The Press Box - The Mitch McConnell Photo and the ‘Death’ of Reading. Plus: Comics Legend Frank Miller!

Episode Date: July 14, 2026

Today on The Press Box, Bryan and David start by looking back at the life of political cartoonist Pat Oliphant. Then they discuss the Mitch McConnell hospital photo and the conspiracy theories surrounding it (8:15). Next they talk about the death of Lindsey Graham (18:54), the "death" of reading, and some Trump news. Finally, Bryan is joined by comic book creator Frank Miller to talk about how he got into comics, writing ‘Sin City’, ‘Batman’, and so much more (53:43). Plus, David Shoemaker Guesses the Strained-Pun Headline! Hosts: Bryan Curtis and David ShoemakerGuest: Frank MillerProducers: Isaiah Blakely and Jon Jones Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

David? We found out right before we started today that we lost Pat Oliphant, an absolute giant in the lost art of political cartooning. Pat Oliphant died Monday at age 90. What a life this guy led. Born in Australia, in Adelaide. Adelaide. He worked for the Adelaide advertiser

and then found out, and this comes from the... the New York Times' obit by Robert McFadden. He found out that the Denver Post was losing its cartoonist to retirement. So he applied, and Pat Oliphant became the Denver Post's political cartoonist. This is in 1965. He won the Pulitzer for cartooning two years later. And I love this from the Times obit. As Mr. Oliphant later told it, the cartoon he submitted for the prize was intentionally one of the weakest he had published in 19,

66. It was a kind of test when it won, he criticized the Pulitzer Board for choosing it on the basis of its American boosting point of view rather than the quality of the world. For those who have never seen a

Pat O'Lephant political cartoon and are hopefully Googling right now, how would you describe his drawing? His style, well, I mean, it's very much sort of of the moment. it was a sort there was but not in a dated way there's just a sort of life and energy that his very specific generation of political cartoon has had where it's not like before it was very formal and

now it's very formal and in between there was this almost like you could have been drawing for mad magazine you could have been doing stuff for rolling stone it's all sort of but this is you know the path that shows you there's a sort of electricity this sort of organic nature to it that that is uh that it's really special. And when I say organic, I mean, like, yes, like words and pictures interplay. That's the premise of comic strips and comic books and everything else. But, like, it's almost like the words are just growing out of the picture. It's like you can almost imagine his political cartoon starting with a scribble

and evolving just from that point into this very, it's like really smart, heady point, right? I'm sure that's not how it happened. But I always just thought there's just so much life. It's less about the style. There's so many artists where you can see a face and say, oh, that's Pat Oloffin, drew that. Like, I know. It's not that with him.

But the style is very recognizable. He would do these cartoons that would have a point, a joke in the main cartoon, and there would be a little penguin in the corner. Oh, yeah. Doing kind of a secondary joke, which may not have been as funny, but was following on the first one.

I was also looking at the list of people who won the first one. Pulitzer for cartooning around this time. Talk about a land of giants. Bill Malden. Jeff McNally, who we later know for Shoe, Gary Trudeau, Herblock, Jules Fifer, and on and on. Olfant went to the Washington Star after leaving Denver.

The Times says that by 1983, he was the most widely syndicated political cartoonist in America in as many as 500 American and foreign newspapers. Do we have 500 American papers? we certainly do not or at least that are syndicating slightly dangerous political cartoons and you mentioned the life in his cartoons his politics were pretty amazing

comparable today to a podcaster and I'm not talking about the pod save guys I'm talking about the dirtbag left people who are on the mic and happy or at least not worried about offending a whole lot of people and his stuff offended a lot of people. Some cases willingly go again, go back in Google.

Some of it is very much of its time. Some of it was over the line on purpose, but he was very, very distinctive. I'd also like to send people back to find this piece. It's from Rolling Stone, 1976 by Don Katz, who was a nifty magazine writer before he lost his way and founded audible.com and made the kind of fortune

that you and I will never see in our, lives. Don Katz was a magazine writer and he had this great idea where he decided to go write about Bill Malden and all the cartoonists who were still big in 1976. And he quoted OlaFant in that article and I want to read you this quote about political cartooning. This really isn't a business, Olafan explained. It's a cause.

I'm an outcast because of it. A writer can't really say this man's an idiot because the law holds him back. We can say it. Yeah. Love that. You think political cartoon has kind of gone away as newspapers have gone away. Is there any way that that would have a revival as an Instagram account, somebody who could do it with the speed that would be required today or use the technology of today to do something with that? I feel like I see political cartoons are making a comeback, but mostly just in the comment section of Twitter.

like people like be and be in via you know chat gpt like don't even have you had that experience you're scrolling through and they'll just be an incredibly professional looking political cartoon yes and you're just like wow like somebody must have spent the time to do this and must have some real value you know but in fact it's just something that someone whipped up with AI I mean so more power to them um so I guess that's to say that like political cartoons still are a relevant form distribution is sort of the issue, right? Political cartoons were never particularly something intended to be savored over, you know, you didn't sit with the political cartoon for an hour thinking about it.

So it shouldn't really be like, you know, it shouldn't be like the end of reading, you know, like they shouldn't just go the way of the dinosaur. But like, but I don't, you know, you said Instagram. It's hard for me to wrap my head around on what like the real, what, I mean, That's what Instagram should be for. And that's not the way that we really engage with it. No. And even if, let's say you were doing it, it's like,

oh, Shoemaker got him, got him again. He drew a funny mustache on Trump. He showed those timid Democrats just how timid they are. I think you would have a tough time competing with AI slop. Totally. For the reasons you said, someone could do a really shitty version of that and do it really quickly. And, you know, oldsters on Facebook.

would be passing that baby around a lot more than they'd be passing your drawing around. It's just the world we live in. And I'm with you, like political cartoons were never meant to be savored. There are a few that hold up. A few, I'll admit that I've thought about bidding for when they come up on online auctions.

When you find an original, I'm like, would I like that on my wall? With some of the political posters we have in the house? Or would that just be one of those? Like, who did this? What? What is this? but anyway if you see any Pat Olufant

drawings available on some of the finer auction sites please refrain from bidding until I can get in there because I'm hunting all right coming up on the press box David two big stories from the world of politics the death of Lindsay Graham and the reemergence

in photographic form of Mitch McConnell we discussed the Atlantic's big piece about the death of reading plus Trump's prime time speech Trump's subpoenas to journals and the comic book artist Frank Miller joins me to talk about Batman, Sin City, AI, The Odyssey, Calvin and Hobbs, and other profound subjects. All that much more on the press box. A part of the Ringer podcast network.

Hello media consumers, Brian Curtis, David Shoemaker here, along with producers Isaiah Blakely and John Jones. Mitch McConnell is back, David. Go on. The New York Times said that on Sunday Mitch McConnell broke his silence. That is a direct quote. It's untrue, but go ahead. It is not true. We did not hear him speak.

We saw a still photo of McConnell with his wife Elaine Chow, casually holding a newspaper. Sunday's sports page, right? Yes, it was the Washington Post Sports page in the manner of a hostage photo. And I have two reactions to him holding the paper. One, did you notice the paper was tilted toward the camera? Mm-hmm. So if he caught me at the breakfast table today and surprised me with a photo, I would not be holding the newspaper so that it faced you.

I'd be holding the newspaper so that it faced me. Conspiracy theories are no. I mean, I think that the answer is, I mean, it's very clear he was holding the paper to prove that that picture was taken that day. I mean, that's regardless of whether or not they're trying to frame it in a different way. Like, they should, I think that's pretty clear. Now, was it a real picture? Was it an artificially generated picture? I don't know.

I don't know. The cheap joke to make is, well, I don't want to. be a conspiracy guy, but he's holding the Washington Post Sports page. I'm not buying it. Oh, that's great. Mr. McConnell was hospitalized on June 14th with no explanation of why he was hospitalized or how he was being treated. It was left to media outlets to rely on dispatcher audio.

