Frank Miller's Daredevil and the Ends of Heroism

Comics Culture

by Paul Young

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, writer-artist Frank Miller turned Daredevil from a tepid-selling comic into an industry-wide success story, doubling its sales within three years. Lawyer by day and costumed vigilante by night, the character of Daredevil was the perfect vehicle for the explorations of heroic ideals and violence that would come to define Miller’s work.    
Frank Miller’s Daredevil and the Ends of Heroism is both a rigorous study of Miller’s artistic influences and innovations and a reflection on how his visionary work on Daredevil impacted generations of comics publishers, creators, and fans. Paul Young explores the accomplishments of Miller the writer, who fused hardboiled crime stories with superhero comics, while reimaging Kingpin (a classic Spider-Man nemesis), rehabilitated the half-baked villain Bullseye, and invented a completely new kind of Daredevil villain in Elektra. Yet, he also offers a vivid appreciation of the indelible panels drawn by Miller the artist, taking a fresh look at his distinctive page layouts and lines.    A childhood fan of Miller’s Daredevil, Young takes readers on a personal journey as he seeks to reconcile his love for the comic with his distaste for the fascistic overtones of Miller’s controversial later work. What he finds will resonate not only with Daredevil fans, but with anyone who has contemplated what it means to be a hero in a heartless world.    Other titles in the Comics Culture series include Twelve-Cent Archie, Wonder Bondage and Feminism in the Marston/Peter Comics, 1941-1948, and Considering  Poetics, Property, Politics. 

Genres: Comics, Nonfiction

291 pages, Kindle Edition

Published July 27, 2016

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name.

Reviews

[Bobby Bermea · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a blissed out geek-fest, an rhapsodic, erudite, positively indulgent nerd-out for a very select audience.

Perhaps not so select. A lot of what Young talks about is the act of making art and how artistic decisions are made and executed. He talks about cinema and 20th century pop culture. There's a lot in here for people who simply appreciate art and how the magic happens. But the vast majority of those people aren't going to pick this book up.

But this book is really for those of us -- like the author -- who read and were dazzled, thrilled and blown away by Frank Miller's Daredevil back in the early 80s; who knew, even as we were reading those books, that comics as we knew it were being altered and would never be the same again. There were some things we could absolutely name. The violence, the "gritty realism", the noir/pulp fiction language and sensibility, all of these things you just never saw in comic books. It was exciting stuff.

But how so much of this was accomplished, how Miller made the magic happen, just went over our heads. Frankly, that's as it should be. The art should just impact the audience, hopefully as the artist intends but without it being spelled out. Certainly, Miller accomplished that.

But looking back with nostalgia and wonderment (especially in light of how Miller has lost his mind since those glorious days) is a lot of fun. Now, examining the magician's tricks is a blast. I was concerned that taking apart a beloved work of art and examining it piece by piece would kill it for me. In point of fact, it made me appreciate not just Miller more, but comics in general as a medium. So much depth and craft and passion and commitment went into those old comics. It's hard, I would think, for people who are relatively new to comics and superhero comics in particular, whose introduction to these stories is the slew of movies since the 2000s, to understand just how unheralded and at the bottom of the pop cultural totem pole comic books were back in the day. Comic books were intended for kids, artists and writers worked in relative anonymity, furiously pumping out disposable entertainment, printed on cheap paper, for .12, .15., .20, .25, .50 cents a pop. Who were these guys? Why and how did they work so hard? Passion, pure and simple. There was no way for even Frank Miller to know, back when he started, that he would one day be a multi-millionaire. No one was making that kind of money. No one would have ever thought that years down the line, a professor from Rutgers would be examining and discussing and writing a book about how he did what he did, who his influences were, how he incorporated them and how he turned his influences to his own purposes.

And now, here we are. For those of us who did love and appreciate Stan Lee and Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko and Chris Claremont and John Byrne and Romita, Steranko, Colan, Buscema, on and on and on, this book actually reads like a celebration of all of them, a recognition of the depth and complexity of their art and an appreciation of their talent and craft. It could never be as fun as reading the comics themselves were. But it's a more than welcome companion piece to those wondrous dreams of yesteryear.

