Tetragrammaton with Rick Rubin - Frank Miller

Episode Date: September 30, 2026

Frank Miller is a comic book writer, artist, and filmmaker. He rose to prominence drawing Marvel’s Daredevil in 1979 and became its writer in 1981, introducing Elektra and turning the series into a major success. He went on to create Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, write Batman: Year One, and create Sin City and 300, both of which were adapted into films. His latest book, Push the Wall, recounts his life and career in comics and filmmaking. Works mentioned: Sin City Superman: Year One Daredevil Batman: The Dark Knight Returns 300 Elektra Lives Again Push the Wall ------ Thank you to the sponsors that fuel our podcast and our team: AGZ ⁠⁠https://DrinkAG1.com/tetra⁠⁠ ------ Athletic Nicotine ⁠⁠https://www.AthleticNicotine.com/tetra⁠⁠ Use code 'TETRA' ------ LMNT Electrolytes ⁠⁠https://DrinkLMNT.com/tetra⁠⁠ Use code 'TETRA' ------ Lectio 365 ⁠⁠https://Lectio365.com⁠⁠ ------ Sign up to receive Tetragrammaton Transmissions ⁠https://www.tetragrammaton.com/join-newsletter ⁠ Follow Tetragrammaton: ⁠⁠https://x.com/tetranow⁠⁠ https://www.instagram.com/tetragrammaton.now Follow Rick: ⁠⁠https://x.com/rickrubin⁠⁠ ⁠⁠https://www.instagram.com/rickrubin⁠⁠

tetragrammaton. My very first note that I wrote down, in fact, about Sin City at all was I wrote Conan in a trench coat because I wanted to bring out an absolutely barbaric element to an urban setting. So it would feel nothing like a cop show or private eye story or any of that. And that it would cut loose with real savagery. Do you typically have a name right from the start for a... character? Marve just leapt into my head as a name. I had different names and they all were such

clichés and they sounded like private eyes and all of that. And one day I just went, his name's Marv. That's great. Like the most non-tuff guy name I could have come up with. And then the characters, would you say they flower out of the world? I guess so. It's very vague at the first. I mean, I had to have the world for the character to emerge because there had to be a sense of what he would be up against and what police created him. How long would it be before there is a scene? Well, I don't know how it is for you,

but scenes leap to my head. They just bolt into my head. And I usually have the very first scene of the story down before I have any idea where it's going. And are they typically in order like that? It's pretty much like that. Again, getting back to Sin City, because it seems to be the best example. I knew for a fact that this brute who was such a loser and filled with self-loathing

would wake up next to this goddess who had picked them up at a bar. And he had this wild night with her and had fallen passionately in love that first night that he'd wake up and she'd be dead next to him. I just knew that for a fact. I just felt that was a savagely compelling opening. The fun came on figuring out what the hell that meant. Mysterians, great. You said the first note you wrote for Sin City was Marv is like Conan in a trench coat.

Yeah, it's typically how many notes might you make before you start writing? Stray ones all over the place. Lots? Well, yeah, lots. Sometimes I'll charge your head, and then the next day I'll let a gazillion stray notes, sometimes on post-its and different notes. Tell me what some other notes might sound like. Well, the first sex confederacy,

because I had just been to Texas, and I was really struck by how forceful and intense and powerful. Southern women were in this very macho state and how they went against what most people's expectations are. And I thought, okay, then let's just take this to the cartoon level and basically have it be that Southern women have taken over the South and made it the most feminist part of America. It did, so it's this cartoon thinking, but I found it kind of delicious. come from things you notice in real life? I think the best ones, too.

Other things are just reactions. I mean, I find that a lot of good ideas come from seeing somebody really screw it. Just screw the pooch and go, man, if you just done this, you would have had something really cool and just going ahead and doing that. And by the time it's done, nobody even would recognize it as having to, and you know, anything to do with what I was reacting to. Like missed opportunities. Yes, and the creative act to me is one where you have to embrace the unpredictabilities

and go down those back alleys. And there's just weird places. And what I always tell people just coming in is I always say, make mistakes. Make tons of mistakes. They're going to be your best friends. Do you typically write too much? I tend to flaw toward the too little. When I do my second pass, I go like, okay, Frank, this is haiku.

I was thinking that I was playing guru, and this was just so good that my shit don't stink. And I've got to either soften it or sweeten it or just clarify things. I mean, I criticized early on by the director I work with. who complained and saying, you just write too tight. And I still don't entirely agree with him because I find that most writing that's done particularly for the screen is pretty damn flabby.

But at the same time he had a point that you can be so tight that it starts to feel as if you're withholding. How is telling a story visually different than telling it just with words? Well, I don't really work strictly in prose. I mean, I've never written a prose novel. Comics have been my medium ever since I was a little kid.

I drew before I even knew how to read. We generally do. The English language, like the Japanese, is a bunch of pictographs anyway. And I think in comics, the fundamental mission is to reconnect the two. so that you are experiencing the two, but not as separate things.

They become one unit in your mind, even though physically you can see there too. Do you feel like the images do more of the work? I think they'd better. I think that native comic books are simply illustrated prose than they're a backward form indeed. I think that comics have more in common with hieroglyphics than they do with illustrating.

children's books. Makes me think of silent movies, how much is conveyed without any words or maybe just a few cards to push it along. Think of the astonishing work that like Stanley Kubrick, for instance, with two. The best pieces of 2001. Silent. You know, the entire sequence of the goddamn bone with the monkeys. That's the soul of the movie.

That's the entire story of the movie. and there isn't nothing but a bunch of grunts there. It's also the spiritual peak of the movie. Would you say all of your work has a spiritual component? It's funny because I'm not a religious guy, but I believe so, because I believe that humans are spiritual creatures. And I have discovered that my entire journey as an artist

is to explore and define the heroic. And there's no way to do that without embracing a higher meaning and to examine the endless puzzle of good and evil. How is it different coming to a character that's not your character to start with Batman, for example? Yeah, yeah. Do you feel required to take from the past? So the editorial decision I made coming in was to regard the entire tapestry that lay of the character. as material to pick from. And I felt free to ignore the garbage

and the bad decisions and the stuff that just didn't fit in with my point of view. In your mind, was your Batman the same person as the Batman before? No, not really, because he couldn't be in be a character. A character is not a portrait of a person. a heroic character especially is like a piece of artwork

represents something the character himself has a tone has a theme and the world around this character reflects that character the best enemies of any of the characters I've worked on have been perverse reflections of the character himself

the reason the Joker is the best Batman villain is because Batman is someone who faced insanity when he was a child and has enforced sanity by himself in the world ever since. And now he's up against someone who is categorically insane and seeks to create chaos wherever he goes. I added giving the Joker perverse sexual streak so that he became, to my mind,

a mythic figure in terms of that he represented all kinds of arcane forms of sadism and evil so that he was in fact more evil than insane. So would you say that of any of these characters, they're only a person in a poetic sense. Is that correct? I agree completely. It's a beautiful way to put it.