Now, belatedly, along with this still photo, McConnell is explaining that he fell and lost consciousness, says he did not have a heart attack or a stroke, says he's undergoing physical therapy. But to echo something you just said, people looked at that photo and said, I don't believe you. I don't believe this is real. Well, that's the most

unbelievable photo in the history of time. What did you find unbelievable about it in particular? Well, it was, I mean, okay, look, if, again, take him totally at face value, taking totally at face value, it's, like, it's so staged, right? The best reading of it, the most honest, I mean, whatever, is that it's staged.

There's no reason why whatever situation he finds himself in that he'd be wearing that, you know, the button down shambray shirt or whatever, the J.Crew, you know, checked button down and like khakis on a hospital bed. Like what would that situation be? No, in fairness, right, you're going to get dressed up. Mitch McConnell would not tweet out a picture of here's me lying down in the hospital bed with people attending. Okay, but if you're healthy enough to put on clothes, can't you be healthy enough to say? stand literally anywhere but next bit sitting on a hospital bed like shouldn't you like let's take this in the hall or take this in the out front or something i mean it just seems so it like it just it didn't add up right it's like it's like putting on a suit to go to bed it just felt so bizarre and then of course

there was a lot of conversation about the ai the ai aspects of the newspaper because there was no but maybe that was image compression a lot of people arguing both ways is this is when I don't. I just check out. I'm an artist. I don't know that I don't know how we'll ever come to any element of truth on that source of truth in situations like this. And then,

no, but what really got me was then, I think it was the following day. I was just like messing around, you know, looking on Twitter about it. And somebody was tweeting, and again,

this is so crazy. I didn't even pay that much attention to it before I gave up. Somebody was tweeting that there was an almost identical photo that they released at some point in the past and was using, pictures, but it was clear they were, to me, that they were just using the new photo and pretending that it was also an old photo. Yeah. But after like five seconds of trying to spin this in my head, I was like, oh, well, we'll just

never know. Like, it's just going to be madness forever now. The Washington Post did look at the metadata. This was reporter Bin Binde and said, it checked out. I also had a photographic expert look at it and said there was no evidence that the photo had been manipulated in any way. That's what they're getting paid to say. Look at you.

Dispiracy, David is back. But I do think at the end of the day, it's like this is, it's too weird for it. Almost it's too weird for it to have been a put on. Right. It's like there's so many, like the first thing that people said was this has got to be fake because he didn't mention Lindsey Graham, his good friend Lindsey Graham. And then it's like, yeah, he probably wrote this memo yesterday. Right.

That's a very logical conclusion. And then to me it flips. If this were fake, there's no way. they wouldn't have retroactively written Lindsey Graham into that thing. You know, there's no way they would have let there be all these questions surrounding it. I feel like his team must be more competent than that. Well, here's the way I think it's staged or whether there's room for doubt about it. When you have a photo and a statement, we don't have a good sense of how up to the task of being the senator from Kentucky Mitch McConnell is.

Sure. That's just the fact, right? you don't have to indulge in any theories to get there. Like, he hasn't spoken, he hasn't given an interview, he hasn't shown in any way. And it reminded me of those, you know, phone calls he had with Scott Jennings and John Thune and everybody else. I said, I spent 20 minutes on the phone with Mitch McConnell and we discussed Iran and Graham Platner and all these other issues. We have an expectation now, or we have, yeah, I think expectations are the right word. we have an expectation that politicians should prove it to us

and that we should be able to keep asking the question. And I was thinking about this idea of, you know, where does conspiracy mongering about a photo like that come from? Well, there's some obvious sources. Chuck Todd, the newly unleashed Chuck Todd, was on Twitter blaming the Silicon Valley conspiracy machine. Social media, AI. Fair enough.

Also, there's Donald Trump. We taught America that everything is a conspiracy and that you just ought to say so. Here, for example, is Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, who was on Real America's voice with Eric Bowling, and he had this take on the photo. Do you believe Mitch McConnell is the one who said, I'm okay? Here's the picture of my wife, Elaine Chow and I in that hospital bed. Well, I just heard from some other sources that was an older photo. So I really don't know. I haven't talked to Mitch.

I certainly wish he and his family well. Ron Johnson, reminder, is a colleague of Mitch McConnell in the Senate. But he heard somewhere that that might be an old photo. So if we blame the inner webs and Donald Trump, David, I'll also throw some blame at Joe Biden's White House for covering up his frailty, denying that it existed at all, and creating a world where we are skeptical, perhaps rightfully so that politicians are capable of the job of serving us.

Well, yeah, I mean, all those things are right. But at a very basic level, conspiracy theories are there because they fill in gaps that are otherwise unexplained, right? And so, like, the number one reason why we're conspiracy mongering right now is because Mitch McConnell has disappeared for four weeks, right? And, and again, sent out the photo when, like, it's the photo, the statement, the phone calls too, you know, I mean, like, I'm not sure that the average CNN viewer is aware that Scott Jennings has a personal relationship with Mitch with Mr. McConnell is a work history of Mitch McConnell. And so the idea that he was one of the two people that called him or that he called just seemed a little bit like bizarre on its face. Like just everybody lie about this. That's what it felt like. But they could have just like wouldn't we've all been fine with just like a iPhone video of him and his wife for like whatever, whatever state,

like he's either, he's either incapacitated or he's just doing a really shitty job of convincing us he's not, you know? I mean, just a really negligent job. And that's where this concerns. conspiracy theorizing comes from. We just don't, we don't have an answer. No one's giving it to him, giving it to us. I completely agree. When you go silent for a month and don't explain again what happened to him, they did not explain that simple fact of what happened to him, then you make Laura Lumer,

the de facto congressional bureau chief for America. And be like, oh, well, she said this on Twitter. There's absolutely no statement from McConnell's office. What are we supposed to do with this? Yeah. Yeah, not pushing back against any of this. I mean, there was a point right before they released the photo where I think people were like calling a Bashir to have to, you know, to call an election, you know, to fill his seat.

And Bashir was requesting information. Because he was publicly and people were saying, you're not going far enough. Just like call a snap election. Just do it, you know? And like if he's alive, then they'll just, then that'll be very clear we can't have one, you know? but it's it's just an incredibly it's just impossible to understand what to do in these situations right you just don't even know

like let's be clear like the people human human beings should have a certain amount of privacy but as a as a officer of the United States government you know an officer of the state of kentah or the commonwealth of kentucky you should like it's your obligation to prove that you're alive if there's any question at all you know if there's ever a question for a, that should be like the most basic, they should have like a congressional staffer whose job is like proof of life

videos, just wander around the halls and be like, in case you were wondering, you know, here I am with so-and-so, you know, like, whatever, but like, it's, that's just the most basic thing. There doesn't even have to be, there doesn't even have to be a question. You just need to prove you're alive all the time. That's just

to be part of the deal. And the non-answer once it comes out is the craziest thing because it defies, it's like the dude who was on the, the, Appalachian Trail or whatever. It's like, it defies logic that we don't know where he is. And it defies like, like meta logic that no one has a fucking excuse for this. Like if you're going to be bullshitting this, just like come up with the excuse.

Like it's, you know, if they had just said Mitt, I mean, not Mitt Romney, sorry, if they had said Mitch McConnell is in a coma, I feel like we'd be in a better state right now. Like everybody would be much more comfortable, right? It'd be like, okay, well, he's in a coma. We should probably figure out where this is going to go. We're working the political issues here. But just not answering is crazy. In other Senate news, Lindsay Graham died Saturday night.

71 years old, Lindsay Graham was a great friend of Washington reporters. Barack Ravid had an amazing note in Axios, said that Graham was not feeling well on Saturday night, but wanted to go on meet the press the next morning before getting checked out. I mentioned this in a little video I made for our Instagram page on Sunday, but Lindsey Graham was an alluring figure for Washington reporters, one, because he was very available, like his old pal John McCain, and two, because he offered them a mystery,

which was, how does somebody who was so opposed to Donald Trump, like his pal McCain, who was trying to stop Donald Trump from becoming the next president of the United States, how does that person become one of Donald Trump's biggest allies in the sense, And you know, you might say, oh, there's there are obvious reasons here. He wanted to get reelected in South Carolina. Completely true. He had certain issues he cared about largely foreign policy issues.