[Paul · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was unaccountably keen to read this. I heard about it on a comic geek Facebook page that I like, and ordered it right away. That's the keen. The unaccountably is that I don't like literary criticism, as a general rule, and I do love comics. So a lit crit treatment of a comic that I, like many comics fans reared in the 70's and 80's, really like was destined to be a bit like olives in your peanut butter.

That's mostly what I got here. Young applies the usual tools of lit crit to Frank Miller's "Daredevil" run, and ends up, perhaps predictably, with a pastiche of ultra-hip identity politics and outdated Freudianism. I get it: men are awful, and eeeeeeeverything is a cock. Yawn.

Young is at his near-best dissecting Miller's craft here. With attention to interviews Miller has done and with the aid of critical resources that actually belong to comics (rather than being retreads from other media) like Scott McLeod, the reader gets to understand a little of Miller's intent and creative process. This is well-enough done to be worth the price of admission.

He's at his actual best near the end, when he says goodbye to latter-day Miller, who with time has become overtly racist and misogynist, and less subtle in his creative endeavours. (This is in the final chapter. Not the penultimate chapter, a weakly imagined discourse between Young and his adolescent first-contact-with-Miller self, which is unreadably bad.) There's a reflective melancholy here that is at once reasoned and affecting. I was, in reading it, reminded oddly of Ken Dryden's "The Game", which, rather than being the usual sports biography, is the story of how Dryden decided to quit hockey. Well, not quit hockey, but quit playing it professionally. Dryden was no more done with hockey than I suspect Young was with comics.

Probably every fan of a creative art form, particularly those who fell in love with that form in childhood, has had a similar experience. Mine was not with Miller, whose stuff I liked okay but didn't love, but rather with Matt Wagner. Wagner's "Mage", the first volume of it anyway, is one of my favourite things of any sort. I re-read it now and again, and engage with it very satisfyingly every time. But it's really the only thing of Wagner's I really like. Even his roughly-contemporary-with-"Mage" "Grendel" stuff didn't really do it for me. And subsequent works, like the two "Mage" sequel series and -- barf! -- "Sandman Mystery Theatre" are so bad I can hardly talk about it. The process of letting go of Wagner as a creative genius, the putting of him in the category of artists who did a thing that I really like once upon a time, was hard on my adolescent self. Young gets me back to that here.

Ultimately, Young puts me in mind to have another look at Miller's "Daredevil" run. I think I'll hold off on that for a little while, however, until the imitative reflex to apply the noodle-headedness of lit crit to it has subsided. You know, so that I might actually enjoy it.

[Doug Brunell · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am a huge Daredevil fan, and Frank Miller's "Born Again" storyline made me want to branch out from writing horror back when I read it as a teen. Therefore, this book is perfect for me. Perfect for me, but not a perfect book.

Really, the only thing keeping it from that perfect rating is that it repeats itself a little too much and it goes off on a needless tangent toward the end that encompasses an entire chapter. Otherwise, the dissection of Miller's first run on the Man Without Fear is a spot-on, analytical assessment of what made this comic book run so special, radical, and different. Paul Young is a fan, and like most of Miller's fans, he ultimately becomes disillusioned with the man, which is where this book gets a bit sad. Miller's later works are, for the most part, lacking everything that made his Daredevil so special. He's become an angrier comics creator, not always without merit, but he's also become an angrier human, and it comes through in his work.

Anyone interested in Miller, Daredevil, or comics is going to want to read this. You will not find a better dissection of Miller's initial run on the book anywhere, and it will reignite why you love comics in the first place.

