#831: Frank Miller, Comic Book Legend — Creative Process, The Dark Knight Returns, Sin City, 300, and Much More

0:00:03 Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of
0:00:07 The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job to deconstruct world-class performers across
0:00:14 all different disciplines. And my guest today is in a sense, my lifetime, a lifetime in the making
0:00:20 since I’ve been a fan since I was a wee lad and certainly many, many months in the making to do
0:00:25 this in person with the one and only Frank Miller. Frank Miller is one of the most influential and
0:00:30 awarded Creators in Entertainment, first gaining notoriety in the late 70s for his transformative
0:00:35 work on Marvel’s Daredevil. And in the world of comic books, Frank is a rare breed. He’s kind of
0:00:42 like Bo Jackson in that sense. Not only was he one of his generations, probably across multiple
0:00:47 generations, one of the most influential artists in that entire industry, but one of the most
0:00:54 influential writers. And that is a very, very, very uncommon combination of talents, particularly
0:00:59 in the West. And I’ll provide more context. After Daredevil, he went on to create some of
0:01:04 the industry’s most groundbreaking titles, including Ronin, Batman, The Dark Knight Returns, and Batman
0:01:10 Year One. So if you’ve seen the later Batman movies, that sort of anti-hero positioning, the
0:01:14 imagery, a lot of it comes straight from his work. His series Sin City and the award-winning
0:01:19 graphic novel 300 were both adapted into blockbuster films, with Miller co-directing the Sin City
0:01:24 movies with Robert Rodriguez, who is my friend here in Austin, has been on the podcast
0:01:29 before. Frank’s upcoming memoir, Push the Wall. My life, writing, drawing, and the art of
0:01:34 storytelling is now available for pre-order. You can find all things Frank at Frank Miller
0:01:40 Inc. That’s I-N-K, frankmillerinc.com, and on Instagram at Frank Miller Official. And without
0:01:46 further ado, please enjoy a long-awaited for me and wide-ranging practical conversation with
0:01:48 the one and only Frank Miller.
0:01:55 At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking.
0:01:56 Can I ask you a personal question?
0:01:59 Now would it seem an appropriate time?
0:02:00 What if I did the opposite?
0:02:04 I’m a cybernetic organism living tissue over a metal endoskeleton.
0:02:15 Frank, so nice to see you.
0:02:16 Good to see you.
0:02:22 And just got off the phone with our mutual friend, Robert Rodriguez. I’m sure that name
0:02:23 is going to come up again.
0:02:23 I heard he am.
0:02:24 Yeah.
0:02:31 I’m sure that’s going to come up again. And before we even get close to Robert, thank you,
0:02:36 Robert, for the introduction, I want to pick up on something we were chatting about briefly
0:02:38 before we started recording. And this is Aristotle.
0:02:39 Yes.
0:02:42 All right. Why did Aristotle come into the conversation?
0:02:49 Aristotle’s definition of happiness was the devotion of all of one’s energies along lines
0:02:56 of excellence. I believe that that is a general application that, you know, in an ideal life
0:03:01 would apply to every moment you have. But it is a guiding principle to a creative life.
0:03:10 Let’s then take maybe some of my props that we have here. And I’m going to go to my phone
0:03:16 because I was reading an early copy of Push the Wall, My Life Writing, Drawing in the Art of
0:03:22 Storytelling. And I took a lot of highlights. And I had to take photographs of the PDF of my Kindle
0:03:26 to look at some of them. And I wanted to go through a little list. This might seem strange,
0:03:34 but I tend to obsess on the specifics. These are some of the tools of your trade. Blackwing graphite
0:03:40 pencils, white paint, India black ink, liquid frisket, erasers, and sable brushes. And then it
0:03:46 goes through description of a lot more. Windsor and Newton series seven, mostly sizes three to 12,
0:03:55 et cetera. A few questions that I want to ask about, including the toothbrush, my trusty spatter
0:03:58 maker. What is liquid frisket?
0:04:10 Liquid frisket is essentially glue. It was first called that and used by oil painters to create
0:04:18 highlights. What the painter would do, he would lay down strokes of this glue across the paint,
0:04:27 then paint across it. And then before declaring the painting finished, he or she would then wipe
0:04:34 up frisket. And you would have this sparkling piece of the underpainting showing through.
0:04:42 And so it creates a very dramatic highlight. I like to use it with ink because it creates an
0:04:43 element of chaos.
0:04:50 An element of chaos. So you seem to be a, in a sense, someone who thrives in chaos or by creating
0:04:55 certain types of chaos. And this monster that I’m holding for those who are listening and not
0:05:03 watching, I’m, I’m holding something in my lap that feels like it’s 20 to 35 pounds. I was carrying it
0:05:09 around walking through New York city, getting a lot of odd looks because it’s, it’s a rectangle about
0:05:17 the size of an x-ray plate. You would use to take a x-ray of both lungs. It’s gigantic. Then this is
0:05:24 Frank Miller’s sin city, the hard goodbye. And I want to just open this up and I’m going to read
0:05:32 something from right inside. This is from Jim Lee, another legend in the space, another hero of mine.
0:05:37 And for another time, I used to have his job at the same college as graphic editor of the
0:05:43 Princeton tiger found some old sketches of his and one of the desks. In fact, but here’s his quote,
0:05:49 even after 25 years, Frank Miller’s sin city, the hard goodbye showcases the full potential of the
0:05:56 comics medium, a stark, brilliant chair. A screw. It remains a defiantly timeless handcrafted love
0:06:04 letter to the days of old and an increasingly slick and digital world. And I segued from the tools because
0:06:12 when I look at some of these pages and I’ll provide some of these as B roll and so on, you know, looking
0:06:19 at something like this, I’ll just show that to the, I mean, it is a masterpiece. I mean, any one of these
0:06:30 could be on a wall by itself, but this is sequential storytelling. And I have many questions, but one of
0:06:38 them is about kind of aliveness and that channeling all of your energies into excellence, because I think
0:06:44 this came up in the documentary about you as well, American genius, that you kind of attack the page.
0:06:50 Like there seems to be a real kinetic channeling of energy into the page, which you can see in this
0:06:57 particular version, the curator’s collection. What did it feel like when you were making this that I’m
0:07:02 holding? Very physical. Very physical. Sin City was a real breakthrough that way because it was the
0:07:09 first time I decided to work so damn big. The book you’re holding is the actual size of the page,
0:07:15 as I did. So what is the size? It’s called twice up. It’s four times the size of the published.
0:07:18 I mean, that is, it covers my entire body on video.
0:07:26 Only about half of it. But that is the size that comic books were originally drawn back in the 1940s.
0:07:34 And over time, in order to pick up the speed of production and just lower the price of making
0:07:39 comics, they made them smaller and smaller and smaller until finally they decided they ought to
0:07:46 fit into an 11 by 17 photocopier and made the pages very, very tiny to work on.
0:07:53 Which was about the time I came in. And when I discovered these old originals from the 40s,
0:08:01 I went, that’s why they looked so damn good. And I decided with Sin City, I was going to
0:08:02 correct the error.
0:08:06 That’s amazing. And toothbrush.
0:08:07 Yeah.
0:08:13 I mentioned this at the end of your list. How do you use the toothbrush? Because I feel like
0:08:21 this, at least in my mind, is one of the hallmark signatures in the minds of many.
0:08:26 Some Frank Miller artwork is this particular element. So how do you use the toothbrush?
0:08:33 What I do is a lid of a bottle of Indian ink has a little squirter thing on it. And I squirt
0:08:40 some of that onto the bristles of a toothbrush. And when I double across a toothbrush and it splatters
0:08:47 across an effect that could be texture on a wall, texture in the sky, splurting blood, whatever
0:08:48 you choose to make.
0:08:52 Just kind of dragging your thumb across the bristles.
0:08:54 Yes. Spraying it as a child would.
0:08:54 Yeah.
0:09:03 What I love is that it gives you that lovely element of chaos across the picture. Across time, I would
0:09:11 combine or replace that with simply snapping a brush across my wrist, which would create more
0:09:14 of an elongated, stretchy.
0:09:16 Sort of a slash?
0:09:22 It creates, again, something that’s unpredictable, but very organic. That’s just playing with the
0:09:23 materials.
0:09:31 What was your motto? This is from the book as well. Your senior year of high school. But I think it was.
0:09:32 Get the hell out of my way.
0:09:34 Get the hell out of my way.
0:09:37 I was impatient to leave school and get to work.
0:09:42 Yeah. Well, I mean, I don’t know if the impatience ended there. So I say that as someone who’s also very
0:09:50 impatient, it has pros and cons. And I’m wondering, like, the visceral violence that is channeled into
0:09:57 creating, say, what we see on the page in Sin City, the kinetic aspect of it is so palpable.
0:10:05 How do you relate to anger? Using it, the right dose, if there is a right dose, channeling it versus
0:10:10 being controlled by it. How do you think about that fire, maybe, is a better way to put it within?
0:10:17 No, no, no, no. I mean, anger is a good word, too. It’s an important and powerful component of drama.
0:10:24 Drama is essentially conflict. If you go all the way back to, like, the Norse myths, but you can take
0:10:30 all the way from the Norse myths through to, like, terms of endearment or whatever else, those are all
0:10:43 full of storm and drung. And comics are a purely visual medium and also a not very, on the face of it,
0:10:53 powerful. There’s no way a comic book can compete with the sheer spectacular firepower of cinema.