And he wanted to be in the room and influence Trump, which he certainly has even in Trump's second term. I think also totally true. But there's this fascinating piece that came out in 2021 in the Times called tap dancing with Trump, Glenn Thrush, Joe Becker, and Danny Hakeem that I found over the weekend. and it talked about how Lindsay Graham grew up in South Carolina in a room off a pool hall. We heard that biographical detail a lot over the last couple of days.

His parents died young. And this is from the Times piece. Graham quote has, from his school days, chosen to ally himself with protective figures. He calls alpha dogs, men more powerful than himself. And Graham is quoted saying this.

To be part of a football team, you don't have to be the quarterback. right? I just thought that was a fascinating detail. Yeah. When we're adding up how did Lindsay Graham become both John McCain's sidekick and Donald Trump's sidekick? Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. And I think that's a sort of, I mean, just in terms of what you read, that's a very kind of level-headed way to approach things, you know?

It's just like, yeah, wouldn't we all rather be the, be like, the fullback, then, you know, we're all getting paid enough money. We all get some of the glory. Daryl Johnson rather than Emmett Smith, you're saying? Yeah, we're Troy Aikman, sure. It's funny. And like I said, Lindsey Graham, you know, you might think that was like a very, very sensitive issue for him. Right.

Like, how dare you and, you know, say that I've changed my stripes or that I'm, you know, I've changed it fundamentally in any way. But no, he would actually participate in all the profiles in which writers were trying to figure out, quote, what happened to Lindsay Graham. Yeah, I mean, I think it's all, there's an element, obviously, in all of, politics, but particularly for grammar, it's all sort of a performance to him. Like, I do believe that he had policy ideas that he was very passionate about, most of which are pretty, most of which are pretty reprehensible. But I do think that it wasn't just farce, but like, but like in terms of his public persona, like, I think that, like, even you said, his last public speech, which was in,

was he in Ukraine when he was, when he was speaking in front of that little group of journalists on a microphone. Like, just, you can just watch the way he talks. Like, he, like, he knows when to lean into the vitriol. He knows when to, like, snarl his lip. He knows when to, like, he knows that whatever he says is evoking things that he has said previously. And there will be comparisons drawn, right?

He knows that he is referencing basically, like, 30 years of, like, you know, neocon hawk politics. Everything kind of goes together. And so, it's all, there's all, it's all a performance. Of course, when someone comes to him, says I want to do a profile. He's going to say yes. He's just, it's the ongoing show. And maybe he figured this out before Trump.

The never-ending show is more important than the actual message, you know? There's a lot to learn from John McCain in that respect. True. John McCain said famously reporters, or as I call them, my base when he was running for president. Did you see the tweet that at front of the show Ashley Parker said out about her favorite story about Lindsey Graham? Please. I'm doing this from memory. whatever, but it went something, I thought it was right after the shooting at the church,

and she was sent down there by her boss, like, they just said, get on a plane this very second, you know, and so she went, didn't have a bag, she had her backpack, and the clothes she was wearing that day, she was just, you know, just by the time that she got to South Carolina and got next to Lindsay Graham, you know, she clearly looked like someone who'd been traveling for a day, and he looked at, and she said, you know, I'd like to stand next to you for the next 48 hours, and he just said, you are sticky and you are icky. Go change your clothes and get a shower and maybe take a nap and then we'll talk. I can hear that in his voice.

I know. It was best. The icky was the best part. Just the rhyming. But so in end, she did. She said she went to like Costco and got a dress. Apparently he kind of like insinuated that she should be wearing a dress and then she reported out the story, you know?

But he's just like, so it's not just pandering to the press. It's also just sort of like engaging them with them on this sort of more human, sort of more alien way that just certain politicians, only certain politicians can really do. But I think just in general the lesson is if you're an open book to reporters, it's going to help your political career. I mean, it's so obvious, but like very few politicians just totally go in on it. Yes, you can look ridiculous and be respected in an odd way at the same time, which is I think where Lindsay Graham was for the Washington Press Corps. And it's so funny you mention that about just that rapport with reporters because Jonathan Martin also has a really good piece about him, remembrance of him in Politico. And he had said that same point, which is that Lindsay Graham was at one point Donald Trump's minion.

And at the same time, this kind of old school senator who would swap jokes with the reporters would say things like he said to Ashley Parker was just kind of a Senate institutional. institutionalist in a way a lot of senators, especially Republicans these days, aren't. That was just a very, very funny duality to him. Going back to the performance thing, go back and watch just any gaggle that he did, you know, in D.C. There was always an element. It always felt like he was in the middle of a conversation. And he was just like, all right, this is it. Okay, start the camera.

And then he would take a step back and start pointing at the camera. You know, like, it was just a, it was all part of the, that, those relationships and the show. topic A for today, David, let's use this podcast to answer the question, is reading dead? Let's do it. Perhaps slightly an awkward thing to say. That's the cover story in the August issue of the Atlantic written by Rose Horowitz. And Rose Horowitz has some fascinating or should I say depressing evidence for the idea that reading as we know it may be over. According to the National Endowment for the Arts, she writes,

which conducts the most comprehensive survey of the nation's reading habits, fewer than half of all adults reported having read a book of any kind in 2022. Only 38% read a novel or short story. A study analyzing dot, dot, dot found that a proportion of Americans who read for pleasure on any given day fell from 28% in 2004 to just 16% in 2023. And that study looked at people who had read a book, magazine, or newspaper, listen to an audiobook or read an e-book. So we're defining reading in the widest possible way. Wait, e-book?

I mean, sorry, audiobooks count? Apparently so. They don't count in the Curtis topeboard, but I encourage you to listen to them anyway. When you're in, like, elementary school and you have to, like, read your, what is it? What was the program that everybody was in, like, young readers? RIF, reading is fundamental? Yeah, reading is fundamental. You bring in the names of the books,

and at some point you realize you can just make them up. You know, like my teacher does not know whether or not this is a real book because you're putting obscure books anyway. It's, you know, whatever. And yeah, yeah, but I guess audio books would have been even beyond the fake book category, anything in those days. I remember filling out one of those sheets, and I had a book called Baseball Rules and Words and Pictures.

I think that's what it was. And I was really nervous to write it down because I was like, oh, it has pictures in the tight. are they going to think this is a real book or that Curtis is just filling out another line? And I should have known that my teacher would never look at the actual entries in the list. We've been doing that this summer in the house. I put up some poster boards. This is the reading as fundamental household edition for me, my wife, and my two kids.

And this is my daughter and I drew these poster boards out. and you write in the name of the author when you finished a book. You write in the book title itself, of course. You write the genre of book that you've read. And then there's an elaborate scoring system, which I don't totally understand because I was present only for part of its creation.

But the scoring system rewards you for reading an actual book rather than an e-book. Okay. Or apparently listening to a book. I don't know how I'm doing, but I think I'm hanging. hanging in. Does it reward fiction and nonfiction differently? No, same. I get it. Can I tell you the part of this conversation? I'm probably jumping way ahead. Please. Has me reflecting on my nonfiction

reading habits that like, because I still read, right? I don't consider myself a non-reader. Do I read as much as I once did? No. But like I'm sort of looking at this from afar. And there's some anecdotes in this and another news that's kind of been swirling around the piece. But about how like nonfiction and fiction activate different parts of your brain. and like sure that's very logical that makes sense but it never really occurred to me until recently that I'm just like oh when I was saying like I'm in like a nonfiction season right now I'm reading all nonfiction am I sort of like am I abdicating my duty is I am I like letting my brain half of my brain go fallow by not reading fiction you know like is this was this a sign of weakness in me that for six months I didn't pick up a novel you know and and I don't know it's it's very intriguing the other one that really got me Another stat that I saw this week that really got me was it was about the, um, about how, uh, literacy, uh, relates to like, to conceptual thinking that like, this was from the piece, right?

That there was, that was this whole thing where like, basically it's like if you, they, they surveyed, you know, whatever, indigenous people, some sort of group of illiterate people. And they asked them like, they gave them the whole, like, you know, uh, just a regular syllogism. The sky is blue. Uh, the bird is in the sky. is the bird on something? What color is the bird's background or whatever?

