Comic Book Confidential was a mainstay of my childhood that I watched countless times. I think growing up in Canada helped because when I saw that The Silver Snail, my local comic shop in Hamilton, Ontario was in the credits for the documentary, it made comics (and the people who made them) feel accessible. It was probably played regularly on the Canadian television airwaves to satisfy Canadian Content guidelines, but that did nothing to diminish its impact on me. Of all the many artistic adventures I’ve taken, creating comics feels closest to my heart and Comic Book Confidential was essential to cementing that association. Comics helped me explore not only to the furthest reaches of the imagination but it made me connect comics with my home and origins in Canada (talk about the sublime to the ridiculous!)
Recently my wife saw Comic Book Confidential pop up on one of our streaming services and we decided to take a trip down comic book memory lane. I already rant a lot about the roots of inspiration and the nature of art as a lost ‘alchemical formula’, so it was nice to see Frank Miller say something very similar. When talking about his inspiration for The Dark Knight, he has this to say:
What I’ve been trying to do recently, um, is to take the stuff of the old (Batman) comics and do it in a way that’s worth reading for me.
Whatever stories I write have to do with my reactions to what’s going on around me, with the world that I live in right now, with 1980s America which is a very frightening, uh, silly, um, place and it’s often silly and frightening at the same time and I hope Dark Knight is also frightening and silly at the same time.
In today’s world, we often mistake criticism as being unsupportive or even contrary to progress. It couldn’t be further from the truth and The Dark Knight is a good example of this. In the clip below, Frank Miller describes how over its 50-year history the character of Batman had been reduced to a silly, colourful costumed hero; very far from its dark and violent roots. If we are to follow the prevailing logic of today, to radically revise a character as a critique of its previous self would be unheard of. If Dark Knight is a good example, then a bad example is when costumed characters are re-imagined to try and cash in on some perceived trend in the larger culture. “Heavy Metal Batman” is a great example of this garbage, where corporate synergy tries to pass for relevance. I may be wrong, but it feels like the work of comics writers now are more about upholding the established way of doing things (because they are fans first) rather than indulging any iconoclastic impulse (and a true artist in distant second).
Why am I going on about this formula for creation? Because the best and most memorable stories came out of taking the world, transforming it through the insights of the artists, and translating them into something new. Star Wars, Watchmen, The Dark Knight, Lord of the Rings and so many more come out of this tradition because it yields the most meaningful stories that speak to people’s souls about what it is to be alive. If an artist can speak to the ways people are feeling/suffering/living and loving, then the audience will listen because they are being given something that speaks to their truest self. Making a connection between artist and audience requires that one individual experiences life and shares those experiences across vast expanses of space and time with another individual; it’s all part of a vast cultural exchange that uses our commonality as its point of departure.
When Frank Miller looked around him and thought about the world and what it meant to be alive in ‘80s America, he used Batman to illuminate and dramatize those ideas. He probably saw that the brightly coloured version in the comics didn’t reflect the difficulties people experienced in their lives. The villains in the lives of working people in the ‘80s were not garishly attired and ridiculous; they inspired fear and brought suffering felt by many. I bet a lot of people felt a deep sense of unease in the ‘80s, and many probably felt the same way as Frank Miller did; that it was all so terrifying and silly. To feel this anxiety is to be alive; to create something that dramatizes the same anxieties (in the ‘safe’ context of art) is to say we are never alone.