0:11:03 That is, cinema involves so many of your senses and it involves images that are perceptibly real
0:11:10 and real people expressing these emotions at you. And then when they want to do spectacle,
0:11:16 they started proving it way back with D.W. Griffith and sealed the deal with Star Wars.
0:11:18 Nobody can touch them.
0:11:27 And they can now do anything in stage, in any other form. So comics had to come out
0:11:36 with, like, little Jack Kirby swinging and just showing, okay, you know, we can’t really do that.
0:11:41 So we’re going to go even more crazy. And, you know, he made up characters who could
0:11:50 eat planets. And in the case of what I’ve been after with my comics is to have the drawing itself be so
0:11:55 emotional and extreme. I’m trying to make it outact an actor.
0:12:01 Well, what I love about your comics is, first of all, I should just point out to people that
0:12:08 don’t know anything about this world. You seem to me to be an outlier on a number of
0:12:13 different levels. One of which is that you’re very well known for your art and you are very
0:12:19 well known for your writing. How common is that in the U.S. comic world?
0:12:19 It’s not that common.
0:12:24 In Japan, it’s a little more typical. But in the U.S., where would you?
0:12:35 More common than it used to be. Because it used to be almost not allowed. There were a few
0:12:40 exceptions. You know, there was Will Eisner, for instance, who was really outstanding in that he
0:12:42 clearly ran the whole show.
0:12:48 For people who have no context whatsoever, why is Eisner such an important figure?
0:12:53 I mean, he’s one of the founding fathers, for one thing. Because he could do the entire thing.
0:13:00 Other people could as well. But he decided to keep doing the entire thing rather than
0:13:06 just becoming part of a factory. Of course, he ran his own factory, but that’s a whole other story.
0:13:14 But ultimately, he settled on doing his one series, The Spirit, which is known as the Will Eisners of
0:13:19 The Spirit. And even though he employed other people along the way, he always ran the show and
0:13:26 supervised it completely. And as he got older, he started doing work that he did inch top to bottom
0:13:33 by himself. That was a much more personal nature, where he once again turned comics in a new direction.
0:13:45 Let’s explore other figures who have helped showcase the potential of this medium through innovating.
0:13:55 I love this terrain because people listening may not be comic lovers, but there’s some medium that they’re
0:14:06 fascinated by. And whether it’s in the realm of fiction and let’s just say novels, whether it’s in film,
0:14:13 whether it’s in comics, there are things that we might take for granted now that were not at all obvious
0:14:25 a decade or two ago. And it seems like a good time to maybe talk about Jack Kirby and how he impacted
0:14:30 the world of comics. And correct me if I’m wrong, but I was reading, and this is straight from your book,
0:14:37 that for a long time comics were set panels, in a sense, right? And you kind of filled in the blanks
0:14:44 to the extent that artists would sometimes get sort of pre, I don’t want to say cut, but sort of outlined pages
0:14:46 within which to place their work.
0:14:52 Well, there were a lot of various ways they were restricted. I mean, it’s in various ways. And a lot of
0:14:58 this happened before I was around, so I don’t know. But I think the reason you bring Kirby up in this respect
0:15:06 was he was the guy who came in when comics were all had either a nine-panel grid or a six-panel grid.
0:15:14 They were all panels with the same page. And more than anybody, he blasted that to pieces.
0:15:20 He was like our D.W. Griffith. He just, you know, ripped the camera off the floor. And all of a sudden,
0:15:26 he would use two pages for a single image. For a kid like me, it was mind-expanding.
0:15:34 It was like I was, you know, this one guy just kept coming back. Decade, decade, decade. I mean,
0:15:42 he started way before I was born. I mean, he served in World War II with my parents. Not side by side,
0:15:48 but, you know, he had several comebacks. And each time, he seemed to reinvent the whole Megillah.
0:15:59 You have, it seems like a few different guiding phrases. We have one, of course, from the book title itself,
0:16:08 push the wall. Another one that comes to mind is defy the code. Can you expand on both of these, please?
0:16:10 why these two?
0:16:21 Pushing the wall or pushing the walls is just, colleagues have always been this strangely schizophrenic
0:16:33 field where, on the one hand, you have artists, cartoonists, writers, or such people who want to
0:16:42 explore and try new things. The nature of these fantasies is exploratory, but the business has
0:16:51 always been very conservative. And the people who grew up on comics became themselves very tradition-bound.
0:17:01 They would fret over things like what we call continuity, worrying about, if you’re working on issue number 385 of
0:17:07 Spider-Man, you can contradict something that was done in issue 14, which is on the face of it absurd,
0:17:16 because the character would be 85, give it around that long. And so, you had this hidebound on one side,
0:17:24 and it’s like enthusiastic, experimental field on the other. And I’ve always just wanted to pose more
0:17:28 toward the people looking for a future and for trying out new stuff.
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0:20:00 How did you, and we’re going to jump around chronologically, of course, but let me see if I can find this
0:20:09 particular paragraph from your book. Relates to a name that you will recognize, and that is Neil Adams.
0:20:17 So, Neil was a hard taskmaster, utterly ruthless in his criticism. He was a godsend. I just want to read
0:20:24 another paragraph. We’ll get into the description of who this is, but you cold called his office. Is that
0:20:30 right? Yes. Okay. Cold called his office. This is when no one knows who you are. And then ultimately,
0:20:35 I think it was his daughter who answered the phone. She says, this is dad. We got another one.
0:20:41 Yeah. Somehow you ended up in the office. You show him your work. And then, and I’ll quote here,
0:20:46 he told me just how awful my stuff was and didn’t bother with using any sugarcoating either.
0:20:50 Where’d you say you were from? Vermont. Go back to Vermont. Pump gas. Get married. You’re no good,
0:20:55 and you never will be. End quote. I gulped. This is referring to you. And then asked,
0:21:00 can I fix it and show you again tomorrow? To which Neil responds, yeah, I’ll see you tomorrow. He growled.
0:21:04 Okay. Who is Neil, and why did you reach out to him?
0:21:05 Oh, that’s Neil Adams.
0:21:06 Yeah. Who is he?
0:21:14 He was the outstanding artist of, he was in a way a one-man generation. Because there was a long period
0:21:19 where nobody entered the comics business because it didn’t pay well. And believe me,
0:21:25 the common wisdom was it’d be out of business soon. We’d just been through the horrors of the comics
0:21:34 code and the public humiliation and the self-censorship of that time. Been disgraced going from a mass
0:21:42 medium and being turned into just a punchline, you know, a dirty punchline. And there were just a few
0:21:49 people keeping the light alive and still doing these old titles like The Flash and so on.
0:21:55 But the books were looking pretty crummy. But there were these glimmers. There were these guys,
0:22:01 some of the old guys just stayed there and kept doing great stuff of an artist named Gil Kane,
0:22:10 for instance. But there was Neil Adams. He was this new guy who came in young and brought such enthusiasm,
0:22:19 and a whole new look. A whole new “take me seriously” look. It was much more, you know, a much more realistic look.
0:22:28 And he dragged the whole generation with him in a lot of ways. Not just with his work.
0:22:39 He did it with his speech and with his actions. He opened up a studio in Manhattan called Continuity, which did advertising work.
0:22:46 and essentially became a halfway house for comic book artists to come in and get his training in,
0:22:53 where he became the guru of this place. When I called up, I looked up his number in the phone book,
0:23:00 he said, spoke to his daughter, got to see him that day, and started hanging out there.
0:23:07 And I started living on little advertising jobs. Sometimes I’d just color them. And then eventually,
0:23:14 I’d get to draw them and so on. And then he lined up my first comic book work. And I was hardly the only one.
0:23:24 So, I’m so fascinated by this exchange and his willingness to help for a few different reasons,
0:23:34 right? Number one is, I wonder, how did this guy muster the bandwidth to do his own work, run a business,
0:23:43 and also mentor? Just that question alone. And then I also think about the sliding door moment of,
0:23:47 what if he had just had a really bad day and he was like, “You’re not coming back tomorrow, kids. Sorry,
0:23:50 I’m too busy.” Right? Like, what a different life.
0:23:53 Sorry. I’m sorry. I gotta blow my own horn. Yeah, blow your own horn.
0:23:57 I was a pretty determined little bastard. So, you know, I would have been back anyway.
0:24:02 You would have been back anyway? Yeah. I banged on many doors before this.
0:24:05 Well, okay. So, this was actually going to be my next question, which was like,
0:24:13 why do you think he agreed to let you come back? He was like, “Go pump gas. Go back to Vermont.” And
0:24:16 then you’re like, “Let me fix it and come back tomorrow.” And he’s like, “Ah, okay, fine.” Right?
0:24:22 Actually, no. It was because I asserted. I asserted that I wanted to fix it.
0:24:28 Okay. Got it. Because I didn’t cry and leave. How many interactions like that? How many
0:24:33 different visits showing him work did it take for him to finally say that your work was not
0:24:40 for throwing away? It wasn’t all that many, I don’t think. And, you know, then I worked on
0:24:48 short little jobs for Gold Key Comics. That was an old publisher a long time ago and so on,
0:24:54 where they would hire you for a three page job where you got $25 a page, that kind of thing.