In fact, I'm going to steal that. Thank you very much. You're welcome. My gift to you. Hey, I get this deal for me. I never imagined it in that way before, but hearing you talk about it, that's what I'm hearing. Yes. Yeah, that's perfect.

Yeah. And also the same is equally true villains. I'm just picking around for iconic villains that I didn't make up here. But if you want to go for the one that's made the biggest imprint on the popular imagination, it would be Darth Vader, properly named Dark Father, because he's the nightmare version of anyone's father. and he represents categorical evil with authority behind it. And there you have a beautiful two-dimensional character. Two-dimensional is not always bad.

And is it always as cut and dried as good versus evil, or are there shades of gray all the way around? I don't think there's shades of gray. I think there's a multiplicity of colors and complexities. I mean, I think a character can have an evil streak a mile wide and be a saint. For instance, I'm putting together my studies on a potential Alexander's the Great Project. And there's no way to portray a character who was without question, a history-changing, world-saving figure, who at the same time was a ruthless, ruthless slaughter of many, many thousands.

And so to me, that is not so much a dichotomy as a dimensionality of these characters. Because really, they couldn't, he couldn't have been great without being both. I mean, Alexander, the nice guy would not admit to history books. Yeah. Is it typical for writers of cartoons to both draw and write? Sadly, no. There's usually one writer, sometimes more. And it's usually an art team that puts together the black and white artwork.

Usually two people, which one would work in pencil and the other would go over in ink. And then there's a color artist nowadays. That can be a team using computer work and so on to achieve it. starting in 1960s, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby put together Marvel Comics. And when they did, Stan Lee

decided that fastest way to get these things done was to jot down a story and handed it to Jack Kirby and have Jack Kirby come back with a bunch of illustrated pages on which Jack Kirby would write all these notes

about what these characters would be saying. And Kirby would include brand new scenes and so on as he was working out, making the story real to him along the way. Steve Dick Coe did the same. And then Stan Lee would come in and deliver a script on top of that. Starting with that, the whole game changed. What was it before that? Before that, it was very much people working in series. The writer would talk with the editor and get a story approved, and the writer would sit down.

and write up a script that said, panel one. And it was a script that began with a description of the illustration, and then dictated what the characters were saying. I included all the little sound effects and all of that. When I first worked in comic books, I worked over scripts like that. But at Marvel Comics, it was the other way around.

And it's still done both ways. Interesting. But that's the way you see when you, if you compare the other comics to the Marvel comics of that time, there's just endless energy and vigor in the Marvel comics. The characters are flying across the page constantly and talking while they're fighting and all those preposterous conceits of the comic book

that we now take for granted. They very quickly went from being a tiny little company to a burgeoning giant and eventually eclipsed it. everybody else. When the lights go down, the body gets to work. Sleep is not passive time. It's an active biological state, one in which the brain clears metabolic waste, the nervous system resets, and the body begins repair at a cellular level.

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Well, D.C. Comics is, of course, the giant that goes all the way back because they had Superman and then later Batman. But there were also Fawcett comics that the Captain Marvel, which during its reign it outsold Superman. It was the most popular comic in America. In the 1950s, a true golden era. The line called E.C. comics came along with the horror comics and science fiction comics and produced the best written and by far into way best illustrated comics of the time and perhaps the best illustrated of all time. What was different about what E.C. was doing?

I think the biggest factor was a man named Harvey Kurtzman, who was an artist and a writer. and a publisher named William M. Gaines, who had a vision for a comic book company that would aim for for adolescence instead of children. Because EC Comics was not for little kids. It was gruesome. It was terrifying. And it was sexier than hell. The fans of it were so devout that they still hold dimensions of their own. and those comics are still the most highly valued ones you're going to find. They've come out in glorious editions, the size of the original artwork. And they do mark a watershed in the evolution of the art film. Do you think part of it was the comics that came before them were made with a specific idea of,

these are for kids, they're these kind of disposable things. Yes. And that EC thought, we can elevate. this to be something bigger? Yeah, I think so, but I think the other thing was he might have been gains, I suspect it was. I think that he probably said, why lose them when they're 14? You know, why not play to the kids who are starting to get boners and really have violent fantasies and all that stuff?

You know, let's raid some of the commercial magazines and get these guys who can draw better than anybody to come in. And then let's have them tell all kinds of different stories. They didn't even compete with the guys in tights, but they were doing crime stories. They didn't have any superheroes. Nope, not a one. Was more story-based or genre-based like movies.

Yes, it was. It was. It's like comics before and after have been one genre medium, pretty much. I mean, in recent years, it's gotten much more diverse, but it's still overwork. overwhelmingly centered on superheroes. In fact, it's centered on the old superheroes. If you were tasked with reinventing a classic character from the past, let's say Bugs Bunny,

how would you approach that? I don't think I touched Bugs Bunny because my mind doesn't work like that. That's just not my kind of meat. Did you never like Bugs Bunny? I liked them playing. Fine as a kid. It's just my imagination doesn't go in those directions. But recently I was working on a Superman project that I was writing.

And I found that in that one, I was hearkening back to the 1940s in a lot of ways and applying it more to the current world. But what I was seeking was really, in a way, a lost glory in that I wanted the sense of wonder. I wanted it to be that breathtaking moment when the impossible. can happen. And that's very difficult to do when flying is normal. Did you ever research the history of how Superman came to be? The only stuff I know is about the two little kids in Ohio. I don't know anything about this. Yeah, they had two Jewish kids in Ohio, but one of them drew and one of them wrote, and they both had this fun idea of this character named Superman, And my own suspicions, which I have to throw at you,

is that they just happen to choose a word that was in the air at the time, the Uber-Mont. And there's something about Superman that flies in face of Nazi movement. And if you look at him, he has black hair, sick eye wraps, and he's very much a golden. I mean, I submit that the only way to really understand Superman is to accept that his origins are profoundly Jewish because he, everything about the character, his origin is Moses.

You know, he arrives in there, you know, riding in a crib from outer space. Yeah. So the echoes are there, and I think these youngsters were channeling what they learned into Superman. So many of the superheroes have some connection to radioactivity. Oh, that started with Marvel. He'd have poisoned by radiation. Yeah, it's a radioactive spider.

Yeah. The radioactive bomb that went off and created the Hulk that goes on. It was during the 60s when it was the Red Scare, the nuclear stuff was going on. And we had all the movies where we had giant ants. Are comics an extension of sci-fi? The superhero stuff is related to what it's also an extension of ancient mythology. and of fantasy. I always seem to bring in Star Wars references here

because Star Wars is such a fine amalgam of doing fantasy and mythology and science fiction altogether. And I think that the superhero is very much of a part of all of that. The fact that it can be done by one person is a lot to do it as well. You know, Jack Kirby is able to stand as a top. heightened in a small field. He created just thousands of characters, and he never stopped. After doing all this amazing stuff at Marvel Comics, essentially being one of the premier architects of it,

he ran off and created what was called The Fourth World that was published by DC Comics, where he created another grand universe that has yet to be explored in film and so on. and he never stopped for as long as he was alive. Who were some of the characters from the Fourth World? Fourth World was all about what he called the New Gods. He was taking the superhero back into mythology, so that there was an eternal contest between two planets that were near Earth, one called New Genesis.

