Frank Miller
From Sin City
Frank Miller (born January 27, 1957 in Olney, Maryland) is an American writer, artist and film director best known for his film noir-style comic book stories. He is acclaimed as one of the most influential and popular creators in comics today.
Frank Miller was raised in Montpelier, Vermont. Miller became a professional comic artist and worked for a number of major publishers including Gold Key, DC Comics and Marvel Comics. He gained attention for a two issue story for Marvel's The Spectacular Spider-Man. He was soon made the regular penciller on Daredevil and quickly took on the writing chores on the title as well. In collaboration with inker Klaus Janson, Miller attracted a growing number of fans, critical acclaim and the respect of industry peers. During this run on Daredevil, Miller created the female ninja assassin character Elektra, one of the characters with which he is most strongly associated. He also broke a comic industry rule by killing off a major character. Since then, his take on Daredevil has remained the dominant one; the 2003 film adaptation, for example, used many elements of Miller's stories, as did its 2005 spinoff Elektra. In 1982, Miller teamed with legendary comic book writer Chris Claremont for a four-part mini-series devoted to the X-Men character Wolverine. The mini-series transformed Wolverine from just a virtually indestructible brawler to a character with a level of emotional depth and honor very rarely seen in comics. Miller and Claremont had transformed the character into a deeply flawed hero in search of his own past, honor, and happiness. The mini-series was a critical and commercial success, transforming Wolverine into a major character for Marvel Comics.
Miller was influential in exposing many American comics readers to Japanese manga for the first time; he wrote introductions and illustrated the covers to Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima's Lone Wolf and Cub when it was first printed in English by First Publishing (1990).
During his years making comics for hire, Miller became an increasingly vocal proponent of the creators' rights movement. As a result, starting in the 1980s Miller increasingly devoted himself to his own creator-owned works. Ronin, a science fiction samurai story for DC, was his first of many collaborations with his wife Lynn Varley. Miller has alternated between handling (and redefining) well-known company icons such as Batman and Daredevil and creating his own works such as Give Me Liberty with Dave Gibbons and Hard Boiled with Geof Darrow. Sin City was his first completely solo venture, a series of stark black-and-white crime stories published by Dark Horse Comics. Varley has colored much of his work, including The Dark Knight Returns and 1998's 300.
Miller has also written a number of screenplays, most notably those for RoboCop 2 and RoboCop 3. After RoboCop 3, Miller stated that he would never allow Hollywood to make movie adaptations of his comics, being disgusted with the constant studio interference with his scriptwriting. Later, Miller's screenplay for RoboCop 2 was adapted by Steven Grant for Avatar Press's Pulsaar imprint, which now owns the rights to create comics based on RoboCop. Illustrated by Juan Jose Ryp, the series is called Frank Miller's RoboCop and contains plot elements that were divided between RoboCop 2 and RoboCop 3.
Miller's stance to movie adaptations changed after Robert Rodriguez made a short film from one of Miller's Sin City short stories without Miller's knowledge and then showed it to him. Miller was so pleased with the result that he greenlighted a full-length film, Sin City. The movie was released in the US on April 1, 2005, using Miller's original comics panels as storyboards. Miller and Rodriguez are credited as co-directors, which Rodriguez insisted upon. The Director's Guild of America would not permit Miller's being credited in this fashion and as a result Rodriguez decided to resign from the Guild. The film's success has brought renewed attention to Miller and to Sin City.
As of 2005, Frank Miller has returned to the Batman creative team taking on the writing duties of All Star Batman and Robin, a series ouside of the normal DC continuity. The series is illustrated by Jim Lee.
[edit] Cameo Appearances
Frank Miller has appeared in three films in small roles, dying in every one.
- In RoboCop 2, he plays "Frank, the chemist" and dies in an explosion in the drug lab.
- In the Daredevil movie, he appears as a corpse with a pen in his head, thrown by Bullseye, who steals his motorcycle. The credits list Frank Miller as "Man with Pen in Head".
- In Sin City he plays The Priest killed by Marv in the confessional.
- He Also Was In Icons a Show On G4, before the release Of Sin City The Movie
[edit] Quote
"I figured Daredevil must be Catholic because only a Catholic could be both an attorney and a vigilante."
[edit] External links
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