Batman: Year One - Part 1

[history79]

The A.V. Club: So you actually consciously set out to change things in the comics industry?

Frank Miller: Well, I set out to remark upon them. And seeing how all these heroes had been castrated since the 1950s, and just how pointless they seemed to be... In this perfect world of comic books, which was what it was back then, why would people dress up in tights to fight crime?

The A.V. Club: Because there wasn't anything bad enough going on back then to justify that extremism?

Frank Miller: It was just a bunch of goofy villains. It was 1985 when I started working on this, and I thought, "What kind of world would be scary enough for Batman?" And I looked out my window.

Comments

[mrstatham]

"I didn't really like these awesome silver-age comics that blossomed out of these horrible rules that neutered comics in the fifties and I'm entirely ignorant of how awesome these characters became under more mature creators in the seventies, so I'm here to grimdark Batman forever with some admittedly decent story, but thus create this awful conflict in the writers of the late 90's and onwards who blowjob the silver age but don't correctly understand how to marry that to my grimdark darkness."

[cyberghostface]

It's not Miller's fault that other writers copied him. It always happens when something is successful or critically acclaimed.

Hypothetically you could say the same about Christopher Nolan's Batman films and how other superhero films tried to copy his approach.

[lego_joker]

Ehhh. Superman in the Silver Age, one could argue was awesome. Batman in the Silver Age... felt for the most part like a pale reflection of that. The Adam West show was the one undeniable gem that spun out of it, but in a way I feel that show was as reactionary to the Silver Age as Miller's stuff was, except in a different direction.

[espanolbot]

Pretty sure Dennis O'Neil deserves more credit for making Batman more respectable than Miller, but that's just me.

O'Neil's Batman was progressively more mature in the traditional sense, while Miller's Batman (particularly in DKR) was more clownish in how seriously it wanted people to take it. Year One is largely better in that it was written early in his career and didn't become host to the usual Miller-isms (that was what Daredevil was for).

[laughing_tree]

This reminds me, has everyone heard about the recent Q&A where Miller says he wants to do a children's book about Carrie Kelly as a Nancy Drew-type?

[silverhammerman]

Looking it up, that sounds... interesting. I mean, Frank Miller did Give Me Liberty, which stars a teenage female protagonist and is pretty great, but that was decades ago at this point and I don't have much confidence left in him.