And they wouldn't know, right? And then the ones that learned to read did, could answer that question. And the rest of them still could not, despite like access to modernity and being adjacent to people who could read, you know, and all this kind of stuff. And that is terrifying, right? That is like, there, I have never been more motivated to like force my seven-year-old to become hyper-literate, you know? It's just like this is, that's like a medical conclusion.

That's wild stuff. It is really wild. That was one of the eye-popping antidotes. in that piece. Other evidence that Horowitz assembled, the bestseller list has gotten a lot simpler. It's filled with young adult fiction, a genre that basically didn't exist when you and I were kids.

You know, you had the kind of Beverly Cleary-style novel about somebody's parents getting divorced that we would often find at the school book fair. Mm-hmm. But I felt that you basically went directly from children's literature to Michael Crichton. or to 20,000 leagues under the sea, which I guess you could consider books for young readers,

but there was not like this massive tier of books that just served younger readers. And I think the implication here is that people then stay in that tier because that tier has become so fertile. They keep reading books like that. Well, sure. I mean, also young adult books are, I mean, for adults can be incredibly fulfilling

and, you know, the same way that you and I read, like, Jim Thompson, you know, some people are just plowing through just like five, just long young adult fantasy novels or whatever. Like, that's all good and well. And there wasn't as much of it before. There was, I mean, it would be interesting to, like, send an editor back in time to, like, 1980 and just have them say, like, actually this would, we would just call this young adult. The book would have been exactly the same. You know, like, when I was that in that demographic reading like Terry Pratchett and Anne McCaffrey, like there was no category, right? So, like, I, Who knows how those would be categorized today? I remember when I worked at bookstores, like at politics and pros, that was the hardest question, or that was the most difficult question to answer because of a lack of an answer. When someone was like, yeah, my son,

it was always a boy, because with girls, even in the early 2000s, there were more options to read in between, and I think girls were kind of statistically more prone to read anyway. It's like, my son really liked so-and-so, but now there's just nothing for him, like, what can he read? and I forgot God, I came and remember what it was. There was a novel about baseball that was right in the,

right in the R's. Like I can see where it goes on the shelf. But it was just, you were taught that that was the answer. You know, it was just like, what, do you have like a 14 year old boy? You can't find anything he likes to read here. Just give him this. Like, it's totally doable.

Now there's a lot of other stuff I would recommend. But, yeah, to go back to, the original point. The bestseller list looks a lot different because there's categories there weren't before, but also because people know how to game the bestseller list now. You know, and people are like more reactive to publishing trends in a quick way. And it's just, it's all more of a, you know, it's not like totally gamified, but it is just kind of, it's more of a reflection of an industry than it is just like actual people's

reading tastes. Anyway. I hear that. I also think there's been a cultural change since you and I were kids. you and I love Star Wars when we were young. And we were happy to follow Star Wars as we got older. Oh, there's a Star Wars novel. Oh, there's a little Star Wars video game.

Let's play that. But at some point, content about Star Wars ran out. There was nothing else to consume unless you were going to be really hardcore and go to conventions, which were much smaller back then. If you take something, and I just pick Star Wars because it's an example of something people like when they're young, now there's a whole media industrial complex about that where you can just stay in that zone for as long as you want, gloriously so, you know, that doesn't offend me at all if people want to do that. But I do think that that's part and parcel

that kind of young adult thing. Like, I want to stay in that part of my life forever and just live here. And by the way, have very, very interesting, detailed highbrow conversations about this subject. That just didn't exist. That possibility did not exist when we were kids. Anyway, just a note. whatever we adults diagnose in ourselves about our lack of reading or how we read less than we used to it's going to be much much much worse with following generations

yeah you and I are both from the TV will rot your brain generation we did not have a scrolling world when we were kids no even with TV things came in chunks you could change the channel

but there were only so many channels to change scrolling world is very very different tablets are issued elementary school students that's noted in the piece do you remember reading during commercial having a book open to read during commercial breaks of a show and feeling sort of lousy about it yes i do because you're clearly prioritizing the base i mean the stuff on tv yeah yeah i got two and a half minutes but two and a half minutes is like more way more time than you would would give it now right because you could just flip to something else or you don't have commercials. You skip, you skip over them.

And that's the thing. The old media world in so many ways seemed hopeless, but there just was a time at the end of the day where you ran out of content. There was nothing else to do. There was nothing else to watch or consumes. You're like, I need to read a book. I am sitting in my bedroom and the only thing, maybe the West Coast baseball game has ended, the only thing for me to do is read a book. Hence I will turn to my book. The culprits in the Atlantic piece, the decline.

of newspapers, the rise of social media, the rise of podcasts, scrolling, which I mentioned, AI, if people don't care enough about writing that they're happy to have AI assistant do it, why would they care about reading? It's funny, too, I was thinking about our childhoods. Cliff's Notes was kind of the AI summary of its time. Did you ever actually try to read Cliff's Notes? Oh, yeah. It was not written in English.

you start to read it and be like what is this? Like often I would have read a book and then I'd be terrified because you and I were trying to be high achievers at L. Pascal High School in Fort Worth and I'd be like I want to make sure I got the key points

because some of the books were difficult or very adult and I'd read the cliffstones and be like I don't understand what this is saying. Who wrote this? Maybe there was an AI of 1996 that was whipping that up.

No, it was just transcription. That was a technology. back then. It was like one old crank who had read all the books, just was speaking to someone who was just stino who was just jotting it down furiously. It also notes something that I think is really interesting. And I, and I counter with a lot of people, not just younger people, but adults, is that they don't totally understand that you can read for pleasure. Maybe they get pleasure other ways. Maybe that's just like, to them, pleasure is binging a, you know, great television show or watching movies. But that's the one that always gets me. And I don't know if you have

these conversation people in your life like what'd you do this week i was like i don't know i read this awesome biography of mike tyson and somebody will look at me like what why would you do that and well it was a good book it was a really really good book and it made me really happy to read it like it was fun and i would like and i like to do things like that and i think there is nothing because i don't read i mean like i read things that i enjoy but i think reading for pleasure i don't know it's almost like like reading on vacation it's like another level of reading for pleasure does that make sense It's like you read for pleasure day to day and it feels like, yeah, I'm glad that I exercise today.

I feel better, you know, the next morning or whatever. It feel better spiritually. But man, just like tearing through the book on like the porch of the place you're staying at the beach is just the greatest feeling in the world. Just bonus reading. Yeah. It feels so good. Another thing I liked about the piece, there's a quote from Neil Postman who was talking about

television. See if this does not sound like the newer media of our time. The problem is not that television presents us with entertaining subject matter, but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining. Television is our culture's principal mode of knowing about itself. You could substitute in a lot of new media for television there. I had some wrecks for your own reading life, by the way, that I've tried to keep myself reading.

One, physical books instead of handily downloaded books for your phone. I don't need to convince you to buy physical books because you buy too many just like me. But even when we're doing reading books for podcast interviews, I always tell people I do not want the e-galley. I want a book because that will just make me walk away

and engage with something that is not a phone or a screen. Exactly. It will wall me off. On your phone or on your tablet or whatever, it falls victim to the same thing as everything else. It's like you pick up your phone, you forgot why you picked it up.

but now you're on Twitter for 45 minutes, you know? It's like, you don't even remember why you were there. And then two days later, they're like, hey, you got that interview. And you're just like, oh, shit, I didn't read the word. Like, you can send me something if it's like a very perfunctory nonfiction situation or something. And I just need to sort of like scout one question out of the book or something. But like, you must know that no one's reading it when you send it to me as a PDF, right? Yeah, absolutely right.

Also, bookstores. You and I are evangelists for bookstores, particularly use bookstores. but it's just a great way to get yourself out of the algorithm and to get yourself to buy something you didn't think you were going to buy and read something you didn't think you were going to read. When I read this piece, I was like, what is the case for optimism about reading?

I don't know, societally speaking. I will go back to that idea that you and I heard when we were growing up that television was going to rot our brains. It only partially did. I also know this just on a personal level. you and I and everyone who is currently alive on this planet, we will never run out of books.

