Frank Miller

Tetragrammaton with Rick Rubin

In this episode of Tetragrammaton, Rick Rubin interviews legendary comic book creator Frank Miller about his profound impact on the medium.

Key takeaways

• Miller describes his initial concept for Sin City as 'Conan in a man trench coat' to bring savagery to an urban setting.
• The interview highlights how Jack Kirby and Stan Lee revolutionized Marvel Comics by moving toward a more dynamic, collaborative creation process.

Main topics

• Comic book history
• Character development

Notable quotes

The creative act to me is one where you have to embrace the unpredictabilities and go down those back alleys.

Conclusion

A deep dive into the mechanics of myth-making that provides immense va

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:02) Tetragrammaton. Speaker 4 (0:23) My very first note that I wrote down, in fact, about Sin City at all, was I wrote Conan in a trench coat. Because I wanted to bring an absolutely barbaric element to an urban setting. So it would feel nothing like a cop show or private eye story or any of that. And that it would cut loose with real savagery. Do you typically have a name right from the start for a character? Marv just leapt into my head as a name. I had different names, and they all were such clichés, and they sounded like private eyes and all of that. And one day I just went, his name's Marv. That's great. Like the most non-tough guy name I could have come up with. Speaker 3 (1:10) And then the characters, would you say they flower out of the world? Speaker 4 (1:17) I guess so. It's very vague at first. I mean, I had to have the world for the character to emerge because there had to be a sense of what he would be up against and what police created him. Speaker 3 (1:30) How long would it be before there's a scene? Speaker 4 (1:34) Well, I don't know how it is for you, but scenes leap to my head. They just bolt into my head. And I usually have the very first scene of the story down before I have any idea where it's going. And are they typically in order like that? It's pretty much like that. Again, getting back to Sin City, because it seems to be the best example. I knew for a fact that this... Bruce, who was such a loser and filled with self-loathing, would wake up next to this goddess who had picked him up at a bar. And he'd had this wild night with her and had fallen passionately in love that first night that he'd wake up and she'd be dead next to him. I just knew that for a fact. I just felt that was a savagely compelling opening. The fun came on figuring out what the hell that meant. Mysterians, Speaker 3 (2:32) great. You said the first note you wrote for Sin City was Marv is like Conan in a trench coat. Yes, yes. Typically, how many notes might you make before you start writing? I'll stray ones all over the place. Lots? Speaker 4 (2:48) Well, yeah, lots. Sometimes I'll charge ahead, and then the next day I'll write a gazillion. stray notes, sometimes on post-its and different notes. Tell me what some other notes might sound like. Well, the first sex confederacy, because I had just been to Texas. And I was really struck by how forceful and intense and powerful Southern women were in this very macho state and how they went against what most people's expectations are. And I thought, okay, then let's just take this to the cartoon level and basically have it be that Southern women have taken over the South. and made it the most feminist part of America. So it's cartoon thinking, but I found it kind of delicious. Do they usually come from things you notice in real life? I think the best ones do. Other things are just reactions. I mean, I find that a lot of good ideas come from seeing somebody really screw it, just screw the pooch, and go. Speaker 4 (4:06) man, if you'd just done this, you would have had something really cool. And just going ahead and doing that. And by the time it's done, nobody even would recognize it as having anything to Speaker 3 (4:17) do with what I was reacting to. Like missed opportunities. Speaker 4 (4:20) Yes, and the creative act to me is one where you have to embrace the unpredictabilities and go down those back alleys. And there's just weird places. But I always tell... People just coming in, as I always say, make mistakes. Make tons of mistakes. They're going to be your best friends. Speaker 3 (4:42) Do Speaker 4 (4:42) you typically write too much? I tend to flaw toward too little. When I do my second pass, I go like, okay, Frank, this is haiku. I was thinking that I was playing guru and this was just so good that my shit don't stink. And I've got to either soften it or sweeten it or just clarify things. I mean, I was criticized early on by a director I work with who complained, saying, you just write too