0:24:58 That was what they called paying your dues. Yeah. We’re going to hop around a little bit,
0:25:03 but I mean, people need to read the book. They need to see the doc, but I know a lot of people have
0:25:11 covered certain aspects of your bio. You first gained notoriety in the late ’70s for your transformative
0:25:18 work on Daredevil, right? Now, I also, and this is pulling from the book, read a bit, and this is,
0:25:23 I’m putting a character, you’ll have to explain, but Elektra in kind of brackets because I’m inserting that.
0:25:30 But now I’m quoting you, was the true genesis of my career in comic books. Could you speak to
0:25:36 that chapter of your life that involved Elektra and what the significance of that was?
0:25:44 Oh, I think that was because I didn’t come in as the writer on Daredevil. I just simply came in as
0:25:52 an artist for hire and realized fairly early on that this was no way to do it because the pictures and
0:25:59 words are one thing. I mean, the words were obvious once I drew the pictures and I very quickly took
0:26:07 the plotting stories and so on. I felt that Daredevil needed a counterpoint, a femme fatale,
0:26:14 and I came up with Elektra, but I realized I was going to hold her back until I was writing the book
0:26:20 myself and I did it that way. I suppose what I’m trying to unpack is, and maybe I’m overstating the
0:26:28 importance, but was that sort of introduction of Elektra an important inflection point for you in
0:26:29 some way? Yeah.
0:26:36 In what way was it important? Well, if you look at those old comics, that’s when, in a way,
0:26:44 I started understanding what a Marvel comic was. A Marvel comic isn’t a story every month.
0:26:52 A Marvel comic is an ongoing sub-opera that you’re following. And as soon as, you know,
0:26:59 with my first issue that I wrote, it was called Elektra and it was all about them. From then on,
0:27:04 the whole thing becomes one sprawling. And I mean, it’s sprawling in both good and bad ways,
0:27:11 it’s sort of epic where characters come and characters go, but it’s focused around a pretty
0:27:18 small cast. You know, there’s a diabolical kingpin who runs all the gangs. There’s the deadly enemy
0:27:25 bullseye, neither of whom I made up. And there’s, you know, Daredevil and Elektra. And all of this is
0:27:33 like a tortured romance that the hero is in love with a psychotic assassin. So it’s to have some
0:27:38 tears involved at some point. It was very adolescent. It came from a very adolescent state of mind,
0:27:45 but I’m very proud of it. I mean, I loved Elektra. He was really inspired. I have a lot of
0:27:51 comics with Elektra at my childhood home on Long Island to this day, polybagged with backing.
0:27:55 And whenever I’m asked to draw her and you think she’s great, you know.
0:28:00 So for folks who don’t have any familiarity, and also because I want to better understand it. I mean,
0:28:09 there are different approaches to making a comic and also crafting a story, right? And so I want to pull
0:28:14 up something that I have here and it’s going to take me a second to read, but I’d love you to walk
0:28:20 people through this after I read at least some of it. All right. Everything starts with and proceeds from
0:28:26 story. Some simple story rules. Number one, start your story as late into the action as possible,
0:28:32 and it is early into the action as possible. Two, get your hero into trouble fast. That or give the
0:28:38 hero a pressing problem to solve. I work on the spine of the story. That’s a phrase that I’d love
0:28:43 for you to define. Work on the spine of the story and figure out how it starts and ends and then roughly
0:28:48 plot the in-between. And I’ll just read one more sentence and then I’ll let you kind of fill.
0:28:52 To do this, I make notes and create scenes that will advance the storyline, but allow room for
0:28:57 digressions and narrative side streets. And then you talk about preliminary sketches and so on.
0:29:05 Can you expand on this and just maybe give an example of how you would do that, whether it’s with a book
0:29:14 like Sin City or any other that comes to mind? How I do what? How you actually start from step one in
0:29:22 creating a story and then proceed through that. Seems like also in the introduction that having a very
0:29:28 good idea of where your story ends is a critical piece of that. I knew at the beginning of Sin City that
0:29:35 Marvel is going to die. For instance, it’s very important. Of course, when I started Dark Knight,
0:29:39 I thought Batman was going to die. It didn’t work out though.
0:29:40 Yeah.
0:29:50 My methodology has changed over time. It used to be as rigid as, you know, more rigid than what you just
0:29:56 read. I mean, I used to really believe there was a way and I was seeking the way to do it. Now I do
0:30:03 believe in letting a story nudge me in another direction. I believe in trusting the muse more than I used to.
0:30:09 How does that show up then in practice? Do you have, you know, the starting point, you know,
0:30:15 the end of the story, you have characters in a situation. Do you draw your way through and then
0:30:21 figure out kind of the narrative arc? What is the proper blend for you now of structure and serendipity?
0:30:27 Well, the thing is to come in and think of yourself as being the generator of the story, surely,
0:30:33 and saying that these are the pieces of clay and this is what I want to do with them. But to realize
0:30:39 that the artistic process is not at its best when it’s an egomaniacal process. And sometimes the
0:30:46 characters talk back and sometimes they know more than you do. And always be aware that there will be
0:30:52 that, just that flash, that thing that happens where all of a sudden you’re in a different story and you
0:30:57 realize this is the one, no, this isn’t the one I was looking for, but this is the, where I want to be.
0:31:03 I don’t know. It to me, it’s sort of like being a space explorer and being ready for things and
0:31:08 knowing that the whole job is really, you know, what is trying to figure out what to ignore and what to
0:31:15 follow. I like the mystery of storytelling more than the, uh, how are I used to see in it?
0:31:23 Well, let’s talk about picking and choosing and specifically would love to hear. I lived in
0:31:30 Japan as an exchange student and learn to read and speak Japanese largely from reading comic books.
0:31:33 So Kozori Okami must have kept you busy.
0:31:38 Yeah. I mean, I was busy reading all sorts of comic books with my little electronic dictionary.
0:31:41 I would love to read Kozori Okami in Japanese.
0:31:47 Oh yeah. It’s, it’s a different experience, of course. How did you first get exposed to, for
0:31:55 instance, Mobius, Otomo, any others you want to mention? How did you get exposed to those influences
0:31:56 and who were, who are they?
0:32:05 The two main invasions, well, three, three actually. The first was the English because
0:32:11 DC Comics started publishing Brian Bolland and Mike McMahon and all the rest, but they were
0:32:18 the easiest for everybody to see because they were all American comics fans. And they, and you know,
0:32:24 the language was the same and everything. It started getting a lot wilder when Forbidden Planet
0:32:26 comics opened in New York.
0:32:28 Man, do I love Forbidden Planet.
0:32:34 Yeah. And when Marvel started publishing Mobius, then the floodgates opened because it was
0:32:41 Europe just knocked everybody’s socks off. It was Mobius, Mobius, Mobius, Mobius, Mobius.
0:32:46 But there were the other guys too that nobody was paying attention to. Mobius obviously did,
0:32:53 was a tidal wave that swept through culture. It is about cinema and so on. And for me,
0:33:04 the other event was, I had a girlfriend. Her father was a businessman who did a lot of business in Japan.
0:33:14 And she tossed me a phone book that was a Japanese comic and it was Kozorioka. And I opened it and studied
0:33:20 it and fell in. And like Ronan was born that day. My storytelling style changed everything.
0:33:28 And, you know, and from that, I helped bring the title over and helped with the Asian invasion.
0:33:31 Seeing it all become so much more international, it’s just been fascinating.
0:33:38 And with the Asian stuff, you’ve got just a completely different sense of time and space.
0:33:40 It is the dead opposite of the Europeans.
0:33:47 When was Mobius sort of at his peak of influence? What would have been the timing roughly on that?
0:33:53 I couldn’t name the exact date. Certainly, he’s up there with Jack Kirby in terms of being one of
0:33:57 those people who, it’s like if you’re listing Beethoven and Mahler and all that.
0:34:04 I’m trying to figure out if the timing is such, because I’ve looked at tons of Mobius artwork that
0:34:06 Mobius could have. When did Alien come out?
0:34:07 When did? Alien.
0:34:12 Oh, Alien. Good question. I mean, it would have been post Star Wars. I was just trying to think,
0:34:18 because like Mobius also, a lot of his artwork makes me think of like Tatooine and some of these
0:34:20 things in Star Wars. So I’m wondering what the directionality is.
0:34:22 Well, Mobius’s influence of Star Wars is huge.
0:34:27 Yeah, okay, great. That’s what I was trying to answer for myself, because it seems so obvious
0:34:34 when you look at it. And to come back to the Japanese, a comic book that I use, it’s not a
0:34:38 well-known title, certainly outside of Japan. Even within Japan, a lot of Japanese people kind of
0:34:45 scratch their head when I tell them. It’s called Rokudenashi Blues, which is Rokudenashi Blues,
0:34:51 which is about high school gangs, which aren’t really a thing, but they pretend like it is.
0:34:58 And you know, the bad kids wear different types of uniforms called chodan or like anyway, and it’s,
0:35:04 but it’s a hyper violent, there are a lot of fight scenes in this, which made it a little less
0:35:10 intimidating for someone who couldn’t yet really read Japanese, right? So my translating burden was
0:35:16 lower with this comic. And the art was spectacular. And what blew my mind, because I had read comics
0:35:21 all the way through my childhood up to that point, and I was 15 when I got to Japan, like you said,
0:35:31 it was how time and space and speed and motion were depicted so differently. And how they captured,
0:35:39 say the swing of a leg or created the effect of blur was so captivating to me. It was unlike anything I
0:35:40 had seen.
