favorite About The BATMAN!!!!!

The Dark Knight Strikes Again – Frank Miller (2002)

            When I was in middle school, I remember seeing advertisements for a mail-order-only special mini-series comic book called the Dark Knight Returns.  As I was a young kid with a tiny allowance, I never purchased them, but when they were collected as a trade paperback I went and got that bad boy and it immediately became my favorite comic book.  I was always a huge Batman fan and to see this story of an old, washed up crime-fighter who comes back to wreck shop on the unsuspecting criminals of Gotham City was awesome.  Frank Miller’s hard-boiled (before Sin City) story and his artwork blew me away.

            Over 15 years later, Frank Miller wrote and illustrated a follow-up to the Dark Knight.  The world of comic books had absorbed his earlier work, along with such classics as Alan Moore’s Watchmen and Miller’s own work on the Sin City stories, so the freshness of a superhero comic book story not aimed at children was gone.  Miller was still up to the task of crafting propulsive stories for the dark knight detective however.

            I did not read the Dark Knight Strikes Again right away, as I was of the mindset that the original was a self-contained masterpiece and to fuck with it would just diminish it.  In that time, I had also stopped reading the monthly comics, and missed the change from hand colored artwork to computer coloring.  While the same colorist, Lynn Varley, did both books, the original was greatly enhanced by the amazing watercolor skills that Varley used to create an original atmosphere for Miller’s drawings.  This second volume was colored digitally, and I originally found it too garish and ”cartoony” to get into reading the story.  I am glad I got over that shit!  One other thing that is missing is the ink work of Klaus Janson, whose delicate penmanship added so much detail to Frank Miller's pencil drawings.  He would have really helped the visual look of this second book.

            Re-reading this book, I find that the story is still as convoluted and dense and frantic as before, which I love.  The artwork is nearly as good as the original, but it is evident in the lack of background details in the panels that Miller rushed this into production.  The younger Miller obsessed over every single detail in the backgrounds of each panel, adding a claustrophobic sense to the reading experience.  Too many panels here use simple color washes as backgrounds.  I still find the coloring too intense and distracting, but I think it suits the nature of this sequel, making it seem more “modern” by comparison to the original. 

            These “Dark Knight” stories by Frank Miller do not exist in the same continuum that the DC Batman comic books do.  They are tales of a possible future for the Dark Knight.  In doing this, Miller unintentionally started the craze of alternate timelines in comics, where different X-men teams live in different dimensions and have different members, for example.  I like to imagine that Miller’s Dark Knight tales are the true end of Batman/Bruce Wayne, and I hope to be pleasantly surprised by the third installment which should be on bookshelves soon. 

            Oh, one more thing.  Batman is NOT a superhero.  Superheroes by definition have super-human abilities/powers, and Batman has none of these.  He is just a human being, immensely smart, immensely wealthy, and immensely obsessed with fighting crime.  While the murder of his parents was a tragedy, it did not force Bruce Wayne to be Batman.  He CHOSE to be Batman, and worked at it until he became the Dark Knight Detective!  In a world of superheroes who got their powers from radioactive canisters, differently-colored solar rays, magic lanterns, and industrial accidents, the Batman stands alone.  Long live Batman.

(This book can be purchased here:  AMAZON  )