tight. And I still don't entirely agree with him because, I mean, I find it most... writing that's done particularly for the screen is pretty damn flabby. But at the same time, he had a point that you can be so tight that it starts to feel as if you're withholding. Speaker 3 (5:34) How is telling a story visually different than telling it just with words? Speaker 4 (5:40) Well, I don't really work strictly in prose. I mean, I've never written a prose novel. Comics have been my medium ever since I was a little kid. I drew before I even knew how to read. Speaker 4 (5:55) We generally do. The English language, like the Japanese, is a bunch of pictographs anyway. And I think in comics, the fundamental mission is to reconnect the two so that you are experiencing the two, but not as separate things. They become one unit in your mind, even though physically you can see they are two. Do you feel like the images do more of the work? I think they'd better. I think that if comic books are simply illustrated prose, then they're a backward form indeed. I think that comics have more in common with hieroglyphics than they do with illustrated children's books. It makes me Speaker 3 (6:45) think of silent movies, how much is conveyed without any words or maybe just a few cards to push Speaker 4 (6:50) it along. Think of the astonishing. Or like Stanley Kubrick, for instance, would do. The best pieces of 2001. Silent. You know, the entire sequence of the goddamn bone with the monkeys. That's the soul of the movie. That's the entire story of the movie. And there isn't nothing but a bunch of grunts there. It's also the spiritual peak of the movie. Speaker 3 (7:19) Would you say all of your work has a spiritual component? Speaker 4 (7:24) It's funny because I'm not a religious guy, but I believe so because I believe that humans are spiritual creatures. And I have discovered that my entire journey as an artist is to explore and define the heroic. And there's no way to do that without embracing a higher meaning and to examine the endless puzzle of good and evil. Speaker 3 (7:52) How is it different coming to a character that's not your character to start with, Batman, for example? Yeah, yeah. Do you feel required to take from Speaker 4 (8:02) the Speaker 3 (8:02) past? Speaker 4 (8:03) So the editorial decision I made coming in was to regard the entire tapestry that lay of the character as material to pick from. And I felt free to ignore the garbage and the bad decisions and the stuff that just didn't fit in with my point of view. Speaker 3 (8:25) In your mind, was your Batman the same person as the Batman before? Speaker 4 (8:33) No, not really. Because he couldn't be and be a character. A character is not a portrait of a person. a heroic character especially, is like a piece of artwork, represents something. The character himself has a tone, has a theme, and the world around this character reflects that character. The best enemies of any of the characters I've worked on have been perverse reflections of the character himself. The reason the Joker is the best Batman villain is because Batman is someone who faced insanity when he was a child and has enforced sanity by himself in the world ever since. And now he's up against someone who is categorically insane and seeks to create chaos wherever he goes. I added giving the Joker a perverse sexual streak so that he became, to my mind, a mythic figure in terms of that he represented all kinds of arcane forms of sadism and evil so that he was, in fact, more evil than insane. Speaker 3 (9:52) So would you say that of any of these characters, they're only a person in a poetic sense? Right. Is that correct? Speaker 4 (9:58) I agree completely. It's a beautiful way to put it. In fact, I'm going to steal that. It's yours. Thank you very much. You're welcome. Speaker 3 (10:05) My gift to you. Speaker 4 (10:06) Hey, I got this deal from Rick Rubin. Speaker 3 (10:11) I never imagined it in that way before, but hearing you talk about it, that's what I'm hearing. Speaker 4 (10:15) Yes. Yeah, that's perfect. Yeah. And also the same as equally true villains. I'm just picking around for iconic villains that I didn't make up here. But if you want to go for the one that's made the biggest imprint on the popular imagination, it would be Darth Vader, properly named Dark Father, because he's the nightmare version of anyone's father. And he represents categorical evil with authority behind it. And there you have a beautiful two-dimensional character. Two-dimensional is not always bad. Speaker 3 (10:51) And is it always as cut and dried as good versus evil, or are there shades of gray all the Speaker 4 (11:00) way around? I don't think there's shades of gray. I think there's a multiplicity of colors and complexities. I mean, I