There will always be more books to read. When you talk about that guilt for not engaging with fiction for a while, it's because there are too many freaking books out there. True. And the nice part about it is like there's not a finite number of these things. You will never run out. You'll never be like there is, it will never be like the kid.

That's an interesting thing because bookstores really were our first experience with like the endless scroll. Right? Yeah. this sort of like paralysis that comes with having an unlimited number of choices on Netflix. But that didn't affect us in the same way at bookstore. I guess, I mean, you and I have both been physically dragged out of bookstores. So, I mean, I guess there is some, there, there is a sort of parallel.

By the bookstore bouncer? Well, like, your family, you know, it's just like, yeah, we've been waiting in the car for 20 minutes now. God, okay. But yeah, but, but, you know, it was, it is strange. You're going to be, I mean, if you go into a bookstore sort of blind. And I, by the way, have told you, I've said before how much I love small bookstores because you can't, there is no endless scroll.

You can actually just look at all the books in an hour, you know, and you're just like, okay, I know exactly that there's no mystery here. I know exactly what I get, that I have what I want. And there are 10 things, and you've got to pick one of these 10 things that look good to you. Or all of them, you know, whatever.

But, but yeah, it's, it's weird that, like, just to think, you would walk into a bookstore. Like, I'm going to walk out with a book. And it's going to, and I've no idea what it's going to be. It's a great feeling. Yeah. It's a wonderful feeling.

Two quick ones here before we get to our guest. Trump is giving a speech on Thursday night about elections, newly declassified intelligence on investigations into a U.S. elections, as Reuters puts it. I am preemptively alarmed about this one. Did you see the speech described as popery on Twitter today? No, I didn't see. told Axios it was going to be popery. Is that just what we're describing

Trump's speeches in general as now? Because they are pretty much popery. They're all papery. Not in the jeopardy sense so much. Well, I guess it's sort of the same as the Jeopardy sense. You have no idea what's coming next in the Jeopardy sense. Poverty. Whose idea was that on Jeopardy anyway?

Popery. There's a catch-all. I don't feel like coming up with four more questions about the economy. Just throw it in a different category. Speaking of old television, too, the term popery to describe that. I think that was, it was archaic when we've heard it on Jeopardy.

It reminds me of ribbon candy for some reason. Yeah. I don't know. I mean, there's a chance that this is like Trump's other big speeches, which is just like a fake speech, right? A non-speech, he's going to get up there and say nothing. And then remember when he was running for president? And it was just like, oh, no, he gave his foreign policy speech.

You don't remember that? His major foreign policy speech. It was just his regular speech, but they just put him, in front of a podium that said Trump foreign policy or something. Make America safe again. Yeah, exactly. So that very well might be what's going on. I mean, speaking of conspiracy theorizing, I mean, there is, there are a lot of,

a lot of voices theorizing that we're going to, I mean, we're not that far off to some real conspiratorial grounds. If you want to, like, blame, there are some insinuations that are going to blame foreign governments for an interfering in the 2020 election. And so one of the people, one of the countries that was actually previously blamed briefly was Venezuela, which Trump now has their ruler in captivity, you know, in prison and is, and potentially in like a position to negotiate something with him. I mean, there's a, this could go real, real weird, real fast.

And I think that I would hope that all the great reporters out there who'll be covering this have already done all their homework on that stuff, right? That they'll be prepared for some of that because I think covering it on the night of is going to be the most difficult thing. It truly is. And a lot of it honestly may just be very repetitive and ignored. You know, it was like what evidence would this possibly be? Will the evidence be even as such as it is be provided to the American public? I don't know. Or what if there's no evidence, but it's just like, and so that is why I'm launching my new election force, which is an army of converted ice agents that will occupy every major state, I mean, every major city. I mean,

it's like he can he he could go we can get to the worst case scenario here without without fretting about congressional approval or anything we've already proven all that spot i mean i don't without too much imagination no yeah i don't want to like i don't want to be like a doomsayer here but like it like it's i think you're totally right it could be it's just strange some things in the in 2020s seem like trump has an incredible absence of power compared to what he had previously because one they're like congressmen that are willing to sort of go against them they're not quite sure sure what the future hold so we're not just lining up in lockstep and two it does seem like he gets cowed by the media like like on a pretty regular basis in the grand scheme of things he gets away

with a lot more but it does seem like sometimes it's just like you know if he gets if he if he if he gets enough like you're an idiot comments from reporters then like he's like maybe I am an idiot but then sometimes he's just like no I'm going to just like create a suburban military wing and no one can really figure out what to do about it or how to report on it you know it's just It's very bizarre. Another thing that's gone sideways, thanks to Trump. There's a big story in the New York Times last week. And I'll give you the authors here,

Tyler Pager, Julian Barnes, Eric Schmidt, and Eric Lipton about the new Air Force One. It was gifted to Trump and in lesser measure America by Qatar. Trump flew to Turkey last week on the new Air Force One, but then he flew back from Turkey on the old Air Force One. And as the Times reported, people briefed, on the new plane's capabilities

said the new plane does not have all the features of the older plane and the switch in the president's aircraft when he departed Turkey was a precautionary measure made it the advice of the Secret Service. One of the insinuations is that perhaps this new plane does not have the kind of missile defense system

that the old Air Force one had. I understand. Oh, go ahead. Go ahead. Well, let me give you one more fact here. Trump said on social media that he was flying in the old Air Force one quote, for old time's sake. That was why the planes were switched in Turkey. Again, please continue.

I mean, the story here is that Trump was, decided that Air Force One was beneath his standards. And when he found out that their new version of the Air Force One was being delayed for whatever reason and could be years away, he decided to find his own Air Force One. and it was this fancy jet that was gifted him from Qatar which everybody thought was a bad idea which everybody, you know, many people pointed out at the time you're not saying you're getting it for free

but retrofitting it at this point is probably going to be more expensive than just building a new one and could, and if done the right way would probably take just as long or longer. But that wasn't really the concern. I understand why Trump wanted this plane. I don't sympathize with it, but I get the logic. And I understand why he,

I understand why he's so sensitive about it now. right but I don't understand why if he's so sensitive about it he's not just insisting on flying on the new plane like who cares about what the what Secret Service says

you're allowed to do whatever you want right it's all very bizarre and then going after the reporters did you mention that part I didn't mention that yet he subpoenaed the Times reporters

well Cash Patel's FBI subpoenaed the reporters but it should be pointed out that Cash Patel was like organizing this whole process from the White House So you're actually exactly right by saying he some Trump subpoenaed them.

But just to be clear. To be clear. Yeah, there's actually two layers here. Four reporters wrote that story. They're being subpoenaed to testify before grand jury. And then some as yet unsopened New York Times reporters told us that Cash Patel was personally directing the leak investigation. Yeah, they're next, I think, is the thing. Right.

So, and the White House or the FBI spokesperson said, just to be clear, the targets here are not journalists. It's the people who are leaking to the journalists. Uh-huh, sure. But this is, but the idea is when you bring journalists and force them to testify before grand jury, the targets are the journalists. You're right. It has a chilling effect in every direction. Yes, yes. If you're forcing, trying to force them to give up their sources, the targets are the journalists. If you're forcing some before grand jury, that is, yes, that is in itself.

Yes, punishment. Yeah, just an incredibly bizarre, just incredibly bizarre situation. And just an incredibly incredible testament to this president that we have that just seems to care about nothing more than these incredibly petty prep projects, you know. If he was only worried about reflecting pools and Air Force One redesigns, I think that, you know, we could all come to some sort of piece with that. But this is, but now the lashing out of the journalist, it's just sort of, it's just, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's inexplicable. You know, it's like it doesn't, it just doesn't make any sense. Let's bring on our guest, David. It's New York month here at the press box.

Hell yeah. Last week we had New Yorker film critic Richard Brody into our Spotify headquarters there in lower Manhattan. He was fantastic. And if you don't read movie reviews or read his reviews, I think something about that interview will speak to you. We talked a lot about what is a critic's job, went over some complaints about Hollywood. but Richard was just fascinating to listen to. Another New York character, David, for this week. We had Richard Brody.

Now we have Frank Miller, who has a new memoir out called Push the Wall, which is out today. Frank Miller is a comic book artist. That's about the most basic way to describe him. He is the creator of the Dark Night Returns of Sin City. Tell me, where would you put Frank Miller in the modern comic book pantheon.

I'm a little bit removed from the modern comic book discourse. I don't know. I mean, but he's one of one. I mean, I don't think you even compare him to other people. Certainly, like,

as, as a, you know, there are writers who are more significant than him in the direction. I mean, as significant as him, he is as a writer in the modern direction of comic books. But stylistically,

the way that he's just informed generation after generation, starting with Batman Year 1, obviously through to Sin City, which just taught a generation of comic book artists, like what Shadow was. And, I mean, just really kind of just, I mean, the success of Sin City is, is, would have, was unthinkable when it happened.

I'm going to release a black and white comic book. It's just like, the noir, you know, like, it's just there was no track record for this and he made it into this real thing this real empire and of course Batman the Dark Night Returns sandwiched in between there is just maybe the most important comic book that was ever written you know ever ever created it comes out in 1986

and tell me this was that the book that put Batman on a darker and more sophisticated trajectory yeah so I mean there'd been hints of it before but yes basically it's said in the future when Batman is an old man and it's like post post apocalyptic but just like

dystopian future but it did recharacterize the way that we see Batman it treated him seriously and it's not it hadn't been fully treated seriously but in terms of like pop culture stuff with real permeation it was basically like the Batman

the TV series was the broader concept of Batman prior to that right it was prior to the movies the Tim Burton movies and it did just sort of open up a lot of different pathways to imagination and to interpretation of the character that weren't there before. One funny thing I estimate I said, you know, your book comes out in 86, Tim Burton's movie comes out in 1989, and for the rest of my life, I have been hearing people say

when a new Batman movie comes out, you know, this is a darker, more sophisticated take on Batman. This is not the silly Batman you're used to. And somehow Batman is always finding new ways to get darker and more sophisticated. sophisticated. Yeah. The process he started. Anyway. Well, it is. I mean, when people say that, what they're saying is this is a Batman,

you don't have to be embarrassed to watch as a grown-up. And what Frank Miller did was give us a Batman that no one could be embarrassed to read. You know, that was just like Dark Night Returns, man. You could read that on the subway. Here's the man himself. Here's Frank Miller. The Hulu original series Furious is coming to Disney Plus, starring Emmy Rossum.

Furious follows Fing. FBI agent Alice Black on the hunt for a mysterious and calculating serial killer. Both walk their own paths toward justice, and as their lives start to intertwine, the line between right and wrong begins to blur. Don't miss the three-episode premiere of the Hulu original series Furious on July 27th, only on Hulu on Disney Plus. My name is Peter Parker, but I'm also Spider-Man. This July, we're faced with a threat.

I can be anyone. The world may have forgotten Peter Parker. I'm just a neighbor. Friendly neighbor. But he hasn't forgotten them. Sometimes Spider-Man has to do the hard thing. That's my responsibility. Talk to Banner?

I didn't know you could get that big. Spider-Man, brand-new day. In theaters, July 31st. Frank Miller, thanks for coming to our New York headquarters. It's a pleasure. I really appreciate the opportunity. You write in the book that when you were five years old, you declared that you wanted to,

write comics. Absolutely. At that age, why was it comics versus writing a novel or making a movie? Well, I was a comic book nut, and the thing that I loved more than anything was drawing pictures. And so I wanted to write comics, and I wanted to draw them. And, and, and it's, it's, and, you know, at the time I was reading things like Superboy and so on. And, and I, and I, and I just, and I knew this was a way that one person could tell a story. Did you think of yourself as a naturally gifted artist? No. No, not at all.

I, uh, it's, it was always very hard for me. And, and, uh, I defined myself early on in my professional career as an effort artist. An effort artist. And I, it took, it took a while for me to learn how to draw with any, with any kind of finesse that that that that but I had to I had to take what was a storytelling uh talent which came very natural to me and and I was very natural at putting pictures together but the actual drawing of them that took a lot of study a lot of hard work you write in the book that Neil Adams the comic book artist became a mentor what was your relationship like with him

Neil is one of the most unforgettable people in my life. I regard him as a second father in many ways. There's so many things that were remarkable about this man. One of them was that even though he was at the time an absolute legend in the business, he was amazingly accessible. I found him by actually looking his name up in the phone book and dialing it and got a meeting with him an hour later.

And he saw me, told me how terrible I was, and told me there was no hope for me. And I kept seeing me as I came back with new drawings and new pages and eventually got me my first work. and we stayed in touch from that on. And I'm hardly the only one. It's with an awful lot of my colleagues as well. His plays called Continuity Associates,

which was basically it was halfway housed for us. I was all but indigent. You want to become a book artists. provided us with work advertising what they call comp work, which is sort of preliminary drawings for people to use to base TV commercials on,

that sort of thing, which was by the standards of our time very well-paying, it kept a lot of us alive. And then we, you know, many of us, moved on to become professional comic book artists. So it was

a clubhouse and a place to get started. He gave you a piece of advice. No matter what people tell you, take criticism personally. Yes. What's a piece of criticism in your career that you took personally? I take it all personally.

You know, it's a... I think about it. And if I decide it was unfair, I just relaxed and set it aside. If I decide there was some truth and I make an adjustment. If I decide that, for instance, if I do a book, for instance, and it's very poorly received, I think about that for a long time and I think about why it was poorly received.

And it often has an effect on the next book. Changing tactics, changing styles, that kind of thing? Or deciding why didn't this one connect? and changing my work so that the next one will communicate more clearly. You moved here to New York City after high school in 1976. Correct. 70s New York is one of those places that's just shrouded in mythology and portrayed in movies. Yeah, it was me and Travis Bickles.

Side by side. You're in the back of the cabin, him in the front? Yeah, yeah. What was 70s New York really like? Scorsese was not doing cinema verete, but it was damn close. It was, it was, it was, you know, Scorsese being a great director, captured the real heart and soul of the era. And it was a city in despair, deep despair, deep economic depression,

and a very low morale, but a very defiant spirit. reading by violence, plagued by drug epidemic. And, I mean, it was a place many people came to find purgatory. In my many long walks, I would often find myself down some dark street. seeing what were just casually referred to as crack whores playing their trade. And these were crack cocaine addicted young women often from the Midwest somewhere who were just basically offering to sell their bodies to people in cars. So there was a roughness to it, there was a despair,

it was a meanness to the city too, especially as the 70s moved into the 80s. You'll see in movies like Wall Street, for instance, how the greed is good speech and all of that, how there was a mean worship of greed and selfishness that became celebrated in the city. Things started brightening with Giuliani's War on Crime

and Bloomberg's more softer-handed follow-up and with the Clinton economy bringing the country much more back to life in general. Back in the 70s, you write comics were in a financial and cultural toilet. How had they gotten there? Okay. You've got to see that comic in terms of pop culture.

I've spent a lot of time as being the kind of the tough kid on the end of the block. That's kind of our nature. In the 1950s, the most successful comic book publisher was one called EC Comics. It published the brilliant and notorious horror comics of the 1950s. The best known titles being like Cales from the Crypt and Vault of Horror, which really moved comics from infancy into adolescence, abruptly. And these comics, well, these comics got a lot of notice from some parents' groups and so on, but they particularly got them from one pop psychologist who saw a way to make a name

for himself because he wasn't much of a psychologist. And he published a book called Seduction of the Innocent, which branded comics. is being the source of juvenile delinquency in the country. A juvenile delinquency was a buzzword to cover anything kids do that was scary to their parents. It's a biological fact that every generation of parents is afraid of its children. You know, look at how the World War II generation was so afraid of its hefty children. And in this case, it was the, you know, the, I mean, this was part of that. You know, and now we've got, you know, then later the boomers became afraid of their kids.

And it goes on and on. But the overreaction to this pressure was the creation of this horrendous thing called the comics code, which was a censorship code. there was far more strict than the Hays Code or the MPAA or anything like that was in cinema. And it declared that comic books were just for juveniles. And in fact, they went further than that. Children's books have never been governed by anything this strict. And that was the boss when I came into comics.

