Comic Book Resources

Daring to defend The Dark Knight Strikes Again

from Frank Miller & Lynn Varley's The Dark Knight Strikes Again

It started with a dare. Here at Robot 6 a week ago, I posted about how comics legend Frank Miller has been posting comments at the blog of neoconservative pundit Victor Davis Hanson. This inspired a comment by James B. Elkins II that casted skepticism on my bonafides as a Miller fan. Since Miller is in fact my all-time favorite comics creator, I responded by daring any and all comers to challenge me to defend what is, to many readers, Miller's most indefensible work: The Dark Knight Strikes Again, Miller and colorist Lynn Varley's sequel to their seminal revisionist-superhero classic The Dark Knight Returns. I've always loved that book, but I'd never written about it at length. Well, David Brothers of The 4th Letter went ahead and took the dare and laid the challenge at my feet.

The result? I wrote a review of The Dark Knight Strikes Again for The Savage Critic(s), another one of my blog-homes away from blog-home. The piece, part of series of posts I'm doing on my all-time favorite comics, places Miller & Varley's much-maligned, much-misunderstood comic in the context of similarly bright and brash works by cartoonist Ben Jones, comedians Tim and Eric, the "glo-fi" subgenre of indie rock, and more. Do check it out--then swing by The 4th Letter for David Brothers's own two-part review of the book, which tackles it from a very different yet equally positive angle.

Frank Miller, conservative comment-thread commentator

Frank Miller and Eva Mendes (photo by UGO.com's Dr. Know)

He's one of the most influential comics creators of all time (and my personal favorite, might I add), but Frank Miller has kept a pretty low profile since the critical and box-office failure of his adaptation of Will Eisner's The Spirit last Christmas. He's reportedly continued to work on scripts for his Jim Lee collaboration All Star Batman & Robin, the Boy Wonder and the sequel to the Sin City film adaptation he co-directed with Robert Rodriguez; and of course there's his long-gestating graphic novel that may or may not be about Batman fighting al Qaeda and may or may not be called Holy Terror, Batman! But whatever he's been up to, he's been up to it incommunicado, turning down requests for interviews.

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Everyone's a Critic: A round-up of comic reviews and thinkpieces

A Comic Studies Reader

* Jeet Heer and Kent Worcester talk about their latest book, The Comic Studies Reader, among a myriad number of other things, on the Inkstuds podcast.

* Speaking of podcasts, The Comics Journal has posted a panel discussion between Dark Horse editors Philip Simon and Carl Horn, Funimation’s Adam Sheenan and Japanamerica author Roland Kelts on the state of the manga and anime industries that took place during Sakura-Con in Seattle.

* There's a new site in town, Comic Book Critics, which collects reviews of various comics and then assigns them a score from 1-10 based on the consensus, a la Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic.

* Mark Seigel and the rest of the First Second staff review the new Scott Pilgim book, comic book style!

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After Watchmen, what next Hollywood?

Ronin

The Onion's AV Club runs through a list of other comics they'd like to see get the full cinematic treatment, starting with Frank Miller's Ronin:

Miller doesn’t have the best track record with Hollywood, especially not with his directorial debut, The Spirit, hanging over any project bearing his name. But surely financiers can still remember what a payday Watchmen director Zach Snyder got out of Miller’s 300. Besides, Ronin was practically written for the screen to begin with, and it fits particularly well into the current blockbuster-action aesthetic. Samurai, demons, robot battles, shifting realities, explosions, sex, and above all, massive mindfucks as the story behind the story keeps changing—Miller’s breakout book looks dense and muddy on the page, but it’d look terrific on the big screen. A few years ago, Stomp The Yard director Sylvain White was reportedly attached to a Ronin project… so where is it?

Other suggestions include Dave Sim's High Society, Craig Thompson's Blankets and James Robinson's run on Starman. The site is particularily comics focused this week (in celebration of the Watchmen release no doubt) as they've also got a 101 guide to superhero comics for the uninitiated and the usual bimonthly slate of reviews.