0:35:42 Yeah. One of the things I’ve got to say is that
0:35:50 amazes me about the manga stuff is that they could draw people relaxed so well, that so much of the
0:36:00 the drawing in “Lone Wolf and Cub.” People aren’t blazing around and stuff. And even in combat, what
0:36:07 they’re capturing is the fluidity and grace of the movement. I mean, it’s the opposite of Kirby, where
0:36:14 everything is angles and force. And so it’s a very Asian violence. And in Europe, you’ll often see a
0:36:21 very, very elegant. Mobius’s violence, when he went really violent, it would be jarring and horrible.
0:36:29 But it would still be gorgeous. And it would still be, the wrist would be crooked just that much,
0:36:34 you know, as it slammed into the person’s face and so on. And it’s just the difference of cultures
0:36:37 reflected in every aspect of cartooning is fascinating.
0:36:46 How did the European and Japanese styles that would incorporate “Lone Wolf and Cub” influence
0:36:51 then how your approach changed after that?
0:36:58 Uh-huh. I was very young. I was in my 20s.
0:37:09 And so I sat down and I did a book that imitated them shamelessly in Ronin. I did Kojima with the
0:37:14 samurai scenes and he had Mobius with the science fiction scenes. And I discovered Aki B. Law and
0:37:16 did him all over the place.
0:37:21 What was that experience like for you in doing that? Did you find it energizing?
0:37:26 Oh, it was great. It was like, any transition that big is a rebirth.
0:37:35 All right. I’m going to ask you a lot more about Ronin, which I have in my suitcase back at my hotel.
0:37:40 But before we get there, I want to talk about,
0:37:47 because I believe I saw this in the book as well. Effectively, if you’re boring yourself,
0:37:51 or if you’re bored, you’re going to bore your audience and throw it out and start over.
0:37:58 Yeah. When do you know if something is working? And I’ll pull out an example of what seems like
0:38:03 something that was working. And what was the name of the colorist? Is it Glynis? Is that how
0:38:06 you say her name? Yeah, Glynis is about Oliver, Glynis Green.
0:38:12 Yeah. Right. So during some of the work on Daredevil would call you up and say how excited she was
0:38:20 was working on it. Yeah. That seems like a signature of something working. Yeah. How do
0:38:25 you tell if something is working or not working? Whether you want to get out of bed and do it or
0:38:31 not. Yeah. I mean, it’s not really a problem I have had so long I can’t remember. Yeah. So if you look
0:38:40 back at what you’ve ended up being happiest with or less happy with, with hindsight 2020, this doesn’t
0:38:45 necessarily mean audience response, right? I’m not talking about market response. It’s like intrinsic
0:38:51 working for you. I suppose what I’m looking for is just any thoughts for folks who have
0:38:55 trouble throwing things away because they just have a high default level of excitement.
0:39:01 So they get wedded to something and they’re like, I’m not going to throw this away. And they have
0:39:05 trouble killing their darlings or murdering their darlings, right? Which is another line that you like.
0:39:10 I love that. Maybe some example way of backing into this would be, what are some examples of
0:39:15 things that you have thrown out? How do you decide when it’s time to cut your losses or get rid of
0:39:19 something? It’s like when it doesn’t get me out of bed. It’s that simple, right? It’s that simple.
0:39:27 All right. This is my primary function on earth. If I’m not enjoying it, then there’s no reason to do it.
0:39:36 Time to switch gears. Ronin seemed like such an all-in, bold adventure on a lot of levels.
0:39:37 Yeah, yeah.
0:39:45 And I just, this is lesson six in your book, “The Dark Knight cometh, smash expectations.” But here’s
0:39:51 where it starts. And there’s a quote from Rudyard Kipling from If, which is, “If you can meet triumphant
0:39:57 disaster and treat those two imposters just the same.” Yeah. Now, here’s the first part that I
0:40:01 wanted to quote, and I won’t do the whole thing, but there’s nothing like a broken nose to clarify
0:40:06 the mind. As a creative experience, Ronin was a fascinating, exhilarating exploration, and it goes
0:40:17 on. So why was Ronin a broken nose? Because I got excoriated for it. I had an angry audience,
0:40:22 you know, people who wanted to be like Daredevil. Yeah. They wanted more of the same from you.
0:40:30 Yeah. And after initial high sales, they dropped and it was not the reception DC wanted. They were
0:40:37 like, you know, playing funeral music and it would go on. And I had nothing but a run of successes before.
0:40:43 Mm-hmm. How did you feel after that? I mean, I’m not comparing my books to anything you’ve
0:40:49 done. These are iconic pieces of work that you’ve produced. But I remember having my first two books
0:40:56 succeed, Expectations for the Third, Sky High, initially does really well. And then, for whatever
0:41:02 reason, just doesn’t meet expectations. And I took it so incredibly personally. I had a really hard time
0:41:07 time with it. Oh, yeah. And I’m just wondering. End of the world. Yeah. What was it like for you?
0:41:13 End of the world. End of the world. Yeah. Oh, yeah. How long did it feel like the end of the world?
0:41:24 I don’t know. It was a while. But the thing is, is that it was useful because I started examining it and
0:41:33 said, what didn’t work? You know, you didn’t connect. It’s like you did something. It made me go, okay,
0:41:41 let’s go for broke and put something together and, you know, develop the theories, do something that’ll
0:41:46 work. And I ended up doing the most structured, ruthlessly structured thing I’ve ever done in my
0:41:50 life, which was Dark Knight. And which is, you know, I mean, it’s so structured, it’s ridiculous.
0:42:01 It breaks into 16-page increments across, you know, four 48-page books. And each one has a
0:42:08 three-act structure. So it’s a four-act structure with three three-act structures. It’s basically,
0:42:18 it’s a trilogy. And was that, that was a conclusion or a direction you chose after analyzing Ronin
0:42:23 or some of the reasons? Why didn’t Ronin work? What are, what do you think are some of the reasons
0:42:31 it didn’t work? I think that it drifted into surrealism and it was also, it was a fantasy
0:42:38 fantasy. And it was out of its time, you know, without question, you lick your wounds. It’s the
0:42:45 end of the world for a little while, but then you do a post-mortem and, and you come out of it better,
0:42:53 your job, and you come out of it. And then moving into the Dark Knight Returns, how are you thinking about
0:43:01 getting back in the ring and working with this? You mentioned the structure as one aspect of it.
0:43:06 Anything else that was important for you to keep in mind personally, as you moved into
0:43:09 working on that particular project?
0:43:14 I was into it. The complexity of it was something I had never attempted before.
0:43:21 There’s so many goddamn characters in that thing. And they’re all moving in 18 directions at once.
0:43:28 It’s a, I don’t know, once I was into it, I was into it. I wasn’t thinking about Ronin or anything
0:43:37 else. I mean, it’s a hell of a all-consuming scope, right? So it’s like, you have to keep your hand on
0:43:38 the wheel and pay attention. Yeah.
0:43:46 Am I getting the timeline right that you were working on the Dark Knight Returns at the same
0:43:50 time that Alan Moore was working on Watchmen? Or am I getting that timeline off?
0:43:54 It was a little before, but they overlapped.
0:43:54 They overlapped.
0:43:58 Yeah, they overlapped. I think they started affecting each other in subtle ways.
0:44:00 In what types of ways?
0:44:06 I don’t know exactly. It’s like, because Alan and I knew each other. We met while we were doing those
0:44:14 two books. I had launched Dark Knight and he was boiling over with Watchmen. And his British stuff,
0:44:21 he did all over the place. And it was all part of this whole, I don’t know what you can call what
0:44:26 we did to the superhero, but it was reconstruction, deconstruction, you know, whatever it was.
0:44:35 And so his approach seemed more to really go at the underbelly of it. And mine was to reconstitute.
0:44:42 You know, in an uglier world to reconstitute the basic gist of the hero.
0:44:48 I know why this came to mind for me. And to give credit again where credit’s due, Frank Miller,
0:44:56 American genius, Celan Thomas, sitting about 15 feet away, always making amazing things happen.
0:44:57 Glowing at us.
0:44:59 Making ugly faces.
0:45:05 He’s behaving for the time being, but got some great footage from Alan, who basically said he heard
0:45:10 these murmurs about what you were working on and that it was amazing. And he was like, “Oh,
0:45:14 shit. Basically, better really up my game.”
0:45:15 That sounds like it.
0:45:21 And the reason I wanted to bring this up is that I just find having at least some other player
0:45:25 on the field who’s really good forces you to improve.
0:45:26 Oh, God. Yeah.
0:45:31 Oh, Alan made me so much better at so many things. Because when I came back to Daredevil, for instance,
0:45:36 it was like, all of a sudden it was like, “Oh my God, I’m just writing.”
0:45:39 And there’s Alan Moore out there now.
0:45:47 And all of a sudden I was just trying so much, you know, trying so hard to be a writer.
0:45:48 He also brought back horror.
0:45:49 He brought back horror.
0:45:50 Yeah.
0:45:53 There hadn’t been any horror in comics for generations.
0:45:57 What makes Alan interesting to you? Just take a sidebar on that.
0:46:01 Oh, okay. He’s the smartest fan there ever was.
0:46:02 The smartest fan?
0:46:03 Yeah.
0:46:04 What does that mean?