And then across from it was this industrial, ghastly, polluted place that had slated. and trolls and was run by a monster named Darkside that was called Apocalypse, spelled along just so they could trademark it. And Darkside was plainly the model for Darth Vader, but he was a much bigger, more demonic character who he would obliterate people with blasts from his eyes and so on. But he didn't have giant cannons that could blow up entire planets, though, so it says, But yeah, everything in Kirby's world was Vagenarian, and he got more so as he got older.

What was his first character? First character Kirby ever made up? Oh, my God. Do you know? First big one. He made up during World War II, which was Captain America. Oh, Captain America. Yeah, he made that up during World War II.

Marvel Comics got the rights to it and revived it. Is patriotism a big theme in comics? It is in Jack Kirby comics. Well, think of it this way. Jack Kirby's given name at birth was Jakob Korsberg. And he was a small man. He must have been the kind of kid that would have been bullied, especially during anti-Semitic times.

He basically grew up in rough neighborhood in Manhattan. So he enlisted in World War II, and he took all the most dangerous job a soldier could make, which was to be a scout. and charged his enemy territory, which small men could do very well. And so patriotism was in his bone. When you came into the field, there were writers,

there were cartoon makers. How did it work out that you did both? Basically, I had lobbying to get to do it. And I was working with an editor named to Jim Shooter, who was the boss at Marvel time. He was one of those guys who's known as a real tough editor, but if you were ready to confront him right back and make your case. He was like the kind of producer you want to have in that sense.

He would push you, but he would still listen. Yeah, and I pushed to get the job because at the time, I felt I just had, I had more to bring to this. And also, I was going to write my own work, and I was ready to just go do it. on something else. I wasn't ready at the time to make something up. Nobody was thinking in that way, really.

We very much were trained to be part of a football team. It was when I started making up characters of my own and realizing that I had to control them, I kind of stuck my sword in the ground and said, I've got to be the one to talk these stories. How much would you know about your characters beyond what's on the page? Everything I could think of.

I mean, I wrote biographies. I feel you've got to do that homework. Because otherwise, you're bluffing, and you can really stumble. They have to be fully formed entities for your work. You've got to have a fully formed in your mind. And at the same time, you've got to let them turn around and kick you in the ass or surprise you. I don't believe that creativity is a rigid process. And I do believe the character is every right to talk back.

So you can have an idea of this is what this character is like. And in the middle of the story, he could decide to do something that you would have never imagined him doing. Yes. Oh, yeah. That happens. Absolutely. Absolutely. Or, for instance, when I, in my Marvin's Sin City, would show a feminine side.

That would always be something I really liked. Like, there's one moment I recall writing these lines. and I didn't even think before I wrote them down. Yeah. Where it's like, all of a sudden I'm crying. I don't know why. Do you feel like you were channeling? It felt that way, yeah.

Like it was just coming out and it was right. Are you ever surprised by what comes out? Oh, yeah. A lot of times I don't expect it. Yeah. That's the best times. Yeah. You don't talk about it.

You don't talk about, though. Of course. Yeah. But it's just so cool. It's so mystical. But that's what's the beauty of it. I mean, that's why we fucking call it art. They say, you know, it's one of the reasons why, I mean, anybody who knows me could tell you,

I've got a real gripe against this new church of AI because to me it is disavowing the creative act itself. For us to have the hubris to think that we can understand. the human mind, and the creative process, and recreate that mind and that creative process, that is us saying we are gods. And what has that shitter been crapping out? I've read some AI scripts. My God. How have comics changed just with computers being involved, even pre-AI?

No, you know, so far, the only ways they've changed have in terms of civil. things like the introduction for it, processors, changed the writing, the act of writing, so profoundly that it can never go back. It has now become something where it's much closer as the way the mind works, and by and large the benefits have so far outweighed the shortcomings.

Yes, there's been a whole lot of flabby writing. That's a separate problem. That means that we've got a flabby writing problem. It doesn't mean that's an impediment to creating and creating in a much more natural and beautiful way. The other way that computers have affected things, generally for the positive, is it in terms of coloring the comics because it just has introduced a much broader range to the palette, the equivalent of movie special effects and all that can be done, where it's become a dead loss.

The ink renderings traditionally have been done by hand. People have been simply having the computer do that. And I find the results to be as if you all of a sudden had Ronnie the robot playing one of the instruments in your band. It's just, to me, it's an emotional flatness. Because comics have an amazing number of disadvantages to other media. We're the tough little kid on the end of the block. Or movies are a big, big guy who drives a nice shiny car and, you know, and it has all the gals and all of that.

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Nicotine is an addictive chemical. Tell me the story of comics from the beginning that we know and every big change in breakthrough along the way. Oh, man. Okay, it goes back to a magazine that came out called Famous Fonnies in the 1930s, where a publisher, I believe, was Max Gaines, who was the father of the EC Comics guy, he simply bound together a bunch of newspaper strips and sold him as a magazine. They sold very well.

Because of this, all of a sudden they said, we need more of them. Let's get some new material in there. And the American comic book was born. And were comic strips around for a long time previous? A hundred years. As long as there have been newspapers? They're pretty damn close to it.

First recorded one was the yellow kid. I don't have the date of when that was around, but that is a beautiful little strip where we're talking the early 1900s. The earliest ones tend to be like simple genre or westerns were a very big deal from very early on. This is in the 1930s? Yeah.

You know, it eventually grew into very primitive science fiction stories. Would these be simultaneously when westerns were popular in movie theaters? Yes, of course. There was always a parallel between movies and comics? Usually the first thing that came on in comics that had not existed anywhere else was Superman. No one had never seen a superhero. We so associate superheroes with comics, and it sounds like in some ways it defined the genre. Yeah, because it was something that no other medium could do.

Yeah. I mean, they started moving toward it when it was the early 1960s Superman TV show with George Reeves and others that followed it. But it wasn't really until the 1970s when they unleashed the Christopher Reeve. Superman movie, that all of a sudden became a genre in film. And that was really the biggest of heaving comic history. And that's only increased. Now that they've worked out the kinks and they can turn around superhero movies with seeming ease. And now that the two major comic book companies have been bought by moviemaking corporations.