think a character can have an evil streak a mile wide and be a saint. For instance, I'm putting together my studies on a potential Alexander the Great project. And there's no way to portray a character who was without question a history-changing, world-saving figure, who at the same time was a ruthless, ruthless slaughterer of many, many thousands. And so to me, that is not so much a dichotomy as a dimensionality of these characters. Because really, they couldn't... He couldn't have been great without being both. I mean, Alexander's a nice guy, would not admit to history books. Yeah. Speaker 3 (11:57) Is it typical for writers of cartoons to both draw and write? Speaker 4 (12:03) Sadly, no. There's usually one writer, sometimes more. And it's usually an arts team that puts together the black and white artwork. Usually two people, which one would work in pencil and the other would go over in ink. And then there's a color artist. Nowadays, that can be a team using computer work and so on to achieve it. Starting in the 1960s, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby put together Marvel Comics. And when they did, Stan Lee... Speaker 4 (12:38) decided that fastest way to get these things done was to jot down a story and hand it to Jack Kirby and have Jack Kirby come back with a bunch of illustrated pages on which Jack Kirby would write all these notes about what these characters would be saying. And Kirby would include brand new scenes and so on as he was working out making the story real to him along the way. Steve Ditko did the same. And then Stan Lee would come in and deliver a script on top of that. Starting with that, the whole game changed. What was it before that? Before that, it was very much people working in series. The writer would talk with the editor and get a story approved. And the writer would sit down and write up a script that said, panel one. And it was a script that began with a description of the illustration. and then dictated what the characters were saying. I included all the little sound effects and all of that. When I first worked in comic books, I worked over scripts like that. But at Marvel Comics, it was the other way around. And it's still done both ways. Interesting. But that's the way you see when you, if you compare the other comics to the Marvel Comics of that time, there's just endless energy and vigor in the Marvel Comics. The characters are flying across the page constantly and talking while they're fighting. All those preposterous conceits of the comic book that we now take for granted, they very quickly went from being a tiny little company to a burgeoning giant and eventually eclipsed everybody else. Speaker 1 (14:27) When the lights go down, the body gets to work. 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Together, they reflect a simple idea. Health isn't built in one moment. It's built over a full 24-hour cycle. Learn more at drinkag1.com slash tetra. Try it tonight. Speaker 3 (16:28) Besides Marvel, historically, who are the other big comic companies? Well, Speaker 4 (16:32) DC Comics is, of course, the giant that goes all the way back because they had Superman and then later Batman. But there were also Fawcett comics, Captain Marvel, which during its reign, it outsold Superman. It was the most popular comic book in America. In the 1950s, a true golden era, the line called EC Comics came along with the horror comics and science fiction comics and produced the best written and by far and away best illustrated comics of the time. And perhaps the best illustrated of all time. What Speaker 3 (17:12) was different about what EC was doing? Speaker 4 (17:14) Well, I think the biggest factor was a man named Harvey Kurtzman, who was an artist and a writer. And a publisher named William M. Gaines, who had a vision for a comic book company that would aim for adolescents instead of children. Easy Comics was not for little kids. It was gruesome. It was terrifying. And it was sexier than hell. The fans of it were so devout that they still hold mentions of their own. And those comics are still the most highly valued ones you're going to find. They've come out in glorious editions the size of the original artwork. And they do mark a watershed. in the evolution Speaker 3 (18:05) of the art form. Do Speaker 4 (18:06) you Speaker 3 (18:06) think part of it was the comics that came before them were made with a specific idea of these are for kids, they're these kind of disposable things? Yes. And that E.C. thought we can elevate this to be something bigger? Speaker 4 (18:20) Yeah, I think so. But I think the other thing was it might have been Gaines, I suspect it was. I think that he probably said, Why lose them when they're 14? You know, why not play to the kids who are starting to get