0:46:10 Inside all of that, he is a guy who grew up in comics, but he’s just so damn smart that he’s
0:46:17 able to take the stuff of his childhood joy and to take it down into places that nobody’s
0:46:23 ever dreamt of going for and transform. Anything he’s ever done, he’s transformed. Utterly.
0:46:32 I mean, the first time he sat down to write Swamp Thing, he changed the entire precept of the character.
0:46:38 That’s something a lot of people miss. It had always been this guy who fell into the muck and
0:46:45 got transformed into a swamp guy. In his very first issue of Swamp Thing, Alan transformed
0:46:54 him into a collection of swamp weeds that used this human as a model to construct a new body
0:46:59 for itself. There was no human in there at all anymore.
0:47:03 The first time at bat, the first time I ever saw his name.
0:47:05 It’s just completely reinventing the character.
0:47:06 He scared the crap out of me.
0:47:17 Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we’ll be right back to the show.
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0:48:29 I promised I would bring back Robert at some point.
0:48:35 And feel free if there’s anything you’d like to dive into that I’m bouncing around and not hitting,
0:48:44 let me know. But you’ve described Robert as an angel of sorts. Why is that? Robert Rodriguez.
0:48:51 Well, for one thing is to be around him, you’re around a man of constant goodwill and of generous energy.
0:48:58 He’s very generous. Just a quick, sorry to interrupt, but people might find this funny. When I moved to
0:49:05 Austin in 2017, the very first person I had over for dinner at my house, and I was very excited about
0:49:10 it was Robert, who I’d known for a while. I invited him over, he was on his way, and then I realized,
0:49:16 wait a second, I have no plates and I have no silverware. So he brought over two plates from his
0:49:22 house plus silverware, which I still have to this day. So that’s, that’s Robert. That’s Robert.
0:49:26 He’s like, keep the plates and the silverware. I think you’re going to need it next time.
0:49:34 So Frank, you were mentioning Robert’s generous spirit, and I wanted to underscore something that
0:49:42 I only learned after watching the documentary, which is that Rodriguez, as I understand it,
0:49:48 quit the director’s guild so that you could receive co-director credit. I had no idea.
0:49:51 That seems wild.
0:49:52 I remember the day he did it, yeah.
0:49:55 Well, can you describe what happened on that day?
0:50:02 No, he just told me he just did it. He said, he said, they said you didn’t have the, what was the
0:50:08 word for it? It wasn’t credentials, it was something along those lines. He just grinned and said,
0:50:14 so I quit. Because he didn’t want anything to stand in the way of us just moving ahead. He knew that I
0:50:22 needed the authority on the set because they were his people. And everybody there, they were so loyal
0:50:29 to him that he’d need to be able to bequeath that to me for things to really work the way both of us
0:50:38 needed them. What was it like working on that film with Robert? How did you divide or mesh your duties?
0:50:49 At one point, somebody in production made this ridiculous poster of the two of us as a two-headed
0:50:58 beast. Because we were working right on top of each other the whole time. There was another point
0:51:03 where we were shooting orders right past each other. Although we were almost always saying the same
0:51:09 thing. But there was one point where we weren’t saying exactly the same thing. And there was Brittany
0:51:19 Murphy in the middle of one of the actors. One of the actors. Yeah. And there she was as a scantily
0:51:26 clad barmaid. And she just tossed up her, I think she tossed her tray in the air and says,
0:51:35 There’s two of them. But generally, it was just, it was just a dream. After a while, they didn’t
0:51:43 need to know which one to go to for which kind of problem. The actors did. Yeah. Oh, yeah. I mean,
0:51:48 it’s and so did production. So would they cut? What were those different types of problems? I’m so
0:51:54 curious. Well, certainly anything to do with really the mechanics of making the movie was Robert.
0:51:59 Robert. Right. You know, um, but when it came to the internal workings of the characters,
0:52:04 the motivations of the characters, the histories, the, the, the, uh, and you know, or if they wanted
0:52:10 to try something out, I could really quickly tell them whether it was in character or not. And then we
0:52:16 would often just get together, the two of us go for a bunch of stuff. And there were any number of
0:52:23 cases where Robert would come to me and say, I need a new shot here. I need a new scene. I remember one
0:52:29 one time he said, he said, I need something new here, Frank. It’s got to be quick. It’s got to be
0:52:36 cheap and it’s got to be brilliant. And we just sat down with a sheet of paper and it was some of the
0:52:43 most fun I ever had working so damned fast. And you know, and knowing Robert, having spent a good
0:52:48 amount of time with it, we both live in Austin. I can see both of you working together. Yeah.
0:52:55 It’s very easy for me to see. Yeah. And I encourage people to listen to my episodes I’ve done with
0:53:00 Robert start with the first one about his creative process and bio, but he used to draw comics,
0:53:07 right? He drew comics. He’s very unorthodox. He doesn’t feel like he has to follow a fixed set of
0:53:14 rules. And I don’t know if he did this on set for Sin City, but he’ll often have actors painting.
0:53:19 He’ll be playing guitar. Oh no, that was so important. Yeah. Yeah. He always wanted to keep the creative
0:53:26 juices flowing. You know, there was one time when, when they, he rented out a hall in Austin,
0:53:29 Bruce Willis and his band play. Oh really?
0:53:36 Yeah. So there’s Bruce Willis up there, you know, pounding it out. Like you’re doing a Springsteen.
0:53:41 Keep the, keep the, keep the creative juices flowing. Yeah. Yeah. And he really walks the
0:53:50 talk. And also I may be stating the obvious for people, but when I look at say Sin City as you
0:53:59 created it here, it’s so inherently cinematic and directorial in terms of angles, framing.
0:54:04 I’ve always felt that way. Even looking at say storyboards, I’m like, okay, well, I mean,
0:54:09 there’s the, if not the same, certainly, I mean, but there are, there’s a lot that rhymes.
0:54:16 And so when I’m looking at these innovations with say, whether it’s back in the day with Jack Kirby,
0:54:20 we’re looking at some of the Japanese influences and how they capture motion differently.
0:54:25 it makes me think of innovations in film at the same time, where you think of like a Kurosawa
0:54:31 doing like a Rashomon and, and inserting multiple perspectives. And you’re like, okay, I mean,
0:54:37 you’re solving a lot of the same problems and exercising seemingly a lot of the same creative muscles.
0:54:44 Yeah. Well, and that’s the way media works though. That’s the way art forms work. It’s funny. It’s
0:54:53 like, you know, so many people strive so hard to act as if they work in a vacuum and no one does. And
0:55:02 the influences are constant and inexorable. That’s kind of the beauty of the beast, really. Yeah. I mean,
0:55:09 occasionally this one piercing person will come through, but even Hitchcock came from somewhere.
0:55:17 You can even root, you know, cut back to what he sprung from or Wells or whatever. And even those two
0:55:23 were in pretty tight competition and did a lot of the same tricks. So it’s, it’s like, you know,
0:55:30 it’s all a big mishmash outside of the films you’ve been involved with. What are some of your favorite
0:55:35 films, whether they are scripted documentary or otherwise?
0:55:44 I’m a big fan of old black points. It’s no secret, you know, but that’s not just the old film. I can
0:55:49 give you a chapter in person. No, but that’s all over the book and everywhere else. Cage and I see an
0:55:54 absolute masterpiece. Like K-Mutiny comes to mind. I’m not familiar with it. What is the K-Mutiny?
0:56:02 K-Mutiny is a World War II story featuring an absolutely brilliant Humphrey Bogart, Bogart,
0:56:08 playing exactly the opposite of the kind of character you’d expect him to play. He plays an
0:56:16 almost Richard Nixonian figure of a World War II destroyer minesweeper pilot who is completely
0:56:21 paranoid. Fred McMurray plays a character you would never expect him to play. This is not my three sons.
0:56:30 this is Fred McMurray is a very serious actor playing a military lawyer and it’s a study in
0:56:37 paranoia on the high seas. What appeals to you about the movie or do you just get swept on it? Is it that
0:56:42 these actors are doing what seems diametrically opposed to what people associate them with? Is
0:56:48 it something else? No, not particularly. I just love high drama and I often do love to see an actor like
0:56:58 Bogart play a character who you don’t expect. Maltese Falcon typecast him for the rest of his career.
0:57:03 Before that, he played many, many roles, which were often
0:57:12 shifting, nasty little men. And he played a paranoid killer once in an adaptation, I believe, of a James
0:57:19 M. Cain novel. And, you know, I love to see the actors when they aren’t trapped by the audience’s
0:57:26 expectations. The things that Robert Mitchum was capable of, he was pretty extraordinary. But also, I like to see
0:57:36 the movies that really were discovering what they could do. And we’re finding them. If you look at
0:57:43 Grapes of Wrath, that movie is hunting for what it is, but it’s doing so in such a compelling way.
0:57:51 It’s doing in such an aching way. Henry Fonda is extraordinary in that movie. And also, I just like to get
0:57:59 in the hands of a great director. It’s why I do keep getting back to Hitchcock. I love falling back
0:58:03 into one of his old movies. I could watch Rebecca, I swear, every night.
0:58:10 I’ve never seen it. Oh, it is so good. It is one of the most romantic movies you’ll ever see.
0:58:13 And it’s occasionally very spooky. It’s a date movie.
0:58:16 Done. Thanks for doing my homework for me.