Tell me about Daredevil. Deadville was created in the early 1960s by Stan Lee and an old artist from way back named Bill Everett, whose work goes back at least into the early 50s. He was kind of the weak sister to Spider-Man, even though the great artist I've mentioned before Wallace Wood drew him and gave him the red costume, we all know. He originally wore a circus outfit that was yellow and really silly looking. So it became a beautiful book. It had a series of really a major artist, major talents in comics history.

For the longest time, it was illustrated by Gene Colan, a very talented and kind of hard-to-define artist whose work had a great moodiness to it, even though his physical kinetics were not particularly exciting. It was as if he was one of a few superhero artists who had never seen Jack Kirby's work. It remained by and large a weak sister title to Spider-Man, but it was kept alive through the sheer vitality in sales of Marvel Comics. When I was first working at Marvel, I wanted to have my own title to take over, to really get things rolling and have something to commit myself to. And Jim Shooter was keeping me busy, saying that he didn't think I was ready for a title of my own, but he'd keep me busy. He was true to his word.

And one time I got to do the second string Spider-Man book, which is a spectacular Spider-Man. And in the story, the story featured Daredevil as a guest star. I see. And the two of them having a fight. And I got very intrigued by this blind guy. and the idea of a superhero's main feature was an impairment. Yeah. And I just drew the hell out of the story and added all kinds of plot elements and so on.

When I finished it, I told a shooter that if Gene Cohen and I ever left the book, that I wanted him to consider me. When I said this in front of the staff, they all thought it was hilarious because, you know, what an uppity kid. but everything fell into place and it turns out Gene Cohen was really getting burned out on it and getting older and Jim Shooter was of a mind he liked the fact that I put so much

labor into it, so much love of the city so much understanding of the character and also frankly that I listened to him so much because he was quite a teacher when it came to the fundamentals of comic book storytelling and of dramatics that he okayed me to come on

as illustrator. And later, I took over the writing as well. It was a wonderful journey. It was my baptism. Yeah. You know, the very first time I wrote an issue, I brought in the character that I made up many months before of Electra. And she ended up changing the entire story.

What had been a monthly comic book with monthly adventures that would occasionally be two or three issues long, became a sprawling Greek opera that just the name Electra must have inspired it. I shamelessly stole the crime allured from Spider-Man comics, the Kingpin, just stole him cold and put him in Daredevil, and decided it was a crime comic. Decided it was going to be like the old crime comics

and like the Mickey Spillane novels I loved so much, and like the old movies I love so much. And so it was my attempt to bring back, to bring that genre back into comic books. How important is seeing motion in comics? It's vital. And the thing is, it's like all the best things in comics, it's vital precisely because it's the most impossible thing.

It's like sound. We are a silent medium. But that's why we, that's why if you look at us, we're so damn loud. That's why we're screaming all the time. That's why the sound effects as big as your fists. That's why our idea of an action scene might involve an exploding planet is that we don't think small. Because if we get small and quiet, we can be a little too easy to ignore.

Yeah. So because it's quiet, you have to make it loud. Yeah, it does get into my... from McLuhan land here. You know, that it's not a hot medium. It's very cool. So you have to do a bit of Rothko there to give people's attention. When did you first come in contact with manga?

That was, at the time, I was working on Daredevil, and I was dating a woman whose father worked for oil companies, and he went to Japan a lot. She said, hey, there's a comic book from Japan. And it was a little samurai comic called Lone Wolf and Cub, and I opened it up, and I was immediately enraptured by it because the storytelling pace was completely different. The drawing style was completely different. There was an energy to the very strokes of the brushes on the pages that spoke to the emotional content of the scenes in a more intimate way than I was used to. It was more based on energy and flow. than on form. So naturally, there's more a sense of continuous movement throughout it.

It changed the whole way I've thought about comic books ever since. Wow. This was a case of my chosen medium changing before my very eyes. It couldn't have been more dramatic. Imagine walking into a theater for the first time seeing D.W. Griffith

after what had come before. Yeah. For me, it was like one of those moments. Have there been, any other moments like that where you're seeing something that there's no context for it? Earlier, when I was a child,

it was when I'd been growing up reading Superboy and Legion of Superheroes and I was over at a friend's house and saw Jack Kirby's Fantastic Four. Yeah. And all of a sudden, I realized comic books could explode and that if somebody got angry,

everything in the room could flag around. Since lone wolf and cub, there have been events where an artist like Dan Klaus will come along. I don't know if you're familiar with his work. The work has a very static look to it. It follows this almost metronomic rhythm, where there will be exactly four lines of hand-lettered copy

underneath each image, and it will tell you a deeply disturbing tale that usually includes no violence of any kind and leaves you unsettled. It's like psychological violence. Yeah. There's many others. I've got to mention Spiegelman's work.

Spiegelman had always been a figure who would bring a very compelling passion to his work and a highly intellectual content to everything he did. But with Mowles, he took Brutal Family History and in a massive, stroke that only a thinking man's artists could do, he turned them into mice. And that was at once a commentary on the fact that they died like rats. And it also distanced you enough from the horror by making them look like little animals

in a Saturday morning cartoon that you were able to read the whole thing, knowing you were reading an atrocity and not turn your head away. And it takes somebody who really knows what he's doing. Spiegelman knew exactly what he was doing, and he executed it mercilessly because he does not waver in that. Has any of your work ever been censored or banned? Oh yeah. One of my daredevil's was banned by the comics code back when that was around. It was rejected by the comics code. One of its rules was that one could never feature drug use in a comic book. I did this comic book during the Angel Dusts business that happened in New York. He was an issue of Daredevil.

And they brought out this fossil to rule and said, we just can't let you do it. Wow. And so I said, I want to talk to him. And so it was arranged and I went and talked to him. I'm telling you, it was a moment I was. which could have been filmed. Because I walked in and it was this little office that looked like it was 1954. Yeah.

And the people that looked like it was 1954, I'm not talking about they looked like they were that old. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But they looked like they were still dressed that way and they were like relatively young people that way. Like the Beatles hadn't happened yet. Yeah. And this was in the 70s?

Yeah. And I just sat down with them and we all talked and I had to tell them out. The comic book market worked and what the audience was like now and so on. And I got to do my story. I mean, I did my story. I got to see friend. That might have been the beginning of the Edd Comics Coholy because it was dead within a year. He got thrown out.

Indeed. Do you ever read underground comics? Love him. I love him. Obviously, Trump. You know, he was amazing. Our Chrome. Yeah, Art Chrome.

And I think that Richard Corbin was one of the other. the most astonishing talents to ever work at comics. Did your Batman have to look like the old Batman? First thing I wanted to match was the silhouette. He'd a massive square look to him, not just the Leonard jaw, but the impossibly broad shoulders and chest. The big hands, the big feet.

He had to be replanted, and he had to look as if he could crush someone's head with his hand. I felt that he had gotten very long, delicate ears, to indicate his bat ears. And I went back to the 1950s, chopped off little things to just keep a more formidable, brutish look to him. And he'd gotten so that his tape had become a parachute, made a parachute silk.

It had been long and beautiful. That was the Neil Adams look, that had dominated for so long. And not only did I not have the skills to imitate what Neale-Ladams did, I didn't have the desire, really. I wanted to go for a much more rough and tumble look. And so I made his cape have weight not to be very long, but for it to feel like it was made of canvas.

And the same with that belt, instead of being black. white yellow, it was a canvas, like okra, or almost. And then I started playing with all the toys. The big pretty batarangs. I decided to bring in a bit of the ninja, touched them and make them absolutely sadistic, lethal, small things that could poke an eye out. And most fun of all was to take the name the Batmobile

and turn it from a sports car into a tank. Did you have to get permission to do that? At first, the editor was nervous about a lot of things, partly because Danny O'Neill was far from politically conservative, but as a man, he was a very conservative fellow, didn't believe in taking too many chances. And also, he had made his name on that character with a very different interpretation.

And so there was some resistance there. and in other quarters. But the boss, Jeanette Kahn, the publisher, she knew something new was coming. And the editor-in-chief, Dick Giordano, who was a long-time veteran of comics.

He had been tasked with turning Batman around. And he knew something bold had to happen. And they both invested themselves thoroughly with me. And luckily, basically, I had the support of the top guns. So we rolled ahead. Have that ever happened before in comics where a really loved character came back in a totally new light? I don't think it had happened before, as I can recall, after that it started happening all the time.

But based on the success of the Dark Night. I think it was people realized that this stuff could be. Well, if people hated the Dark Night, people wouldn't hop here. Yeah, yeah. Every once in a while it takes a shock to make. a medium change course. No, those are all the best moments. We don't want more of the same.

We want Elvis, you know? Tell me about working with Robert Rodriguez. Robert Rodriguez, man, that was just a kick in the ass. That was just great. As finding a collaborator, as good a man as you could ever find, he had a way of getting his guts into a project. Basically was a gut-first creative talent.

He immediately saw Sin City as a series of technical problems to solve. And he loved technical problems. He's like a wizard at turning a complicated problem into a simple problem. Like he would often say things to me that sounded like guru-like. Like, you just got to shoot it backwards to make it work. And he'd be right. And so from the beginning, he showed his high concept for Sin City. to me by saying all these people for all these years have been adapting comic books to movies.

This time we're going to adapt a movie into a comic book. Amazing. See, that simple inversion, and that explains Sin City. And it's so different. If you think of the history of comics turning into movies, I would say often unsuccessfully. Maybe Superband was successful on some level. I remember like Dick Tracy. What did you think?

What did you think? What did you think? It was Dick Tracy and Popeye were camping nostalgic rumps. Superman was actually a joyous celebration that it was also in itself an exciting ride. It seemed like a regular movie. It didn't seem like a comic book movie. No. No, it didn't.

one of the main reasons too is I spoke with Richard Donner about this and he said that his main operating word making Superman was versus immolitude he said take it seriously and get all the details right to give you every evidence

that this is really happening it's seriously there can't be a dust spot that isn't evidence that this is really going on I believe that's why it had the perfect with you believe a man can fly. And you're watching that movie,

and the movie is more than half over when he first takes off. That's how long they take to lift him off the ground. I mean, that's how much work it is and should be to do fantasy. My biggest reservation about the current crop is you go in and it is like a Saturday morning cartoon. It's like everybody can do all this ridiculous stuff. And I don't feel wonder because there's no frame of reference.

Yeah, and it makes it seem like what they're doing isn't difficult. That's right. It's just presented as it's ordinary. Yes, yes. And it's also almost desperate need to clutter the screen with so much of it all at once. Yeah. Rather than bring out the wonder of a single element against a, a more recognizable setting and casts.

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perform at your very best. Element electrolytes are sugar-free, keto-friendly, and great tasting. Minerals are the stuff of life. So visit drinklm-n-tie.com slash tetra. And stay salty with element electrolytes, L-M-N-T. Tell me more about Electra. When did the character come to you? Oh, way back right. When I was a kid drawing... comics that were little black and white crime comics that I did that published in a school newspaper. So you had first drawn her then? I had a character named Electra, and she had the black hair and the intense eyes and all

of that. But it was me drawing as an amateur. I couldn't draw much of anything then. I always knew I wanted to use that name, but I had already decided that I would be a talent book professional, but I was always just making up character. right and left. Yeah. Since I had studied the whole story of Agamemnon in the House of Atreus and Agamon's daughter,

Elektra, was really one of the most frightening characters in mythology. And the original scary avenging dark-eyed daughter, that was her real beginning. When I developed her as a comic book character, I was just beginning as a professional writer. So I did what any sincere artist does. I looked around for who to steal from. And I looked to an idol and mentor of mine, Will Eisner, and his masterwork of the spirit. And perhaps my favorite story in it, which was one called Sancerra, which was about the spirit's first girlfriend, the love of his life who fell into a life of crime. And a little eight-page story, he breaks your heart

as she's the one criminal he lets go. It's not just for old times' sake, it's for passion's sake. And I took the structure of that little eight-pageer and made it at 21-pageer or whatever it was and made it my first writing job. Then it turned to its own thing. It turned into a martial arts adventure character who ended up having weird relationships with the Antichrist and all kinds of stuff.

But that's how it began. Are there a finite number of stories? Do all stories break down into a handful? I don't really so. I mean, I've heard that said. I've even thought it myself. But the more I do of it, the more I believe that the beauty in what we all do is chaos, the accident, the thing that.

not supposed to happen, but works anyway. And there'd be no reason to make stories if we were just kicking out an algorithm to use the language of our time. Explain to me what a graphic novel is. Okay, graphic novel is a term that was coined by Will Eisner in the 1970s. And he did this because he's so impressed by the European Banffes Sine. Eisner was out to make comic books. He always wanted to make them compete more with literature, which is very different than my goals. But he also thought that the term comic book was essentially derisive,

and it meant it was dumb stuff for little kids. And so he coined the term graphic novel. I've never made much use of that term, because I don't care what they're called. Like a song is a song, it's a song. But in terms of format, that's where I really wanted to push the handle up. What would you say the delineation is between the comic book and the graphic novel? First thing was physical version is page count.

Graphic novel. In America, has always been between 48 and 64 pages long. I did not find that acceptable. I've gone more into multiples of 100 pages. That's where you can really tell a story and let it breathe. American comics have been too constipated and congested for way too long. Too many damn words and not making really good use of the form itself. Instead making it look kind of like illustrated books or just repeats of the sad old time

that were made back in the 1940s to the 1960s. Tell me about comic bookstores. I love comic book stories. I think that they're a miracle that I saw being born that comic book publishers were going out of business. The sense of doom when you entered the offices was palpable. Why did that happen? Here I've got to backtrack a bit, and you are hearing my interpretation of history. In the 1950s, when we all got investigated by the Senate and accused of creating juvenile delinquency,

and all over that. The government went after comic books? Yes, yes. I don't know about this. Oh, yes. They were called the Keefe of her hearings. I've read the entire transcripts of these hearings. With a great comic book publisher,

was Bill Gaines of E.C. comics, who was the first one to be on trial because the whole thing was set up to put him out of business. He was up there speeding on diet pills. But that's the myth, okay? But no, he was up there defending comics vociferously, and they were charging them with everything. They said that Batman and Robin were a homosexual couple.

This was, of course, in a time when homosexuality was considered the equivalent to child molestation. And all of this was generated by pop psychologist, looking to make a name for himself named Frederick Wortham, who wrote a truly execrable book called Seduction of the Innocent about how comic books were poisoning and perverting the minds of children in America. Yet in order to survive, the comic book publishers, authors of all these heroes who never gave up, abjectly surrendered and apologized in public

and paid for the strictest censorship board in American history. You make the Hays Code look gentle. I had no idea. Yeah. It's like a family scandal that, you know, nobody talks about. And this Cold War relic existed and stayed in place into the 1970s. Wow. Yeah.

And it went completely irrelevant. I mean, including... Were the people making comics, like, afraid? Everything was still submitted to them. And you were told by your editor, you can't do that. Wow. No comic book shall use the word horror or terror in its title was a rule, and it was enforced. But you could see a movie with horror or terror.

You could read a book with horror, anything. Yes. There were comic books that were kind of spooky and that's supernatural in them, but they were called mystery comics. They couldn't call them horror comics. Were ghost stories allowed? They did allow some ghost stories because it didn't specifically out. ghosts. Everything was followed to the latter. It also had a lot of religious stuff in it

that, of course, that there's always a lot of that in any censorious crap. And of course, anything to do with sex or nudity to you. The prohibitions on violence were much milder. Of course, because the 50s. The war machine must go on. Yes, yes, yes. Yeah. And largely, we got by ignoring the damn thing, mainly because it was run by a bunch of people are totally out of touch. You didn't really step right on it. You were going to get away with it. But I was exactly the age and the temperament to step right on it repeatedly.

Yeah. Because I wanted to, I wanted to crush this thing. It's not good to just have a tumor on your butt and not do something about it. So we're getting to comic bookstores. It's industry is folding. Let's just put it this way. Dasping for air, I think it's a good. a good way to put it.

Okay. It's getting sad and old. And these bright little comic shops, I think it's starting California. Most things do in entertainment. They started just setting up deals with the publishers where there were no distributors. The stuff would just be shipped directly to the stores. The way it became set up was that new distributors moved in. And they would simply buy books from the publisher.

They wouldn't say, we'll buy these and return the ones they didn't sell. They'll say, no, we're taking this 40,000 copies of this comic, and we'll take the risk. But we want this slice of the pie. And so you had an entity as a middleman because these were comics fans who were doing it, so they were much more in touch with what would be sellable and so on. And then you had all these bright new comic shops popping up. They were beautiful. They were nice, clean places.

They weren't the little drugstores with the spinner racks. And they sold lots of toys and all of that. So they had a real good retail base. And they'd come in and they'd have a relationship with the customers. So when the customer came in, he wouldn't just go and buy Spider-Man or everything else. There'd be someone there who'd say, hey, you know, that guy for Spider-Man, he's on a new book here. And then, of course, the good ones like Golden Apple, It would get the idea of saying, hey, they really like this guy's drawings.

So let's have him come in and sign the books here. And that'll be an event that'll set more books. And it'll become more and more of a community. Meanwhile, these conventions were happening, which people were showing up in costumes and the joyous events. And those started a long time ago. This started with the science fiction people and continued in with comic book people. The term I've been using again and again

over the past few years is tribe. Yeah. Because I love tribes. I love the existence of them. I love seeing gamers. Their passion, the intensity and the creativity they bring to stuff that I know fucking idea what you're doing. But I like to see what their minds are doing.

With comic book people, they don't have to be making them to be creative. the debates because I'm a devoted debater so it's like that to me that sort of thing is what makes basically human life worth living it's like a fraternity yes

and the argument part of this is a big part of important part of it I do think that as a society we've gotten so gun shy about even disagreement that we are

getting ourselves debilitating ourselves even by acting like it's rude to say you're wrong. What was the first comic book convention you ever went to? The first comic book convention I ever went towards a San Diego convention. I was invited to a San Diego Comic-Con. I had no idea what they were like. It was back when it was a very small convention.

It was completely contained in one hotel, the Westgate Hotel, like a real old-fashioned. California Hotel. I went to it and I believe I was 24. I was probably drawing Daredeville at the time. And at that convention, I remember I walked into a room and met Jack Kirby. I met many other people that same convention, but that to me was just like, my God, and I meet him and he's this sweet guy and he's a ball of fire. To the end, he was a ball of fire. To the end, he was a ball of fire. But at that point, he was not an old man, even though you'd think he was ancient

because he'd been working for so long. Yeah. He was young when he started. I remember sitting down and talking with him, and as soon as I would throw an idea at him, it would come back to me, re-envisioned, strengthened,

and blossomed in 18,000 directions at once. Wow. I was witnessing genius in action. Everything he saw. and heard, was being processed by an engine of creative intellect like I'd never seen before. So at these conventions, there would be talks? All the time. They would sell collectible comics?

That was mostly what they did. Trade comics, sell comics. Most of the convention, but it was all in one hotel, and they would take the bottom floor of the hotel, and there would be a bunch of people, sitting on folding chairs at collapsible tables with cardboard boxes full of old comic books that they were selling at either slight markups or a lower prices than cover. It's like a flea market just for comic books. And then somewhere along the line before I ever got into the thing, they got the idea of,

hey, this guy lives in town, let's have him show up and have everybody meet him. and then the people behind it knew that something was growing in there. There was a lady who I've known for years now. Jackie Estrada is one of them. And she would just cheerfully introduce people and then we'd end up on stage together swapping jokes and things.

And eventually it started growing into something else where issues of the day would come. come along. Sometime in the 1980s, when comic books started growing up with things like Dark Night and Watchmen coming out, when everything start going right, come on, you're a little bit acquainted with entertainment. You know what I'm talking about. What do people do?

They shit their pants in fear. Instantly, people were saying, well, we need a rating system like they have in movies. Come on, man, you know what that means. There's a long tradition of reading sacred text slowly, allowing each word to settle, echo and reveal meaning over time. Rather than rushing to conclusions, this practice invites reflection, listening, and attention. For centuries, this repetition has been used to stay close to wisdom. Not by studying words as information.

but by receiving them as something lived and experienced over and over again. This tradition is known as Lectio Divina. Emerging in early monastic life, it engages scripture through four gentle movements, reading, reflection, repetition, and rest. A short passage is read, a single passage. A single phrase is held. Silence becomes part of the practice, creating space for insight to surface naturally.

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A modern way to keep biblical wisdom close, quietly present, steady, and alive within everyday life. Lectio 365 is a free resource. Find inspiration there, now and always. Learn more at leccio-365.com. How would you compare your work to say Alan Moore or Grant Morrison? Very different animals.

Particularly in the case of Alan, we arrived at similar times. we approached the superhero with similar notions superficially, but profoundly diametrically opposed points of view. His work was an autopsy on the superhero, and mine was an attempted resurrection. I was kind of like the witch doctor calling lightning down to bring the thing back to life, and he was the clinician saying,

this never should have lived. It was just a very, different, even though we became fast friends, we'd love so much of the same stuff. Between the two of you, you were the kings of the graphic novel. For a while there, it was like that. And as the counterpoint to us, the dramatic counterpoint was speaking. Yeah. Because he was coming in from the literary world.

But it needed all three of us for that kind of magic moment to happen. And had you and Alan not been so diametrically opposed? you both didn't need to be there. That's the way it works. It's like you need those countervalences, the different points of view. That is one of the one quarrel I have with our current age is people who now come to think conflict is a bad thing.

They think they're all supposed to be the same. And I don't think conflict is a bad thing at all. I think conflict is how things get defined. So we went from strips to books. Yeah. that was a moment. And then from books of strips to single subject books. Since that, what had been the biggest breakthrough moments in comics?

The biggest leap to me has been, in terms of format, is what's now called the graphic novel. Because that, for the first time, declared that we're not simply something that becomes a collectible intake, that we can seek permanence and we can seek legacy. It's not disposable anymore. No. Nor is it precious.

That's a big difference. It's a big difference. Yeah, but it also, nor is it precious. Yeah, but because it's still comics. But what I mean, though, is that it's not precious because a copy of Farewell More Lovely is not precious because you know those, can get another one. Are you saying wider distribution is part of what makes it not precious? We might be using precious in different ways. Okay. But precious, I'm using precious as a pejorative.

I'm using it to mean that it's a dainty thing that has to be, like fussy. Or kept in a plastic bag or something worse. I'll be sitting signing comic books and something. Someone will bring one that looks like the dog ate half of it. and it's been pissed on and so on, and I'll say, this is the proper condition of a comic book. It's been read to death, you know. And those are the ones I do the free drawings on. I believe that what we do only exists in that it interacts with humanity. You know, it's not a jewel that's to be worshipped.

Since the graphic novel, have there been any breakthroughs? People would immediately bring up computers when you ask that. On comics, et cetera. I won't join that crowd. I mean, I think that obviously it's the entering other media, but that isn't really a breakthrough that's being adapted. Can you imagine any way that a comic could become a movie that hasn't been done that you'd want to see?

Whoa, man. Selina, why'd you give me one of these smart ones? I've often wondered what it would be like, to bring in some of the methodology of improv to explore things with actors and let it take unexpected courses and then build your whatever effects you needed or whatever around that. I am in love with actors. I mean, they have been the most thrilling part of working for the screen. they're the special effects.

We know they're not human, okay, we know this. It doesn't have to be discussed. They are different creatures to see what would come out of them by testing and taxing and make directing become much more participatory and challenging task. So the division of labor wasn't so much a division of labor between script writer comes in, drops his piece of genius,

this immutable piece of genius. And then each person does their immutable piece of genius and make it more of what you see people do when they workshop a play. I'd love to see something develop in cinema. That would be like that. And it sounds like that has the potential to capture what you described about Jack Kirby

of it being more alive. Yeah. and the idea of doing it, but doing it with a writer always there, someone who would know how to take, because, you know, almost no actor can really add live. You know, it's not,

it's not what they bring to the table. They can express the feeling they have that gives me the line. And that's a very valuable thing to do. Tell me the story of 300. It's as simple as this. I was a very, very young boy. and my father took me and my older brother Steve to the movies on a Saturday at the Capitol

Theater in Montpelier, Vermont, and we saw the 300 Spartans in 1962 Richard Egan, classic, that told the story of the Battle of Thermopylaught in 480 BC. Now, the story told in that movie is fundamentally historically accurate. Although it was all done in very 1960s, we really wish this was Ben-Hur kind of posturing. It was perfect for a little boy my age and for one of my brother's age. And I sat in theater. This whole wonderful story unfolded with these handful. of men with spears were fighting an unspeakable horde of enemies, defending what would become

democracy and science and all of that. And then at the end, they got betrayed and then encircled and brought down by arrows. And they died to a man. And I sat there next to my brother, and we talked quietly with each other. And one of us dared the other. to ask dad something, and I said to my father, dad, did the good guys die? And he said, I'm afraid so, son. And in that moment, in that amazing moment, my entire concept of what a hero was changed forever.

A hero was no longer the shining figure could fly through the air and could get bullets bounce off his chest and would save the day, every day and would win. A hero was someone who was willing to commit to the death, to failure and death. Could be the martyr.

Yes, yes. But was willing to go that last bloody distance in the effort to achieve something. And that has informed everything I've done ever since. Wow. Have you ever had a hero die and then figure out a way to do a second story after they're dead with that character or no? Well, I'm not going to have people come back to life if I'm doing Justin City.

And I don't really like supernatural stories all that much. Have you ever had anyone come back to life in anything or no? Yes, I did with Elektra in the Daredevil comics. I brought her back to life. When you killed her,

did you know you were going to bring her back to life or no? No. No. I killed her. Then I got the idea because I was working I'm in a book, and I kind of missed her, and the book was really not getting fun to do anymore, and I thought, well, I'll try this, and maybe it'll be really cool.

And did you explain her coming back, or was it like a cartoon where... No, it was done with mystical ninja tricks, man. You made sense of bringing her back. It's not like you ignored the fact that she was killed off. I did it. I'd almost instantly realized I'd made the biggest creative mistake I ever made my life. And so once I realized that error, it'd be in comic books where you can do anything, I did a big old fancy-pants graphic novel called Elektra Lives Again,

where I really killed her, and there was no doubt that this woman was dead. No, bring her back after that one, no. So you saw the movie 300, and then what happened next? I'd already told my parents I was going to be a comic book artist, and I said, would I get good enough? I'm going to make a comic book. And when was that? After I'd done Sin City, I decided, okay, I'm good enough now.

I'd done dark night. I'd had all success that you can get in comic books and all that. But I realized I'd been putting it off. And it was time to really take the challenge on. And you wrote it as a graphic novel? Yeah, I wrote it as a graphic novel. I intended it for that horizontal format. but at the time, the only way to really make a nickel doing comics

was to have to be in the standard comic format. So I got clever, and I decided to format the entire thing for double-page spreads and did it as a regular comic book, planning it to be published in the horizontal format as a hardcover. Had anyone ever done that before? No, and I decided there would be no soft cover edition, because I didn't want there to be a cheaper version or a compromised version.

