Frank Miller, RIP... Sort of

Frank Miller was a mover and shaker in the comics world back in the 80s with The Dark Night Returns. TDNR was the equivalent of William Goldman's amazing Robin Hood film Robin and Marion.

Go to the link to learn about TDNR. The quick synopsis is that Bruce Wayne is 50+ and Batman is retired. He returns but given his age and the times it is purely a last hurrah. It was brilliant and strange. Age usually doesn't touch superheroes and it paved the way for several treatments of the superhero genre that included the passing of time.

Probably the purest legacy is Mark Waid's Kingdom Come.

Miller then went on to create the Sin City series which I found initially interesting. But graphic violence can only take you so far and I lost interest.

Well, Frank Miller has officially entered the community of Old Farts.

Miller put out this screed about the Occupy Wall Street movement. He thinks they are protesting the War on Terror.

You can criticize OWS for a lot of reasons but they are not attempting anything against the War on Terror. That is, unless you conflate the WOT with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The two are not the same except in those who are either poorly misinformed or reflexively jerk up the flag like a frog in an electric current whenever they feel threatened. I suspect Miller falls in both categories.

I'm sad but unsurprised. Miller falls into that group of people who praise individual action as long as it doesn't happen. You can see this throughout his work: iconoclastic men who take matters and the law into their own hand when they see injustice. But when somebody actually does this it upsets the status quo and these same people are terrified. Miller goes so far as to suggest the OWS protesters join the military to fight terror. Which is fine if it had anything to do with what the OWS is trying to do. Anything at all.

I wonder sometimes if artistic success such as has been enjoyed by people like Frank Miller or Tom Cruise or others makes people a little psychotic. They get such enormous positive feedback they lose the ability to correct themselves and go off the rails.

A very good critique of the screed is by Tony DiGerolamo here.

I don't quite understand why the OWS movement pushes the buttons it does. I find it fairly hopeful if inarticulate. I hope it will make the transition from inchoate movement to political action much as the Tea Party did. The Tea Party was every bit as incoherent and odd as the OWS but it had an inherent authoritarian organizing principle that pleased some big money people who then co-opted them.

Where's George Soros when you need him?