0:58:26 What artists or art forms have influenced the work that you do outside of comics themselves?
0:58:31 Well, movies. A lot. And lots of books I’ve read, you know.
0:58:33 Lots of books. What types of books?
0:58:40 Yeah. When I grew up reading Mickey Spillane novels, and from that, all the other crime stuff.
0:58:46 And somewhere along the line, I fell in love with ancient history. And that’s where I got 300 and
0:58:52 all of that. History is just this endless wealth. It’s like everywhere you turn, there’s more and
0:58:58 more to get. It’s very breathtaking. When I was a kid, I watched a lot of TV, but I don’t know.
0:59:11 Let’s come back to 300 and your other adventures in Hollywood. What have you learned? Because I ask
0:59:18 this selfishly. When I work on my stuff, I’m a control freak, complete control freak. And a lot
0:59:24 of my friends are control freaks. And I’ve just seen a number of different train wrecks when
0:59:31 Hollywood and the structures in Hollywood collide with a creative who has a story or something that
0:59:36 they view as their baby. I’ve just seen a lot of messes. And I’m wondering what you have learned
0:59:39 about working in entertainment or Hollywood.
0:59:43 Oh, well, I’ve got one overriding thing. Okay.
0:59:50 Which is just, I mean, more important than anything else is, you know, the right people. It’s like,
0:59:53 when I’ve worked with the right people, the experiences have been wonderful and the results
1:00:00 have been wonderful. How do you know for you who the right people are? Because there’s so many slick
1:00:02 folks in LA. No offense to anyone in LA. I know.
1:00:10 But man, do you get told what you want to hear? And I’d love to know how you identify having spent
1:00:17 some time in the trenches. I don’t know, man. All I can tell you is that I’ve been exceedingly lucky once.
1:00:26 I’ve been unspeakably lucky the other time. I was exceeding lucky with Zack Snyder because in his case,
1:00:32 he was taking control. He was going to do it. Okay. And he did a brilliant job.
1:00:44 In the case of Robert Rodriguez, that was heaven because it was the adventure of a lifetime.
1:00:50 When it’s been more distant than that, it’s been bye-bye baby more. You know, it’s been the same
1:00:55 thing that it just happens. But it’s something I did like, you know, if it’s something that I did,
1:01:03 you know, Marvel or DC comic that gets adapted. That I end up seeing pieces of what I did mixed in with
1:01:08 things that feel like they came out of a Dirty Herring movie, mixed with things that came out of
1:01:15 Scooby Doo and it all gets a little, you know, less exciting. Let’s just say you created a masterpiece
1:01:25 in the next 12 months that everyone in Hollywood. How do you make some of the important decisions about
1:01:28 who to work with? Do you call Robert and you’re like, Hey, what do you think about these people? Do you
1:01:30 call Zach Snyder and ask him the same question?
1:01:38 The answer is right across the room. I mean, Celine Thomas runs my company and she really knows what
1:01:45 she’s doing. And before I really hear about anything, she already knows all these people and what they’re
1:01:50 doing and everything. I wouldn’t even call it a hire. It’s a, it’s a partnership.
1:01:55 Yeah, that’s what I mean. All roads lead to Celine. She’s bowing in the background.
1:01:58 She’s waving us away.
1:02:06 I want to ask about alcohol. What is your relationship to alcohol? What has it done
1:02:13 for or against you? Oh, that’s, I wouldn’t call it an easy question, but it’s a simple enough one,
1:02:22 especially the way you phrased it. Simple answer, against me, a lot. For me, nothing. Nothing.
1:02:31 It’s taken a long time to come to that conclusion. It’s a big old aspect of my life. It’s a genetic
1:02:39 condition that I allowed to get out of control. I would say I did use it to disinhibit me and probably
1:02:47 worked very, very productively because of it and did stuff that was inspired, occasionally reckless.
1:02:55 But the deleterious effects and the ways it’s affected other parts of my life,
1:03:02 no, it hasn’t done me a goddamn bit of good. I was coerced to stop. I was, I was,
1:03:10 see, Len and others decided I was going to die and arranged for me to be put in a place and watched.
1:03:17 And, you know, the time had to pass and the, you know, medicines given and that sort of thing takes a
1:03:25 while. I will tell you this in all sincerity. This is not posturing in a bit for either one of you.
1:03:32 I’m having a time in my life in that respect. I mean, creatively, it’s just like, I’m now I’m going
1:03:38 like, okay, now I can get serious. Okay. You know, it’s like, for one thing is what happens when you
1:03:46 get off the sauce. I imagine any addictions like this. You don’t realize how much anger that has been
1:03:56 bottled up in it. And now what you thought was fuel. I mean, I thought I was fueled by all this,
1:04:05 you know, this kind of like fire. Oh, it doesn’t feel you. It doesn’t feel you. It’s like saying,
1:04:11 well, it’s great to have my stomach feel this way when you’re constipated. It’s a lot better to be
1:04:15 focused and moving. Clarity is quite lovely.
1:04:26 So did the getting off of alcohol in and of itself dissipate the fire or the anger, or did
1:04:32 the getting sober allow you to better deal with that in some way?
1:04:38 It helps you understand when and where it’s appropriate.
1:04:47 There’s plenty to be angry about, but it’s not this free floating. Am I mad at myself? I’m mad at the
1:04:53 world. What advice would you give to a dedicated
1:05:04 novice who’s looking to get into comics and get into drinking, wait, where should they? What’s your
1:05:10 favorite cocktail? Uh, no comics. Yeah. And they’re, they’re a student of the craft. They’re obsessed.
1:05:17 They’re dedicated. They have the raw ingredients that maybe Neil saw in you, right? What advice
1:05:18 would you give to them?
1:05:27 It’s what I said in the book, which is story, story, story. First, think of it as one craft.
1:05:34 Don’t think of writing and drawing. There’s one thing and it will become clear what it is. But
1:05:39 beyond that, it’s cartooning is making things that are very complicated and making them quite simple.
1:05:46 That’s where your mind should be going more than anywhere else. At this stage, complication is not
1:05:51 your front. The, uh, convey information. Then learn, learn that. I mean, pick up, like,
1:05:59 Scott McCloud’s book on understanding comics, for instance, and see how he breaks down how comics
1:06:08 work. At the same time, pick up Sid Field’s book on screen by, get a good sense for a simple approach
1:06:15 to three acts of storytelling. You’ll use it for a year or two and then, you know, and then you won’t be
1:06:22 using it anymore, but it gets you somewhere. Learn how to draw. How do you learn how to draw?
1:06:27 I think this is in the book, but Neil Adams telling you to go out and buy some toy cars
1:06:31 so you can learn how to draw cars correctly. That was great advice. Great advice. Right?
1:06:38 What great advice. So what a simple solve. What a simple solution. How does someone learn to draw?
1:06:46 Learn how to draw. Like humans. Humans are the big problem, you know? And oh man, every dirty trick
1:06:52 there is. I mean, I can give you some names of some books. Yeah, that’d be great. Okay.
1:07:00 Okay. George Bridgman. George Bridgman. Yeah. Okay. There’s no E in it in Bridgman.
1:07:07 There is an E in George and it’s the complete guide to drawing from life. It’s only about the figure.
1:07:11 Why do you like that book? There’s so many books on drawing. Why do you like this one?
1:07:16 This one’s good for, uh, because he’s an art of cartoonist. He treats the body like a machine,
1:07:21 so it’s easier to understand. You do get the gesture, but you’ll have to bring that yourself
1:07:29 anyway. Stuff’s completely non-photographic. It’s somewhere between the thinking of Michelangelo
1:07:34 and the thinking of a comic book artist. Mm-hmm. That’s cool. You know? So that’s the non-photographic.
1:07:40 Perfect. That seems critical here. Yeah. Hey, you know, there is another person people like a lot
1:07:49 named Andrew Loomis. Andrew Loomis? Yeah. That’s L-O-O-M-I-S. I favor him less because he’s
1:07:58 voice. He’s worked as a sleeker, more, um, sleeker, smoother look. And I, I favor the more
1:08:05 mechanical, muscular style, but, but usually any kind of aspiring comic book artist, both those books
1:08:15 on the shelf. How did you learn perspective structures? How did you learn how to work with
1:08:23 perspective? The trick to perspective is you realize that it is a trick. It’s a complete lie.
1:08:31 Perspective does not exist. I mean, it’s an invention by mathematicians. So do keep that in
1:08:38 mind when you’re about perspective. So it’s a device that you apply to a drawing. And, uh,
1:08:44 but you know that when you look at down this room, that lines seem to converge and so on.
1:08:50 So what you do is you rough out the basic shape of what you think something is.
1:08:58 And then you converge a couple of those lines. They hit a point and that becomes the horizontal.
1:09:04 And you can keep your vertical straight up, or you can give it a, you know, an upper or lower tilt,
1:09:08 and so on. There are books on perspective too. I just don’t know the names.
1:09:12 But how did you develop your abilities with perspective?
1:09:14 I mean, with any other comic book artists.
1:09:20 Yeah. And, you know, I have to say, and hopefully this doesn’t sound strange, but looking at this
1:09:29 gigantic beast here, looking at, for instance, you know, this is one of many, many different pages
1:09:35 that I captured just to revisit. But when I look at some of these, I’ll show, this is the one I showed
1:09:43 before I’ll show it again, but this one here. So you look at this two page spread and I’ll describe it for
1:09:54 folks. But these are really stark, very, almost inverse color palettes, but although they’re black and white, of a dancer.