boners and really have violent fantasies and all that stuff? You know, let's raid some of the commercial magazines and get these guys who can draw better than anybody to come in. And then let's have them tell all kinds of different stories. They didn't even compete with the guys in tights. They were doing crime stories. They didn't have Speaker 3 (18:59) any superheroes. Speaker 4 (19:01) Nope, not a one. It was more story-based or genre-based like movies. Yes, Speaker 3 (19:05) it was. Speaker 4 (19:05) It's like comics before and after has been one genre medium pretty much. I mean, in recent years, it's gotten much more diverse, but it's still overwhelmingly centered on superheroes. In fact, it's centered on the old superheroes. If you were tasked Speaker 3 (19:25) with reinventing a classic character from the past, let's say Bugs Bunny, how would you approach Speaker 4 (19:32) that? I don't think I'd touch Bugs Bunny because my mind doesn't work like that. That's just not my kind of meat. Did you never like Bugs Bunny? Oh, I can play him fine as a kid. It's just my imagination doesn't go in those directions. But recently I was working on a Superman project. that I was writing. And I found that in that one, I was hearkening back to the 1940s in a lot of ways and applying it more to the current world. But what I was seeking was really, in a way, I lost glory in that I wanted the sense of wonder. I wanted it to be that breathtaking moment when the impossible can happen. And that's very difficult to do when flying is normal. Speaker 3 (20:23) Did you ever research the history of how Superman came to be? The only stuff Speaker 4 (20:29) I know is about the two little kids in Ohio. I don't know anything about this. Yeah, they're two Jewish kids in Ohio. But one of them drew and one of them wrote, and they both had this fun idea of this character named Superman. My own suspicions, which I have to throw at you, is that they just happened to choose a word that was in the air at the time, Ubermont. And there's something about Superman that flies in the face of Nazi movement. And if you look at him, he has black hair. Sick eyebrows. And he's very much a golem. I mean, I submit that the only way to really understand Superman is to accept that his origins are profoundly Jewish because everything about the character, his origin is Moses. You know, he arrives riding in a crib from outer space. So the echoes are there, and I think these youngsters were channeling what they learned in the temple. into Superman. Speaker 3 (21:36) So many of the superheroes have some connection to radioactivity. Speaker 4 (21:43) That started with Marvel. Speaker 3 (21:45) Either poisoned by radiation. Yeah, Speaker 4 (21:47) it's a radioactive spider. Yeah. The radioactive bomb that went off and created the Hulk. It goes on. That was during the 60s when there was the Red Scare, the nuclear stuff was going on. And we had all the movies where we had giant ants. Are comics an extension of sci-fi? The superhero stuff is related to, it's also an extension of ancient mythology and of fantasy. I always seem to bring in Star Wars references here because Star Wars is such a fine amalgam of doing fantasy and mythology and science fiction all together. And I think that the superhero is very much of a part of all of that. The fact that it can be done by one person has a lot to do with it as well. You know, Jack Kirby is able to stand as a titan in a small field. He created just thousands of characters, and he never stopped. After doing all this amazing stuff at Marvel Comics, essentially being one of the premier architects of it, he ran off and created what was called the Fourth World. that was published by DC Comics, where he created another grand universe that has yet to be explored in film and so on. And he never stopped for as long as he was alive. Who were some of the characters from the Fourth World? Fourth World was all about what he called the new gods. He was taking the superhero back into mythology so that there was an eternal contest between two planets that were near Earth. one called New Genesis. And then across from it was this industrial, ghastly, polluted place that had slaves and trolls and was run by a monster named Darkseid that was called Apocalypse. spelled it wrong just so they could trademark it. And Darkseid was plainly the model for Darth Vader. But he was a much bigger, more demonic character who he would obliterate people with blasts from his eyes and so on. But he didn't have giant cannons that could blow up entire planets, though. So it's... But yeah, everything in Kirby's world was Wagnerian. And he got more so as he got older. What was his first character? First character Kirby ever made up? Oh, my God. Do you know? First big one he made up