[Tommy Grooms · Rating 4 out of 5]

Paul Young offers a great (and pretty much the only) comprehensive look at the Miller run of Daredevil and what made it successful. Young breaks down the run’s place in Daredevil’s history, how Miller’s art and writing subverted the expectations of the superhero genre, and the roles that the “unholy three” of Kingpin, Elektra, and Bullseye played in that regard. The book also reads as a personal journey, as Young reflects on his conflicted feelings towards Miller: both as a “nebbishy” young man and in his struggle to reconcile Miller’s later, brash right-wing politics with the subtlety of his Daredevil run. This personal touch is mostly welcome, most notably in Young’s examination of the key issue of Daredevil 181 through a conversation with his 13-year old self. But the last chapter drags a bit and the author’s turmoil seems to lead to some odd readings of later Miller works in Daredevil’s universe (whatever Born Again’s message is, it’s not “[celebrating] hatred as a crucible for the heroic soul”; and however unsubtle the satirical demon-possessed Democratic presidential candidate Ken Wind is in Elektra: Assassin, it’s balanced out by the equally unflattering, trigger-happy Nixon stand-in as incumbent). Nevertheless this is an essential read for understanding a key moment in Daredevil’s history and for comics as a whole.

[Dave Brown · Rating 4 out of 5]

I stumbled onto this book quite by accident, but it had a lot going for it fairly immediately. While I had not read Miller’s work on Daredevil, I, like most any other comics fan, had read (and come away with strong feelings about) his Batman retcon The Dark Knight Returns. That said, Daredevil has always been a favorite character of mine…indeed, the first comic that I ever seriously collected, although after Miller’s run…and so seeing what Miller had done with this character fascinated me.

I’ll preface everything else here by saying that, if this book grabs your attention at all (and you’ve likely stopped reading by now if it doesn’t), then you really should read the source material before reading Young’s analysis. I took the time to do so and it won’t take long….about five collected volumes of graphic novels, none difficult reads, an you’ll be up to date. Doing so gave me a great appreciation for Miller’s work in and of itself. I didn’t really appreciate just how influential his writing was on the character, nor how much of his influence shows up in the recent Netflix series. I particularly enjoyed Miller’s forward in one of these collections, in which he discusses that Daredevil had always fascinated him because, given his history, he should have been a villain, yet chose to be a hero.

Miller’s re-telling of Daredevil’s origin certainly takes a rocky road to get there, but I tend to agree.

This isn’t so much about Miller’s writing, though, as Young’s analysis of Miller’s writing. Young describes Daredevil here as the most Christian of superheroes, which piqued my theological interest. The rationale for this statement is that Daredevil’s focus is always on compassion for the victim, rather than justice or revenge on the criminal. Within the confines that Daredevil inherently struggles by adhering to the rule of law while still acting as a vigilante, this is a fascinating take. Young also feels that the current Netflix series isn’t truthful to Daredevil as a character because it seems to focus him on seeking revenge. Again, insightful perspectives and criticisms.

There’s an interlude in the middle of the book that attempts to ground the the author’s thesis theologically, but it’s strange. The writing style becomes oddly introspective. That said, the writing style throughout the book is very conversational, and I found myself often wanting it to be more academic given the subject matter. The issue is that the writing is conversational to a fault, including foul language at times, and that detracts from the seriousness of the analysis. I get the motivation to make the topic more accessible to a wider number of readers…this is sort of a comics apologetic in places…but the book suffers for this choice overall.

Perhaps the best part of this book is that Young writes as much as historian as he does literary critic, giving a detailed look into how the comics industry functioned at the time that Miller began working on Daredevil. This was certainly informative for me…as much as I’ve always loved the medium, I had no clue as to these inner workings. We also learn how influential Miller was on the industry and how artists are treated therein, especially within Marvel Comics, which was an entertaining account.

I enjoyed Young outlining Miller’s work on making Bullseye a villain to be taken (very) seriously, as well as his creation of Elektra, whom, as any Daredevil fan knows, is integral to Matt Murdock’s story. Young also gives an insightful analysis of the artwork decisions on Miller’s run, and the intent conveyed in those panels, which I found intriguing.

In the end, the author lands where most critics have with Miller’s perceived artistic and social digression in recent years, but does so while still respecting his contributions both to the character of Daredevil and to the medium of comics in general. If you’re a comics fan, and certainly if you’re as much a fan of Daredevil as I am, then this book is a must-read.

(This review was originally published on https://www.unobtrusivelucidity.com)