It is difficult to find a cartoonist who has had more influence of Frank Miller on the western imagination. The American author born in 1957 still inspires cinema, television series, even video games. If after so many years the masses love Batman is mainly thanks to his reinterpretation of the character in enormous success works, such as the return of the Dark Knight and Batman: Year one. When Miller took him in his hands in the mid -eighties, Batman was, sorry to say it, a bellimbusto in shoes, a grotesque residual of past eras.
Frank reserved for him the same treatment used for Marvel’s Daredevil: He made it an adult, urban, contemporary. Batman was no longer a ridiculous fustacchione who pulled criminal punches in carnival clothes. He was a vigilante full of scars, with heavy hands and tortured heart. Around him, the city was the protagonist. Gotham City – New York, smoky and corrupt, became the main opponent of the bat man and together his most intimate friend. Batman could only exist there, between the miasmas of the manholes and the rigid asphalt, in the stinking alleys of wickedness just illuminated by the sparkling of the signs in the distance. The eighties of the post punk, of Gothic and industrial music seemed the perfect soundtrack for a super hero full of limits and defects, wounded by life, problematic as the monsters he faced, fighting against the nightmares born from his mind and reality. Miller learned from Maestro Neal Adams the art of the most dark comic, he modernized the character and together he brought him back to the origins, to the seminal stories of Bob Kane and Bill Finger who came out from 1939 onwards. Their Batman was frightening and hard as a Faulkner novel. Frank Miller resumed those atmospheres, made them explode. He enhanced the dark and problematic side of his characters but at the same time understood a great truth: we still have and always need heroes.
While other cartoonists, to modernize the great characters of the Comics had tried to desecrate them and take them to the level of the common reader, Frank did the opposite. Of course, Bruce Wayne’s painful humanity (and others) put on paper to reiterate their limits and dark corners. But precisely this humanity made such the heroes: it enhanced their chivalrous companies, still made them models. «The world is full of heroes. The problem is that people are looking for them in wrong people, “Miller said some time ago in an interview granted to Wired. “My mother was a nurse. Tireless in his work. He launched himself without hesitation to stick a needle in the heart of those who had a heart attack. He spent hours with people dependent on drugs. She was heroic. Just as the home mothers are, or all those who sacrifice hours of their lives for others ».
In these few sentences there is the whole universe of Miller. His heroes are exceptional figures not because they are in possession of enormous powers, but because they are equipped with great courage. The comic book Paul Young, a few years ago, published an interesting book entitled Frank Miller’s Daredevil and the End of Heroism. On closer inspection, however, Miller does not make heroism set, on the contrary renews him by showing him for what he is: the ability of every man to overcome himself, his limits and trauma.
We could almost say that Frank is the antidote to the Wake culture and the prevalence of the whining. As fragile, painful and hesitant are his characters, they always find the strength to perform extraordinary businesses. They become – Men and Women – Knights of the modern era. Of course, obscure, because human existence is a mixture of lights and shadows, good and evil, small people and size. In this sense, the US cartoonist can be defined as a conservative. Several times over the years he has been accused of being right (and obviously there would obviously be nothing wrong), especially when he spoke of Islamic terrorism in the graphic novel sacred terror, but in his right and left case they are completely caricatured categories, superfluous. If there is conservatism in Miller, it is all in the aspiration to a chivalric and heroic ideal, which however is within everyone’s reach and therefore perfectly democratic. His heroes are also weak and losers, not just gym in costume. All this is perfectly visible in the stories of the Sin City cycle, of which Star Comics has just published the third splendid volume. In those pages we find Miller at his best, in his natural environment. The shadows that populate Basin City are an updated version of the noir of Dashiell Hammet, James Cain and other great authors. Miller investigates the marches of the bad guys and somehow makes them understandable and related to us. At the same time it shows the weaknesses of the vouchers, their deficiencies.
Once again, Frank remarks the limits of human beings to push all of us to overcome them. This vision is very well explicit in another very successful cycle, taken up by Zack Snyder in the cinema. We are obviously talking about 300, pulp version of Herodotus’s stories on the Persian wars, specifically of the battle of thermopylae, where the heroic warriors led by Leonida opposed the death to the hordes shutted by Serse. Also Star Comics will publish the volume Xerxes in a few months, the continuation of the Saga of the Spartan fighters, set about ten years earlier, or at the time of the battle of Marathon. The protagonists, in this case, are not the Spartans, but the Athenians.
In both cases, these are stories of fighting the oppressor who came from afar. “For me, the greatest problem is the very concept of civilization,” explained Miller to the magazine Vulture, “and the clash between the vision of the western and oriental world, which has been underway since then, is still playing a role”. According to the American cartoonist, the works on the Persian wars reveal “who we are and where we come from. Because the same forces that have fought then are still at stake today. Much of what is happening, in particular in the Middle East in the conflicts between East and West that persist, is rooted in the era. The same problems also exist today ». 300 and Xerxes first of all portray a people fighting against submission. They speak of men who defend their land, their boundaries, their traditions against the arrogance of an aspiring ruler who believes a divinity. Serse, in 300, asks the Spartans for an act of submission.
He will leave them alive, he promises, if Leonida will bow to him. Her hordes are monstrous, its most fearful warriors are dressed in black, with the face covered. Armies without face and without identity. Serse represents the Globalist Empire, it is the head of a “system for killing peoples”. He wants men available, all the same. Try to seduce Leonida, the courageous head of the watershed: “I am a generous God”, he says, I can make you rich beyond all limit “. The great king reason according to the law of loss and profit, and thinks that everyone does the same. His first force is wealth.
In this sense, Serse represents the dark force of globalization. His army is multicultural, breaks the boundaries and barriers. He himself in the comic and in the subsequent film is an androgynous being, indeed neutral, neither man nor woman. He is the unparalleled desire, in some ways also unbridled turbocapitalism and conqueror. A fierce enemy who promises peace and is cloaked in beautiful words: he even proposes respect for diversity, as long as the Greek people become a slave. Leonida, of course, refuses. The scene in which the Spartan King, with a kick, throws the Persian ambassador inside a chasm, shouting “this is Sparta!”
Leonida is also a human hero, very human. He has a sore heart for his wife and son who touches him, suffers from his fallen companions on the field. But he does not abandon the struggle. He is a knight with some stain but without fear, a dark knight in turn. It is the typical hero of Miller: what we could all become.
