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.

Let us hope that the Avengers: Civil War film is better than its source material!

The Avengers: Civil War – Mark Millar, Steve McNiven (2007)

            As a life-long reader, I try to avoid watching films adapted from novels or books I have already read, for I am always left disappointed.  Sometimes it is a minor disappointment, such as my small quibbles with the film adaptation of Alan Moore’s Watchmen masterpiece, and other times it is a full-blown disaster where I leave the theater wondering how someone could get the plot of a novel so wrong in adapting it to a movie.  There are a few films that I felt have done true justice to their source material.  One of them is the film version of Vonnegut’s Mother Night, which is as brutal and engrossing as the novel, and Terry Gilliam’s version of Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas, which captured perfectly the sick highs and debauched lows of the book.

            I have never differentiated between high literature and low literature.  Words and stories are all on equal ground to me.  A wonderful comic book can move me and inspire me as much as the most lauded literary classic.  Comic books actually helped introduce me to a wide world of literature that I otherwise would have never explored, from Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories, to Philip K. Dick, to classics such as Robinson Crusoe and Moby Dick, which I first read in their Classics Illustrated form.  Knowing that the upcoming film Captain America Civil War was an adaptation of the Marvel Civil War story-line I read the comic in advance. I would rather experience the original and then compare it to the film than to do that in reverse with the film coloring my view of the comic.

            Having done that, I soon realized that perhaps my thinking was off.  The Avengers: Civil War story-line does not only take place over the course of the 7 titular issues, but is spread out over nearly 80 different Marvel comic titles!  It is an unholy mess that does not live up to expectations, and actually drove me to anger and resentment at having to read superfluous material (Marvel Girl, Young Avengers, etc.) just to gleam that one little bit of information actually relevant to the Civil War story-line.  Because this was essentially a cash grab by Marvel Comics, they planned it so that if one does not read all the peripheral titles the main story-line is damn near incomprehensible.  What a blatant greed-head move.  It does not help that the actual story-line is weak and could have been handled in 3 or 4 issues.  This story was instead spread out over ten months of tedious tie-ins.  (To see the full list of issues included in the Civil War story-line, click here: http://projectfandom.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/Civil-War-Checklist.png )

            Brutal!  I have not even gone into the actual story-line.  It is so weak.  Here goes.  A group of superfluous superheroes films themselves fighting crime for a TV reality show.  In the course of this, the enemy they seek blows himself up, along with 800-900 people in a small town subdivision.  Several hundred of them are children.  This causes uproar nationally and the US government works with Iron Man Tony Stark to create a super-powered beings registration act.  Essentially, the government wants all super beings to register with them and only use their powers and skills at the request of the Federal Government.  Captain America, who has fought for Life, Liberty, and the American Way since World War II, finds this to be fascistic and gathers up superheroes to fight against those who take Iron Man’s side.  Lots and lots of extraneous discussions and random battles take place as all the Marvel heroes take sides in this conflict.  In the end Captain America gives up, not wanting to fight his fellow heroes anymore (after beating the crap out of Iron Man), and is assassinated as he turns himself in.  IT IS FUCKING POINTLESS.  I do not think they kill off Cap in the film. 

            I wrote that story in less than a paragraph, and Marvel stretched it out to over 85 separate issues!  I hope that the movie does a massive edit and removes all this fluff baggage.  I hear it is very well done, and very exciting, so I look forward to seeing it.  However, I cannot recommend this comic series.  If you only read the seven “official” Civil War titles, you will make very little sense of it as a whole.  Trying to dig through 80+ extra titles to find that little bit of info that helps the Civil War story-line continue?  I can’t believe I did it, and I hope you do not.

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  )