As a medium, North American comic books took their first successful stab at respectability in the 1980s, and cartoonist Frank Miller was one of the chief reasons why. His work on “Daredevil,” “Batman: Year One” and especially 1986’s “The Dark Knight Returns,” which won vast acclaim, restored the Batman character to popularity and paved the way for the character’s first serious movie and all that came since. It also sent Miller himself to Hollywood as a screenwriter, starting with “Robocop 2,” but as this excerpt from his memoir “Push the Wall: My Life, Writing, Drawing, and the Art of Storytelling” shows, that chapter of his life wasn’t entirely happy, and led him back to comics and his next triumph. (Excerpt footnoted by Star staff.)
I always get into trouble when I’m not writing and drawing. An unmoored feeling sets in and, along with it, a weird and precarious comfort. In the movie “The Graduate,” the father admonishes his son, Ben, for dithering after college. To his dismay, he finds Ben floating on a raft in the backyard pool. Ben, unbothered, says, “Well, it’s very comfortable just to drift here.”
