Frank Miller, Comic Book Legend — Creative Process, The Dark Knight Returns, Sin City, 300, & More

Frank Miller talks with Tim Ferriss about the tools and physical, kinetic process behind his artwork, and how Aristotle's idea of channeling all one's energies along lines of excellence guides his creative life. He traces his career from cold-calling mentor Neal Adams, through his transformative runs on Daredevil and the creation of Elektra, to the failure of Ronin and the ruthlessly structured comeback of The Dark Knight Returns. He explains the storytelling and stylistic innovations of Sin City, including working twice-up at large format, batch processing whole books, and laying down black areas first to use fewer lines. Miller reflects on influences from Jack Kirby and Will Eisner to Moebius and Japanese manga like Lone Wolf and Cub, his collaborations with Alan Moore and Bill Sienkiewicz, and working with Robert Rodriguez and Zack Snyder. He closes with a candid account of quitting alcohol and a billboard message urging people to challenge conformity and ask why.

• Sin City was Miller's breakthrough into working 'twice up' (four times the size of the published page), the original 1940s comic page size, to correct what he saw as decades of shrinking comics down to fit photocopiers.
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• Miller broke in by cold-calling Neal Adams from the phone book; Adams brutally told him to go back to Vermont and pump gas, but Miller asked to fix it and return, and Adams' Continuity studio became a halfway house where Adams lined up his first comic book work.
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• After Ronin was excoriated and felt like 'the end of the world,' Miller did a postmortem and responded with The Dark Knight Returns, the most ruthlessly structured thing he ever made: a four-act structure of 16-page increments across four 48-page books, each with its own three-act structure.
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• The Dark Knight Returns and Alan Moore's Watchmen overlapped and the two creators, who met during that period, began affecting each other's work as they reconstructed and deconstructed the superhero.
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• Robert Rodriguez quit the Directors Guild so Miller could receive co-director credit on Sin City, since Rodriguez wanted nothing to stand in the way and knew Miller needed authority on a set full of Rodriguez's loyal people.
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• A conversation with artist Dick Giordano during early Sin City led Miller to lay in all the black areas first and add lines later; he found he needed far fewer lines, and 'the real Lucas in Zig was born.'
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• On Sin City Miller invented a batch process: instead of penciling, lettering, inking and coloring page by page, he did all tissue layouts, then all pencils, then all panel borders, then all flat black areas across the entire book, which sped the work and made it better.
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• Miller reveals alcohol did 'nothing' for him and a lot against him; Lynn Varley and others, convinced he would die, arranged for him to be placed somewhere and watched until he got sober, and he's now having the time of his life creatively.
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• Liquid frisket is essentially glue, first used by oil painters; laid down in strokes, painted over, then wiped up to reveal sparkling highlights of the underpainting beneath.
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• Miller's signature spatter texture is made with a toothbrush dipped in India ink and dragged with his thumb, or by snapping a brush across his wrist for a more elongated, organic slash.
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• Early in his career Miller did three-page jobs for the old publisher Gold Key Comics at $25 a page, what was called 'paying your dues.'
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• Miller cites three foreign 'invasions' of American comics: first the English (Brian Bolland, Mike McMahon via DC), then Moebius and the European wave through Marvel and Forbidden Planet, then the Asian/Japanese influence.
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• Miller's manga awakening came when a girlfriend's father, who did business in Japan, gave him a phone-book-thick copy of Lone Wolf and Cub (Kozure Okami); from it Ronin was born and his storytelling style changed.
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• In his first issue of Swamp Thing, Alan Moore reinvented the character entirely: there was no transformed human inside anymore, but a collection of swamp weeds that had used the dead man as a model to build a new body.
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• To keep creative juices flowing, Robert Rodriguez once rented a hall in Austin where Bruce Willis and his band played, with Willis 'pounding it out like doing a Springsteen.'
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• Miller's reading recommendations for aspiring cartoonists: Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics and Syd Field's book on screenplay structure for three-act storytelling.
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• For learning to draw the human figure, Miller recommends George Bridgman's Complete Guide to Drawing from Life (treats the body like a machine) and, secondarily, Andrew Loomis (L-O-O-M-I-S).
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• One of Miller's favorite films is The Caine Mutiny, praising Humphrey Bogart as a paranoid, almost Nixonian destroyer commander and Fred MacMurray cast against type as a serious military lawyer.
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