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Book
#: 1
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Elektra: Assassin
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Frank
Miller
Biographical/Career
information
Born: January 27, 1957, Maryland
Frank Miller has been a popular name for cartoonists. There was the Frank Miller who drew the Barney Baxter newspaper strip and the Frank Miller of the Des Moines Register who won the Pulitzer Prize for his political cartoons.
This Frank Miller was born in 1957, long after the Golden Age had ended, and is one of the more innovative and controversial storytellers of today. His first published work appeared in the Twilight Zone comic book in 1977. But it was with long-time superhero Daredevil, which he took over in the spring of 1979, that Miller began to attract attention, praise and some critical reaction. Marvel got things rolling by introducing him with the modest statement; "From time to time a truly great artist will explode upon the Marvel scene like a bombshell."
Miller has a very personal style, seemingly gleaned from a wide range of sources - Eisner, Japanese prints, Alfred Hitchcock movies, Bernard Kriegstein, martial arts movies and European artists like Guido Crepax and Moebius. Miller has experimented with multipaneled pages. He’s sliced them up vertically, horizontally, sometimes cutting a tier into a half-dozen frames. Periodically an artist comes along who reexamines the established ways of telling a story - Miller is such an artist. The violence of Miller’s Elektra stories often touched off responses, however Miller continued undaunted, stirring up more controversy at DC with Wolverine and Ronin.
In 1986 Miller wrote and penciled the Batman: Dark Knight Returns series taking the character back to basics as a quasi-mystical, unrelentingly righteous characters whose entire world has been demolished. The series is credited with breathing new life into the Batman license and influencing Tim Burtons' direction with the movie. 1990 brought Miller back to Elektra with illustrator Lynn Varley for Elektra Lives Again. Miller has continued to work prolifically with Give Me Liberty, Hard Boiled, Martha Washington, Sin Cityand The Big Guy and Rusty the Robot.
An outspoken proponent of freedom of speech, Miller is a Board Member of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund.