been thinking about frank miller a lot lately
there was a very punk thing manifesting through that dumb kid
a very punk, reactionary, inherently conservative thing that couldn't understand anyone who wasn't a white man angry at the near-certainty of dying in cities made terrible by mutant hands
i mean why did i like repo man. why am i a nearly-fifty gay punk who got the ethos behind the jokes in a movie that is 99% joke*, but didn't understand why the jokes were funny. why was i so dissociated & damaged by violence in the home that i didn't get why the "real" punks in the movie are so fucking funny. you have to be a punk in this fucking world, because how can you be comfortable in the skin you were born in, in america? the only way you can be comfortable being defined by this oppressively dumb, barely sentient lumbering Thing calling itself society is through complacency & sedation
* the remaining 1% is a sincerity pure & intense as boomslang venom spat in your eye. that is why i liked repo man, by the bye. because it Believes the shit it talks, to your face, as it smiles like harry dean stanton fingering a straight razor
(listen i never promised your a primrose path of seagues. just keep reading & pretend i'm not here)
i've never read anything that said frank miller saw repo man but i mean christ, look at frank when he's firing on all cylinders as a satirist. 'give me liberty' is as punk & anarchic as any alex cox movie. the Whole of a frank miller project is never as great as its opening chapter. i think we can all agree on that: the martha washington book miller & gibbons death-marched to conclusion does not interest me as a work of fiction because frank really wanted to write a dave sim length essay on (of all people) ayn randian theories and YAWN, man
but that opening salvo, 'give me liberty', was as fucking punk as it gets, and it's magnificent comix, and it's miller giving alan moore the business, and it's the stadium rock equivalent of listening to fugazi live in the snow on their fourth encore and the people who were there were fucking living the music, believe
[lest you fail to identify my synesthesiac tendencies i consider elektra: assassin one of the finest cyberpunk novels i've ever gobbled. so maybe i feel art more strongly & specifically than most ordinary people who weren't deeply traumatized. i experience music. there's no other way to say it. every time i hear one of my favorite songs i am forever hearing some part of it anew because the experience is new and i'm still playing that track, motherfucker]
anyway. i'm never going to assemble all these notes in one place & edit them into a cogent slab because who cares, on the internet. i'd rather make art & think about art & blither about it where & when-ever i feel like it, because i've survived death three times & once it was nearly at the hands of my dad. i've earned the right to not give a fig about brevity. and i think frank the tank is a guy i need to thank, cringe as his name goddamned be. he's just as fuckin' bad as dave sim and has just as many weird sins to answer for, and i say this counting alan moore's name also in the lot, because they're all popular artists, and i hold my favorite creators' feet to the fire all the time no matter the medium. i've kept a list of who was naughty & who was nice & who can be considered an architect of the present moment because these sumbitches have been shaping popular imagination for decades, baby. and frank's a fuckup, first & foremost, so his work has produced a fuckoff bevvy of idiots who in time came to shape conservative tendencies in young white men
insert existential drawn-out heaving sigh here
but frank's a great artist, no matter whether i think his linework has irreparably deteriorated or not, because he's made some Great Art, and chapter one of the dark knight returns is an excellent 48-page graphic novella that's < the dark knight returns as a whole, which is a very clumsy book. ronin is a fucking excellent graphic novel from start to finish; there's no up-and-down to the tone that fucks up what miller's doing. it's mathematically perfect in its pacing. it's assured, it's practiced, it's stadium rock... yet i'd rather read the first chapter of the dark knight returns, any given day, because it is a perfect batman story that shoulda been an annual or one of those "elseworlds" prestige format things DC started squatting out
and what the fuck is punk about batman, anyway? what in the name of balls has happened to this meander of sentences since i first typed the words "there is a very punk thing" about young frank miller. i dunno. but there's something there, because miller had batman become King Of The Punks in his weird dumb superhero comic about an aging son of old money dressing up in armor to bruise superman's jaw, and frank miller identified with the blank angry irony of sid vicious's swastika fetish, and frank miller was a dumb white kid who got the crap scared out of him when early 80s new york beat him up & took his money. he very nearly wound up being a victim in a mike hammer book, chewed up and covered in filth-- or at least he clearly felt that way, and as a lifelong violence survivor i can totally empathize what's it's like, living in terror, so no surprise when the guy who barely held it together after getting robbed saw the twin towers fly apart, no surprise That Guy turned into a really embarrassing coked-out uncle and started drawing supercrude bat-fantasies about killing saddam with his hands & his love (of america)
but still: there's that punk Thing. because the dark knight strikes again is as tonally weird as tdkr, and it's goddamned beautifully abused by lynn varley, at the other end of a creative partnership that i'll never quite comprehend because creeping jesus, imagine having sex with the dude who considered himself the physical inspiration behind 'that yellow bastard'? the confidence to draw himself as the main monster in his best "hard-boiled" book, that's fuckin' Punk
and the way frank miller drew Ben Grimm, recently?
and anyway when i say i've been thinking about frank miller a lot lately usually it's for the pacing & all that "writing" jazz-- and what the fuck is writing when it's done by re-arranging a literal wall of post-it notes? don't answer that --but in this instance it's i've been thinking about frank miller a lot because i really used to admire his artwork even though it's ugly & there's never been anything sensual about his line, his lines had this Energy. and i know that energy wasn't all caffeine and booze and coke
the energy was punk. it's for-sure there. it's a guy who was making some of the best comix of his young life and survived getting robbed by new york at the same time as a pandemic is destroying the city and reagan's in office & that fer shure meant we were all gonna eat a nuke. so fuck it, fam, clamber in my chevy malibu & let's bang. the line of a repo man is always intense
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