It's amazing. And you write about that in the book that these censors, This Comics Code Authority said that policemen could not be portrayed as rotten, and criminals could not be portrayed as anything but rotten. Yes. And you couldn't have these scenes of violence and horror, what they did, you know, would decide was extreme violence and horror, anything like that. Yes.

And you had to go and negotiate with these people in person sometimes? Oh, I chose to. I picked a fight. You enjoyed it? Well, no, I wanted to take them on. Uh-huh. because they rejected something that I, they said, they specifically said,

you cannot, I had a story that I, that I, that I turned into Marvel Comics. And, and, and it was, it went right at several of the rules in the code because it was about the angel dust, you know, crisis. and so I had a kid a kid whacked out on angel dust hallucinating all over the place

and you know frothing at the mouth the whole deal there's some juvenile delinquency right there oh yeah but also it's drug use with a child and so on and they of course rejected it it was done to be rejected and I and I went in in order

to argue argue the case with them and was so surprised to find out that it was just a bunch of know what they were. They were just sort of some people in a time capsule, these meek little people who all looked like they were in, leave it to beaver and who were all kind of flattered. Did anybody ever showed up? Everybody knew they were still in business. I mean it's it's a And and You know

That was my first experience with censorship Face to Face And to realize it's not what you expect You always expect something so big And and fears And And you just don't expect it to be quite so stupid I ask you this

These days you hear a lot of people grumble That every movie is a reboot. Everything we see coming out as a reboot. Someone like you, coming from the world of comics, where you're often asked to reimagine beloved characters. Yeah, yeah. How did you think about the idea of a reboot?

I mean, of what? Of everything. I mean, as a concept, right? Because I think what people are grumbling about now is they say, oh, there are no new ideas under the sun. Everything we're seeing is, you know, something served to us in a different form. Well, that's such a big subject.

The thing is that I tend to think remakes are a waste of time. It's like who really needs a remake of Psycho, for instance. It's a masterpiece. Sequels, awful lot of great sequels are around. I'm sure glad Star Wars wasn't a one-off. and it's it's it's uh so i i think it's everything depends on quality again i don't have hard and fast answers to that i do think that any field be it comics or cinema is kept alive by its new ideas not by just its regurgitation of old ones

did you get a different pleasure from writing a kick-ass batman story versus a story that involved your own characters? It's different. It's different. I mean, I think I did each in the right time. The Dark Night was a, was a, gave me stuff to respond to, stuff to extrapolate from, and made it possible for me to do something that I really made up out of a whole cloth, like Sin City. Darnight Returns came out in 1986.

You were working on it when you were 29 years old. Just when I started. And like a lot of us, you know, when we were 29, 30 seemed like, you know, turning 30 seemed like the worst thing in the world. It seemed old. How did that inform your conception of Batman? Oh, I remember when I was 29 working on Batman, I said, I'm going to make you impossibly old. 50. And you could not imagine Batman being young.

younger than you were at that age? I just didn't want him to be. You know, it's just, yeah, I mean, I didn't want to turn older than Batman and be working on him now. What do you think of how crazy? When I was rereading that book last week, I, you know, really loved how you used newscasters.

Oh, that was fun. And 80s TV talking heads. What was it about 80s TV news that you found so interesting? Well, we still had, we still had the dominance of the three networks. and they were very recognizable personalities. There's no mistaking Ted Cople.

He's one of the easiest people to cartoon with that round Charlie Brownhead is. And that unmistakable speech pattern, you've got this high, high intellect, but everything's always put in a rather quizzical, teasing tone. And so it's a, I enjoyed them a great deal, I also, knowing enough about classical stuff, I also knew the value of a Greek chorus

in any play, especially one that played with the concept of gods. And so to have the chattering voices of us humans going on while these larger-than-life figures were having their conflict in the skies seemed to me that it would just be natural. Dark Night Return sold a ton of copies. In those days, how'd you find out about your sales? Would you get a phone call?

Would you get some in the mail? How would that work? No, I got a phone call from the marketing guy. And it would come in on like a weekly basis? I would get to, the way the comic book market, the main sales are done through this glorious direct market we have. And that was the way the book was distributed. And with that direct market, the retailers order from distributors, and it all happens very fast.

So the print orders are set to those orders. And so we knew very quickly. It would be solicited. The orders would be placed, and my phone would ring. and with Dark Night, my phone rang a lot because the sales weren't just high. They were high enough so that we were able to break precedent and go back to press.

Why do you think people are drawn to vigilante stories? It's like anything else with this heroic stuff. It's refulfillment. I mean, all of these superheroes are vigilantes. It's a And in this case It's especially the time The Dark Night came out

New York is a scary place And The idea that there was this big demonic guy who'd come out of nowhere And save you was Really appealing But beyond that to the wider world Never mind just New York

It was the same thing Batman was to me When I was a five-year-old it was a big dad who was there to save the day. So Dart Night comes out in 1986. And I feel with every successive telling of the Batman story, including the Tim Burton movie that came out a few years later, we would always hear, now this is a darker and more complex take on Batman

than what you are used to when reading public or viewing public. And that continued through the Christopher Nolan movies and Math Reeves and everything else. Yeah. Why is Batman always getting darker? Well, because, because, because it worked, and because it's, you know, since it's gone now from being children's fair to being adolescent fair, which is where it's at now. You know, if you're doing some for adolescent boys, they're going to be more in the move for something that's good and harsh and tough.

basically it's moved from from being gun smoke to being dirty hairy okay that makes sense after the success of that book you moved from New York to L.A. How did living in L.A. influence your work? Well, in Sin City all of a sudden there were tarot of tiles and palm trees and and the women in the comic

started looking a lot better and the vintage cars started popping being up all over the place. But I would say that I would say I, it opened me up a lot. Is there any essential difference between an L.A. detective story and the New York detective story other than the terracotta and the palm trees? Yes. I think the L.A. detective stories tend to be more romantic. Raymond Chandler is a much more romantic writer than say Mickey Spilley. And keep in mind, the American detective story came to fruition in Los Angeles and San Francisco with Dash Alamed and Raymond Chandler and others.

It also flourished, of course, in Florida and in New York. But I think that the sort of the, like the sultry, very attractive, but very morally dark aspects of L.A. Give you a very gothic kind of venue for stories. When did the germ of the idea for Sin City first come to you? I've been thinking about it since I was in seventh grade. not by that name but I was

doing strips for the high school newspaper I did a regular strip that was a story about the about a detective who was up against the

disciples of the Reverend Sun Jung Moon and and called it Karma and was already thinking along those lines and I

as time went by I discovered the grand work of Johnny Craig and Wallace Wood that was done in the 50s plus others in the EC comics crime comic books

and was determined and of course of course, biggest influence of all, was I was sitting there in my grungy little apartment in New York, watching a million-dollar movie

on my, on my, you know, my, my, basically my, what do you call the ears? Yeah, rabbit ears? My rabbit ear TV.

And, and, and a million-dollar movie I discovered, like, all this amazing, you know, vintage stuff from the 40s and 50s. I'd seen Ralph Meeker playing my camera and, you know, and kissed me deadly. And, you know, just so much, so much great stuff.

You write Sin City was me at my freest. How so? Yeah, I'd never had that much. I'd never approached something with so much. of a desire to just be a bit reckless and make up the first story I all about made up as I went along and and and and it the characters changed their appearance across across it as styles emerging more and more and so it was it was I was I was letting it all happen as it went and and it was it was it was not a

contrived or worried over project. And the black and white look that comes from the million-dollar movie and Kiss Me Deadly and old movies like that? Yeah, it also meant I could do the whole thing myself, even lettering. What do you think the basic appeal of film noir and hard-boiled detective stories are? Oh, without question there. I mean, sure, you've got the great open stuff. You've got the sex appeal, violence, all of that. But more than anything, the morality plays.

The morality tells. Without that, they are nothing. If you see one of them that doesn't have that, it's an empty, ugly feeling. You feel like you just watch some people getting murdered. It's like watching a Slashir movie or something Without that backbone of morality in it

Yeah That kind of code in it You've got to have You know You've got to have Humphrey Bogart saying You know Saying saying You know why

Why he's got to turn the girl in Because it's bad for business If you let things like that happen to your partner Yeah exactly why he's got an avenge his partner. Yeah. Do you think a noir detective story could be set in present day?