1:10:08 And the elegant minimalism and some of the line work in this book makes me think of certain really old school illustrators like Leyendecker.
1:10:20 And it’s just, there’s a, like an archetypal energy to this type of work. And I remember in the documentary,
1:10:27 to invoke Jim Lee’s name again, he said something like he was, he was talking about, I don’t know if it was Sin City or your work in general or you,
1:10:32 but he said, and then I could try A, B, or C, and then I’m sure that Frank would tell me I’m using too many lines.
1:10:42 It was something like that. And I thought it was something like that and I can’t do what he does, so I make fun of it.
1:10:50 Yeah. So I recall collecting, people should check out Jim Lee’s penciling too. I mean, back in the day, I collected when he was working on the X-Men and stuff.
1:10:55 I mean, just, just looking at the anatomical work he did with like Colossus and stuff.
1:11:12 It’s just amazing. Amazing. This seems to access something different. And I’m, I’m wondering how you developed the economy of sort of elegant line use and use of negative space, like this use of black and white.
1:11:23 Because part of the reason I asked about the perspective is I noticed, which is something you can only really notice in something that’s large format and produced this way is all of the perspective lines that have been erased.
1:11:28 There’s a million perspective lines that have been erased in this.
1:11:32 And maybe the thing is that makes you feel the way.
1:11:36 Exactly. And then you have something like, like this here.
1:11:42 Yeah. Right. And this, if you can see this one, I’m hitting with my knee.
1:11:43 Now we see how I got those arms.
1:11:54 Yeah. Where you see, where you, your mind is creating all the perspective you need to make sense of this as a three dimensional experience in your brain.
1:12:01 But it looks like probably 40, 50, 60 lines of perspective have all been erased.
1:12:04 How did you develop this style?
1:12:14 I remember one time I was talking with, uh, I was early on in Sin City and I was talking with, um, Victor Dono.
1:12:14 You know who he was?
1:12:16 I know the name.
1:12:19 Yeah. He was, he was, he was a comic book artist for a long time.
1:12:24 Uh, mostly known, known as being an associate of Neil Adams.
1:12:28 And he was looking at the early Sin City stuff.
1:12:33 And you notice the early Sin City work has much more line work in it than the lighter stuff.
1:12:37 He said, and he was, he was like the best teacher in comics.
1:12:42 Okay. He was, I mean, he was, he was a good artist and everything, but he was a great editor.
1:12:49 He mentored Klaus Janssen, for instance, and, and, and, and it was, it was a terrific influence over a lot of people.
1:12:55 He said, Frank, real New York Italian, all the way to this guy.
1:12:59 He said, Frank, I’m looking at this Sin City you’re doing.
1:13:06 And he said, and I’m thinking about some of the old guys.
1:13:12 And I’m thinking, there was this old guy, and he names him, I can’t remember right now.
1:13:21 And he was doing stuff kind of like yours, only eventually he just started laying in all the black areas first, put the lines in later.
1:13:24 And he found out he didn’t need so many lines.
1:13:28 That’s interesting.
1:13:31 I went home, and the real look is Sin City was born.
1:13:40 Because once the black was down, I went, hey, I’m, I’m more than halfway home.
1:13:44 I’m there, you know, I’ll just add a few little things here and there.
1:13:50 And that was when, that was when, now I’ve worked that way ever since on everything.
1:13:57 And at what point did you also, it seems like, innovate with a,
1:14:01 because I understand I kind of start to finish first to last page batch processing,
1:14:09 where instead of doing the penciling, the lettering, the inking, the coloring on a per page basis,
1:14:13 you’re basically doing the penciling for the entire book.
1:14:14 And that was Sin City as well.
1:14:15 That was Sin City as well.
1:14:16 Yeah, yeah.
1:14:17 It’s just so mind-blowing.
1:14:24 Like, it seems to me, I guess in retrospect, that that makes so much sense to do it the way that you did it.
1:14:33 I decided I’d do all the tissue layouts, trace them all off into pencil drawings, then do all the panel borders.
1:14:36 You don’t want to be around me on those days.
1:14:39 And then lay on all the flat black areas.
1:14:43 And what this did was it made it more fun every step of the way.
1:14:46 And it sped the whole thing up like crazy.
1:14:49 And it made the work so much better.
1:14:50 It was idiotic.
1:14:53 By the end of it, the line work was so spontaneous.
1:14:55 Man.
1:14:57 What is that first step that you mentioned?
1:14:58 With tissue?
1:15:04 No, that’s where I solved the basic compositional and drawing issues on a separate piece of tissue.
1:15:06 Which is just a type of paper.
1:15:08 Well, it’s a vellum.
1:15:11 It’s not really a tissue.
1:15:12 It’s stronger than that.
1:15:16 It’s a type of drawing paper, but it’s nearly transparent.
1:15:19 I place that marker rough.
1:15:22 My drawing board is a light table.
1:15:34 And I put the actual piece of Bristol board on top of that and trace that off so that I can move things around.
1:15:35 I can change the size.
1:15:38 I can replace things and so on.
1:15:41 So that was also done on Sin City.
1:15:42 That’s wild.
1:15:45 So a lot of innovation happened on Sin City.
1:15:48 Yeah, so it was a transformative piece of work.
1:15:52 Why did so much coalesce during Sin City in that way?
1:15:58 Well, therein lies a tale.
1:15:59 I love tales.
1:16:03 Well, no, it’s because everything was happening.
1:16:07 I had broken away from the major publishers.
1:16:11 I was working with the then young Dark Horse comics.
1:16:16 And we tested the waters with each other with the Martha Washington series.
1:16:18 And it was hard-boiled.
1:16:22 And I decided I was going to take my baby there.
1:16:27 And so I just decided, okay, it’s time to reinvent the wheel.
1:16:29 I’m going to apply the stuff that I’ve been told.
1:16:36 And as I said to Mike Richardson, I said, look, we’ve done two science fiction series.
1:16:41 And I know everything is superheroes are science fiction.
1:16:45 I want to do a crime comic and in black and white.
1:16:47 And he didn’t flinch.
1:16:50 So we were, you know, we were rolling with that.
1:16:59 So was it the ability to take that creative leap that seems like it had been building inside
1:17:00 you for a very long time?
1:17:01 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
1:17:06 Is that the kind of creative unlock that then led to these various innovations?
1:17:09 Is that the way that you would think about it?
1:17:09 Or was it other?
1:17:10 Well, one thing does lead to another.
1:17:14 But most of creative work is problem solver.
1:17:16 It’s not, God is speaking to me.
1:17:19 It’s, you know, how do I get that?
1:17:20 No is to look right.
1:17:28 And in this case, it was how to get the look I’m after as efficiently as possible.
1:17:30 I won’t show it again.
1:17:34 Maybe I can pull it up on the screen as B-roll.
1:17:38 But that right-hand page in particular of that female figure.
1:17:38 Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
1:17:45 And the black kind of left portion of the torso, which is framed with black lining.
1:17:49 And the right side, from our perspective, framed with the white.
1:17:58 I mean, just the economy, the amount of meaning that is transmitted with such a relatively small amount of ink.
1:18:01 I know it’s, in some cases, a lot of black in the background.
1:18:02 It’s a lot of ink.
1:18:07 But in terms of line work that is sort of the latticework of the perception.
1:18:08 It’s just so incredible.
1:18:14 In the early pages in Sin City, there was a lot of line work underneath all that.
1:18:16 Towards the end.
1:18:17 It was clicking along.
1:18:20 That was what it was going to be from the earth.
1:18:29 Also something that, you know, comes to mind, at least for me, in the Japanese way of doing things.
1:18:33 And there’s a lot of variability, of course, among Japanese artists and so on.
1:18:37 But it’s very interesting how they apply detail, right?
1:18:40 You might see a ton of detail in a small portion of a panel.
1:18:41 Yes, yes.
1:18:42 And then very little on the rest.
1:18:44 I love that.
1:18:44 Right?
1:18:45 Or you might see a page.
1:18:47 It’s like the more Imari approach to it.
1:18:47 Yeah.
1:18:48 Exactly.
1:18:54 And then you might have a page where it’s very fast-paced.
1:18:56 The line works pretty sparse.
1:18:58 And then there’s one panel that has a lot of detail.
1:19:10 And the beauty, and this comes also up in Understanding Comics with McLeod, is how much work the brain does really effortlessly between the panels.
1:19:17 Well, it’s also to where McLeod was applying McCloughan.
1:19:21 Because, you know, there’s a lot of McCloughan thinking in McLeod.
1:19:23 I’ve been loving the book.
1:19:26 So thank you for sending me an early copy, Selen.
1:19:34 And I can’t wait until I can actually export all my highlights because there are so many highlights that I’ve put into it.
1:19:47 And what I want to also emphasize for folks, I really believe this, is that if you want to be good at anything, study people who are excellent at something.
1:19:51 It does not have to be the same thing you are hoping to pursue, right?
1:20:02 Like if you study Jiro Dreams of Sushi or something like that in an effort to become better at X and aim for the top of your field, that seems totally disparate.
1:20:19 And if humans are story-making machines, and that we often create meaning, almost always, from stories, then studying your work within the realm of comics and film,
1:20:25 even if someone is not involved explicitly in comics or film, the lessons can still be applied.
