There aren’t a lot of things better than rediscovering some good shit from back in the day. I just reread most of Frank Miller’s first run on Daredevil from back in the 80′s. I can’t adequately express how exciting those books were. Without this comic, there likely would never have been the seminal game-changing works of 1986, Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns (also Frank Miller, as we all well know). The writing was complex, but it never lost sight of the importance of entertainment, of being fun. The art was raw and hyperkinetic. More than almost any other comic before or since, you smelled the spilled blood, and felt the knuckles against your jaw.
Both as a reader and as a creator, I can see how these qualities are taken for granted now, and how comics have become less about the unbridled fun, and more about a certain…self-expression. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a creative person (I balk at the appellation artist, because there are qualitative overtones in that word that I cannot bring myself to accept), and I understand the importance of telling stories that resonate with me, stories that I want to tell.
But I also want to tell stories that the audience wants to read. I want to make people feel things, I want my readers to emote. I want to create that sense of excitement that I felt today as I reread Daredevil’s incredible battles with Bullseye, and I want to make my readers (or viewers) ache with the kind of loss that Matt Murdock made me feel as he accepted that his first love was dead.
I’m not sure that Frank Miller, who I absolutely idolize, sees his work this same way now. I think his stuff has become much more personally driven. All-Star Batman and Robin almost satirizes his own earlier works, and I know that his upcoming Holy Terror, Batman! is a direct byproduct of the fact that he lived in New York when 9/11 happened. There is no shame in this man’s game. He’s a legend in the industry and he has earned the right to create his art as he sees fit. And he will deservedly have an audience for it.
I just miss the days when he was the baddest-ass in mainstream comics. Byrne’s FF, Simonson’s Thor, Wolfman and Perez on Teen Titans, Levitz and Giffen on Legion of Superheroes, Miller’s Daredevil…these were the books I grew up with…comics in the 80s. Creatively, this is where I come from. This is my home. And I guess you can’t go home again. Dang it.