I always think about them as such a, you know, period thing. Could they be set in the age of computers and social media and iPhones and everything else? Oh, yeah. I've got no question about it. It's a concept and an idea. I think you could set one in outer space. That would be a challenge.

I mean, it's like you'd have to lose some of the appurtenances, but you'd have to feed the soul of it. It's all about humanity. And that moral code you speak of. And the human beast isn't something that's going to change. This tethered to a period of American life. No, it's human nature immutable. You were adamant early on that Sin City would not be adapted for a movie.

Why not? Because I thought it would be botched up. I thought it would just be turned into yet another vehicle for, you know, for some actor and that it would be put through a very homogenizing process in Hollywood and so on. And I got persuaded and proved wrong where Robert Erdogas. I think that movie was one of my first experience with co-directors, at least on a big film. How did that work day to day to-day? He started several earthquakes with that, yeah.

I can imagine. How'd that work day-to-day on the set? Who said action? Who said cut? How did you guys divide up? We were called a two-headed beast. He was generally the one who would call cut. You know, and I would, but both of us would be, would be pestering the actors and so on. I mean, I remember one time,

the Marley Shelton, lovely Marley Shelton, who played a character named Shelley, who was a barmaid in Sin City. she got direction from me, then from Rodriguez, and then from me again. And there she was dressed in that very reviewing barmaid outfit, holding a tray of drinks. And she just pirouetted and said, there's two of them. So it was, it was, we really didn't have hard and fast rules about who was making what decision. We agreed so often.

And when we had different ideas, we'd just sit down and discuss them. There were no great disagreements about this is working, this isn't working. No, sometimes we shoot something two ways. Robert had the final say because he was the editor. A couple more before you go. You write in your book about The Odyssey. Yes. And we're just a few days away from seeing Christopher Nolan's movie.

Right, great. Movie. Why does the Odyssey still resonate as a story? Oh, because it's one of the original. great tales. They've achieved so many things it wants. It's a defining heroic, you know, chronicle. It spins out endless worlds of wonder and mythology. It has its own kind of, it has its own kind of ulterior motive in that if you read the Odyssey

you realize that Homer is actually giving you a map of the world that hadn't really been given out before that everything in the Odyssey all these Wonderlands are actual his stylizations of real places and all of these mystical characters are

cartoons of real qualities and real and real and real aspects of human nature so my challenge to Christopher no one was, it would be this it's like I wish him well on what he's doing he says it's a big task

but he's got to do something that will top oh brother where art thou That's an interesting way to put it. That's an awfully good version of the Odyssey. It is. It is. It's a high benchmark in its way.

Yeah. In your book, Ronan, there's a sentient AI character. Yes. AI now is being used by people to write and to draw. Yeah, yeah. What are your feelings about the way people are using AI today? Oh, I think it's a bit of stack. The worry over it.

No, the, no, the, the, uh, the deification of it. I think we're looking at a huge technological creation. But to think that it is a replay of it for the human mind, and to think that one can actually, that the human mind can actually conceive of something more complex.

complicated in itself is a bit ridiculous to me. Also, I've got to say that a lot of the overblown claims about AI smack too much of religion to me. So I like to say that AI is a false god. Smack of religion, how? Penicia. This will fix the medical thing. things we need to be fixed, it will help humanity.

This can write better than a human. This can draw better than human. This can heal better than the doctor. It's like we're having a wet dream about our own irrelevance. No, no, our own, our own, what's the word? Obsolescence. George Lucas is quoted on the cover of your book calling you the Michelangelo of our What have your interactions been like with George Lucas?

We've talked once, and it was just really wonderful and pleasant. And it was, he was, you know, he's like, it's like, it's like talking to a guru. I mean, and, you know, he, and, you know, it was so appropriate, he was a face on a screen. And, you know, it's, but, but, and, and, and, and, and it's, and I think. And I think that it's, I feel that, that as someone who has definitely followed his work, that any, any, you know, praise he had for me, it was, you know, it was a profound meaning because, because as a myth maker, you, you'll, you know, you sort of take great pleasure in any kind words you, get from the most successful myth maker of our age.

It's fun to read you writing about Calvin and Hobbs. What do you admire about Calvin and Hobbs? Reaching everything. The writing is superb. It's deceptive in its simplicity and in its acuity. The drawing is so delicious that it does. because it does 90% of the writing's job. And the entire strip crawls inside the head

of an imaginative little boy and his pet stuffed tiger and it gives you the reader an endless adventure of what's actually going on in a child's mind. I think that it's the apotheosis of the American cartoon stream. Finally, we love to talk about bookstores on this podcast. Bookstores that we love a lot.

You were here in New York for the birth of Forbidden Planet. I sure was. In 1981, tell me what was that like to walk into a store like Forbidden Planet? That was the coolest. It was celebrated by my colleagues and I. I was sharing studio space with Howard Chacon and Walter Simonton at the time in Midtown Manhattan, and we made regular visits to Forbidden Planet and were exposed to the comics of Europe and Asia. Some of them had trickled over through other sources, but this was the grand explosion of them.

And each of us fastened on different artists. I was the one most obsessed with the Asian stuff, you know, as is evident in my samurai work. Whereas you could see, Walter was devouring the works of Sergio Tope and others. And I was also, I also was just, just, just I couldn't get enough of Yuga Pratt, so many others. And there was Erge, the French master, who created the what's called the Lanclair

or Line Clear School of Artwork, which didn't use much in the way of black, but just did a single thin line to delineate everything. it was transformative and it had an immediate effect on a chunk of serious comic book artists who were looking to really expand what's going on.

This stuff was either hard to get or impossible to get in all of a sudden it's in one store in New York City. Yeah. And you could just wander in and graze and buy stuff. That's fantastic. All right, when you hear this podcast, Frank Miller's new book

Push the Wall will be available in Find Books stores and also probably lousy bookstores as well. Frank, it's a real pleasure. Thanks for coming on the press box. Thank you, sir. Really appreciate. All right, it's time for David Shoemaker guesses the strained pun headline. Yeah.

Last Tuesday's headline about the Cubs beating the Brewers was the taming of the crew. Today's headline comes to us from alert listener Joseph Brinkert. It's from the Denver Post. Dion Sanders, David. the head coach of the University of Colorado Buffaloes

is upbeat about this year's football team he's upbeat about this year's football team I don't think you need much more than that what was the Denver Post's Strainpun headline God, why is it a primetime reference? Yeah we got to go with his nickname there Prime time well he was primetime when he was a player now it's a little simpler he is coach

Oh Coach Prime sorry coach So Prime is what we're playing with. He is upbeat about those Buffaloes. I feel like we're going to have a good season. I'm very, very, very excited. I'm going to the alphabet here. These are looking up.

I choose to be positive. Therefore, I am an... Oh, I got the word. I just cannot think of the word. I am a... I am an... I'm not a pessimist. I am an optimist.

Oh, Optimist Prime. Oh. Optimist. Oh, I thought I was coming up with a prime rhyme. Okay, there we go. Optimus Prime is fantastic work. Optimus Prime. He is David Shoemaker.

I'm Brian Curtis. Pretty Sylvetic! By Isaiah Blakely and John Jones. Thank you, gentlemen. Coming up next week, more New York month. I'm going to have another special guest in the Pressbox studio in New York. Joel's here on Thursday. Please follow us at PressBox Ringer on Instagram.

You'll see some original videos from me. You'll see clips from the show. Treasures from the Curtis Magazine archives. I just posted a review, David, that Michael Crichton wrote of Slaughterhouse Five in 1969 two weeks before Crichton published the Andromeda String. Oh, wow. And see the cover of the magazine and the review itself on our Instagram page. Plus, we have upcoming books, old books you should read much more.

If you need a write us, pressbox ringer at gmail.com. David, let's put together our lukewarm takes, and I'll see you back here Tuesday with more, you know, lukewarm mixed media. See that. See you later, Brian. Thank you.