1:20:42 And I’ll be very curious and excited to see how people in industries and areas that may not, can’t even be guessed at this point, will implement some of the life lessons from the book.
1:20:44 I’ll be very curious to see.
1:20:45 It’ll be very fun.
1:20:51 You know, I have to also mention, and I’ve wanted you to pronounce this name for me.
1:20:54 Well, I never thought I would meet you, but since I was a little kid.
1:21:04 The Electra that you did that, I want to say it was a lot of watercolor artwork, Bill, how do you say his last name?
1:21:04 Sienkiewicz.
1:21:05 Sienkiewicz.
1:21:06 Sienkiewicz.
1:21:07 Sienkiewicz.
1:21:08 Sienkiewicz.
1:21:09 No.
1:21:12 Sienkiewicz.
1:21:13 Sienkiewicz.
1:21:14 Okay.
1:21:15 Sienkiewicz.
1:21:17 Exactly.
1:21:18 Think Russian.
1:21:18 Pretend you’re Russian.
1:21:20 Pretend you’re Russian.
1:21:23 That is a beautiful, that is a beautiful piece of work.
1:21:25 Yeah, it’s pretty amazing.
1:21:26 It’s amazing.
1:21:27 And I don’t.
1:21:32 And it was a berserk experience for both of us.
1:21:33 Tell me, because that thing.
1:21:34 We had such a time.
1:21:36 You had such a time, a good time.
1:21:40 We were like two 12-year-olds just making a crazy going, yeah.
1:21:44 What was the experience like, and why did you work well together?
1:21:46 Maybe that’s worth digging into a little bit.
1:21:48 Well, first of all, we liked each other a lot, okay?
1:21:49 That’s a great starting point.
1:21:56 It was one of those times that happened that, you know, you live for, in that comics had
1:21:58 been very restrictive for a very long time.
1:22:02 Things like Dark Knight had started busting things open.
1:22:05 You know, Watchmen was out and so on.
1:22:14 Bill had gone from being the guy who draws like Neil Adams to being more and more this guy
1:22:20 who was pulling in Ralph Stedman and doing all this stuff and really becoming his own man.
1:22:22 He had just worked with Alan Moore.
1:22:30 He was looking for a much looser kind of arrangement, you know, because Alan’s a very dominating writer.
1:22:35 Dominating in the sense that he has an idea of how the panel one, panel two.
1:22:40 Well, he writes a very tight, I mean, he’s a clockmaker when he writes the story.
1:22:43 You know, Watchmen plays off that constantly.
1:22:47 And Bill is bucking Bronco.
1:22:53 So, when Bill and I got together, it was, they just opened Epic Comics at Marvel.
1:23:00 Back when Marvel was actually trying to loosen up a little bit before it became Marvel again.
1:23:02 You know, and…
1:23:03 Yeah, it’s easy for people to forget.
1:23:05 I mean, Marvel went through some very hard times.
1:23:06 Yeah.
1:23:11 Before the technology caught up sufficiently to end up with Marvel Studios and so on.
1:23:18 No, I’m talking about when Marvel was really trying to bring in the European influences and stuff like that.
1:23:19 It was quite an exciting time.
1:23:23 Archie Goodwin was running a fascinating division there.
1:23:29 I came up with a miniseries, supposed to be four issues, Electra, for Marvel Comics.
1:23:34 And Marvel couldn’t, when they saw what it was, the script was, they went,
1:23:36 This can’t be part of Marvel Comics.
1:23:40 This is just, like, too goddamn weird.
1:23:44 And so, it bumped over to the Epic Division.
1:23:45 Can I give them credit?
1:23:47 They didn’t just say, We won’t do it.
1:23:52 And then it went from four issues to eight issues, you know, whatever it was.
1:23:55 And the top blew off the…
1:23:58 I mean, the lid blew off the pot that was on the stove.
1:24:05 How did you give Bill enough rain as a bucking bronco?
1:24:06 Didn’t.
1:24:07 You didn’t?
1:24:08 I wrote full scripts.
1:24:09 Okay.
1:24:13 He just drew over the fucking one, and I had to pull the whole thing back.
1:24:15 Can you explain what full script means?
1:24:17 Well, full script is like a screenplay.
1:24:18 It is, right?
1:24:18 Yeah.
1:24:24 Only a little stricter, because he tells you what each panel number is, and exactly what
1:24:26 goes in it, and what the captions are.
1:24:29 So, you would send that to Bill, and you’d be like, Thanks.
1:24:30 Appreciate the effort.
1:24:35 Which is what would come back would be much more abstract, and much more daring.
1:24:37 Cool, but it wouldn’t break the clock.
1:24:39 It would still work.
1:24:45 It did not say I wouldn’t, like, send him an exploding tank and get back a bunch of tomatoes
1:24:47 rolling down the street.
1:24:52 No, but it required reinterpretation of my script, and I welcomed it, though.
1:24:54 Yeah, that sounds fun.
1:24:55 I saw brilliance was happening.
1:24:57 Yeah, that sounds like a lot of fun.
1:25:03 And it’s just because of that, though, the excitement grew, and I kept expanding the story, because
1:25:07 all these unexpected elements that he’d throw in, I don’t want to turn them into characters
1:25:07 and stuff.
1:25:13 And luckily, Archie Goodwin was along for the ride, and, you know, it was an absolute gas.
1:25:15 I love that book.
1:25:17 Oh, I mean, I still have it.
1:25:19 I literally still have it on Long Island.
1:25:20 Let me ask you a question.
1:25:24 It may go, no, this may be a dead end of a question, but I’m going to ask you anyway.
1:25:31 This is a question I often ask as we start to kind of whine towards landing the plane here.
1:25:39 If you had a billboard on which you could put anything non-commercial, right, metaphorically
1:25:45 to get a message or something in front of billions of people, it could be a statement, a quote,
1:25:51 a word, an image, combination, what might you put on that billboard?
1:25:53 Does anything come to mind?
1:25:54 Whoa.
1:25:56 A motto, a mantra, anything?
1:26:00 I’m going to get very broad on this.
1:26:00 Okay.
1:26:02 And just say, ask every question.
1:26:03 Ask every question.
1:26:05 What does that mean to you?
1:26:09 This means that we live in a time of silence.
1:26:18 People are leaving things unquestioned, unspoken, and it’s not a good line.
1:26:20 I can’t come up with a good one, it seems.
1:26:23 I think ask every question is pretty good.
1:26:28 Well, we can take a couple bites at the apple if you like.
1:26:30 How about just challenge?
1:26:31 Challenge?
1:26:32 Yeah.
1:26:33 Okay.
1:26:34 What does that mean to you?
1:26:44 That when you are confronted with things that everybody says, be ready to challenge.
1:26:47 Challenge.
1:26:48 Push the wall.
1:26:49 Defy the code.
1:26:55 If everybody says do X, if everybody says you must do Y.
1:26:56 At least at least say Y.
1:26:58 Yeah.
1:26:58 Y.
1:27:00 Y is a pretty good one.
1:27:01 Do you want to go with that?
1:27:02 Y is a good one.
1:27:03 It’s just Y.
1:27:04 I guess they go together.
1:27:05 Both of them go together pretty well.
1:27:05 Why don’t you go Y?
1:27:06 Okay.
1:27:08 With the question mark.
1:27:10 Y question mark.
1:27:11 Ask.
1:27:12 Where’s the camera?
1:27:12 There it is.
1:27:14 Or why’s it got to be that way?
1:27:15 Why’s it got to be that way?
1:27:16 Why’s it got to be that way?
1:27:19 They all converge sort of in the same theme.
1:27:24 Just trying to go against an age of pathological conformity.
1:27:25 Yes.
1:27:27 Yes.
1:27:28 Often subconscious too.
1:27:30 Pathological conformity.
1:27:30 Yeah.
1:27:32 Ask the Y.
1:27:34 Why does it have to be this way?
1:27:35 Also with your own thinking.
1:27:36 It applies everywhere.
1:27:37 Everywhere.
1:27:38 Yeah.
1:27:38 Everywhere.
1:27:40 Frank, thank you so much.
1:27:41 It’s great to see you again.
1:27:42 Oh, this is going to be a real pleasure, man.
1:27:48 And everybody, you can find Frank on Instagram at Frank Miller Official.
1:27:52 The website is FrankMillerInk, I-N-K.com.
1:27:55 And you can now, where’s the camera?
1:27:57 You can now pre-order.
1:28:04 So absolutely check out Push the Wall, My Life, Writing, Drawing, and the Art of Storytelling.
1:28:05 I’ve been reading it.
1:28:08 I’m going to finish it over the next couple of days.
1:28:11 I’ve really been taking a lot of notes.
1:28:14 I also took a bunch of notes from this conversation.
1:28:18 And we will have links to everything that we talked about in the show notes.
1:28:22 As per usual, at tim.blog.com slash podcast.
1:28:24 Frank Miller will be the only Frank Miller.
1:28:28 If you search by name for guest, you will find this episode.
1:28:35 And until next time, be just a bit kinder than is necessary to others, but also to yourself.
1:28:39 And ask why, why, why.
1:28:40 Thanks for tuning in, everybody.
1:28:44 Hey, guys.
1:28:45 This is Tim again.
1:28:47 Just one more thing before you take off.
1:28:49 And that is Five Bullet Friday.
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