And I'm glad there wasn't a soft cover. Yeah. There wasn't some of the European ones, but I couldn't really control that. How did that end up becoming a movie? That was my call because I owned the property. I was very protective of it. Zach Snyder wanted to meet me.

I was living out in Los Angeles at the time, and I met with him, and he came, and he, knowledge of the battle, was encyclopedic. And he had already done some tests that he wanted to show me of the way he would do the visual effects to supercharge the action and so on.

And that way he could get across the scope of the Persian army with various, like, computer duplication figures and such. And I saw it was in very good hands. So I approved the project. After that, I visited it on set, but I was not in any way.

way of principal production. What's it like seeing something that you write turn into a film? It's as simple as this. If it's good is really nice. Is it surreal? Yeah. I'm sitting there and it's just biting my lip

and going, God, did that work? Was that right? And then very early on, I'll get the feeling this is missing the point. Or, oh, no. The central meaning has been lost or something like that. Yeah.

What does push the wall mean? It's got multiple meanings, but it essentially means to test boundaries of the medium itself and to defy and trample traditions. I would have never understood that if you didn't tell me that right now. Really? I had no idea what it means. Okay. We were really bombed on this one.

So that's what... Rick Rubin says we got a lousy title. No, I didn't. didn't understand it. Okay. And I thought maybe it had some personal meaning. Well, the personal meaning is that it's, I've always felt that it was my role in comics to be pushing the laws.

Yeah. Pushing against the walls in a very sort of constipated type tradition-bound medium that should be a joyous explosion of creativity. Tell me about writing the book. Fun and Strangue. Did you remember a lot of the things in it, or did things come to you as you were writing? that you didn't remember that you remembered? Yeah, a lot of it also came from,

because this book was often done in the form of dialogue, where I was getting asked questions, and it was translated back into as if it were all something that I composed. Lots of things came up that I hadn't particularly remembered. There were vivid memories that I've never lost, like the business of falling through the eyes as a child, which was a very formative thing in my mind.

life that I think actually was character forming for me. Just to come that close to apparent death at that young and age, you have always been someone since is very aware of the possibility of cataclysm. That I will walk into a room and imagine what if that fixture isn't so good. For instance, one of the things I find myself thinking about a lot these days is following what's going on and observing what I see in our politics and everything else. I see very fundamental mechanisms of society and how the mechanics of life are breaking down. How much would you say you were influenced by television growing up?

A lot, a whole lot, starting with Saturday morning cartoons. What were the cartoons you grew up with? Superman. The original Leicester Brothers Superman, that was the one I watched the most. But I ate up all kinds of things like Johnny Quest and all of those. But then I went along on to follow fantasy on TV. You obviously things like Star Trek and all that. But, you know, Western shows when they were on.

And then later, and when I was still a kid, I became totally enamored with the old show, Cojack. Great show. And it was another thing that made me fall in love with New York without having been there yet. Yeah. That Kojack show was the first police procedural TV show we ever had. And with one of the most amazing heroic actors we've ever had, because anybody that ugly who could play a hero that pure,

he was such an ancient Greek hero. Yeah. He really brought the Greek to that character in a classical sense as well as a police sense. What makes a story great? Story's got to have more than one. thing to make it great. I'd say, for me, a story has to involve a test of the human character and a definition of that character through the test. That's why the hero is always to me

the subject is because a hero is a character who is endlessly tested. This goes, It's all with it back to the earliest heroes. Is there always one hero, or can it be more than one? Well, surely there can be more. I mean, there can be more than one. I don't know if you always want to go for the Avengers, though, because the heroes should never outnumber the threat there is. Jason and the Argonauts is a wonderful story about heroes.

300 has got 300 of them. So, no, it can certainly be. And if you think about Robin Hood, that's a story about many heroes. There just happens to be one title character. Tell me about the decision for Batman to sacrifice Robin. Sacrifice Robin? Didn't your Batman kill off Robin? Oh, yeah.

Yeah, he did. That's a big choice. That's a big move. Yeah. Yeah, but he'd gotten really bad. I see. How did Robin turn bad? He could never move.

measure up. He idolized Batman. Everyone considered him the heir apparent. It's the story of Satan. And he couldn't measure up and the old fuckers wouldn't die.

So it's like he grew to hate him. It's basically it's it's a study in sin. Envy killed him. You didn't want to live in the shadow of Batman. That's right.

It's like, well, it's like the play Armaddeus. It's the oldest story in the world. Yeah. So you might as see, he had the Solieri complex. Yeah. Do you remember when the idea hit you for that to happen? I don't remember exactly when that hit me. But I remember.

It's a big idea. Just if you look at our life with Batman and Robin forever, it's a really big idea. It's a push-to-wall idea. The line that really hit the editor, Bob, Shrek the hardest was when Robin says to Batman, I love you. And Batman just responds who likes just something completely snarly and gnarly and, you know, just doesn't give an inch back. Because, come on, that guy was out-slaughtering people. You know, Batman's got kind of a thing about innocent people being slaughtered. Batman couldn't for a second, you'd count in a

having an ounce of feeling for someone who did exactly what that nameless mugger did to his parents. Yeah. And doing it with joy. Was there ever any consideration of creating a new villain instead of going with one of the classics? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's just the problem of the classical villains were so goddamn good. But, I mean, I could. It would be fun to do sometime with one of those.

Does it make it less bad? If it's a new villain? Oh, that depends. It depends. Because like, my attention has gone elsewhere in so many ways that I really feel like I want to spend, I want to give it most of my energies to making up stuff that's pulling us in new directions rather than pulling the old stuff in fresher directions. I'd rather be like starting some new gardens rather than tilly the old ones.

How important is it for stories to be timeless. If you think about that, you're killing yourself. If you do something topical based on what's going on in the world today, does that make it too disposable? A tale of two cities is topical. Herodotus is topical. If you do a story about something that's going on right around you, you're still doing a story about people facing conflict, facing trials, making decisions, and dealing with the twin natures of the human and the natural. And these things are immutable and unchangeable. And so I don't think there's a distinction there.

What's the relationship between free speech and comics? Same as a relationship between free speech and any other story form. Same as a relationship between free speech and any conscious life. it's a function of thinking freely as a prerequisite to living freely and if we don't have that, what's the point? There is not.

If there was a piece of advice you could give your younger self about stories, what would you tell him? Move back to Vermont, pump gas. Good one. You'd be right. Now, what would I tell him now? I'd probably just give tips on how to save time.

Don't go down these particular dark alleys. But mostly it would just be take the chance. Do not think about trends or do not ever think of people like it when or that sort of thing. See what's bugging your gut. Tell that story. is a podcast. Tetragrammatin is a website. Tetragrammatin is a whole world of knowledge. What may fall within the sphere of tetragameter. Counterculture? Tetragrammatin. Sacred geometry. Tetragrammatin. The Avant Garde. Tetragrammatin. Generative art.

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