The Tim Ferriss Show - #831: Frank Miller, Comic Book Legend — Creative Process, The Dark Knight Returns, Sin City, 300, and Much More

Episode Date: October 20, 2025

Frank Miller is regarded as one of the most influential and awarded creators. He began his career in comics in the late 1970s, first gaining notoriety as the artist, and later writer, of Daredevil for Marvel Comics. Next, came the science-fiction samurai drama Ronin, followed by the groundbreaking Batman: The Dark Knight Returns and Batman: Year One with artist David Mazzuchelli. Following these seminal works, Miller fulfilled a lifelong dream by doing an all-out crime series, Sin City, which spawned two blockbuster films that he co-directed with Robert Rodriguez. Miller’s multi-award-winning graphic novel 300 was also adapted into a highly successful film by Zack Snyder. His upcoming memoir, Push the Wall: My Life, Writing, Drawing, and the Art of Storytelling, is now available for pre-order.This episode is brought to you by: Eight Sleep Pod Cover 5 sleeping solution for dynamic cooling and heating: EightSleep.com/Tim (use code TIM to get $350 off your very own Pod 5 Ultra.)Shopify global commerce platform, providing tools to start, grow, market, and manage a retail business: https://shopify.com/tim (one-dollar-per-month trial period)AG1 all-in-one nutritional supplement: DrinkAG1.com/Tim (1-year supply of Vitamin D (and 5 free AG1 travel packs) with your first subscription purchase.)Timestamps:[00:00:00] Start.[00:02:14] Aristotle’s definition of happiness: Devotion to excellence.[00:03:02] Tools of the trade: Blackwing pencils, India ink, liquid frisket.[00:04:45] Sin City‘s physical creation at “twice up” size.[00:08:06] The toothbrush spatter technique.[00:09:24] Channeling impatience, anger, and violence into dramatic creative work.[00:10:33] What Jack Kirby knew about making comics competitive with cinema’s spectacle.[00:11:56] Will Eisner and The Spirit‘s influence on the US market where writer-artist duality is rare.[00:13:33] How Jack Kirby blasted apart the panel grid (and a young Frank’s mind).[00:15:49] Push the wall and defy the code.[00:19:54] The ruthless mentorship of Neal Adams.[00:24:57] The genesis of the Elektra amd Daredevil “soap opera.”[00:27:56] Story structure: Start late, end early.[00:29:10] Trusting the muse over rigid methodology.[00:31:15] European invasion: Moebius and Forbidden Planet.[00:32:52] Japanese influence: Lone Wolf and Cub‘s impact.[00:34:30] Cultural differences in depicting violence and motion.[00:36:38] Ronin: Shameless imitation and rebirth.[00:37:28] How does Frank know if something is working (or not working)?[00:39:27] The critical reception of Ronin as a “broken nose.”[00:42:37] The ruthless structure of The Dark Knight Returns.[00:43:40] Mutual elevation with “smartest fan” Alan Moore.[00:48:26] Robert Rodriguez: Angel of goodwill and generosity.[00:49:28] Sin City film: Co-directing and the Director’s Guild sacrifice.[00:50:31] Working as a “two-headed beast” with Rodriguez.[00:55:27] Favorite films.[00:58:19] Books and ancient history inspiring 300.[00:59:00] Hollywood lessons: The importance of working with the right people.[01:01:13] The partnership and guidance of Silenn Thomas.[01:02:01] The clarity and creative rejuvenation of getting sober from alcohol.[01:04:48] Advice for aspiring comic artists: Story, story, story.[01:06:20] Learning to draw: Bridgman and Loomis books.[01:08:07] Perspective as a mathematical trick and lie.[01:11:00] Dick Giordano’s advice: Lay in blacks first.[01:13:52] Sin City workflow innovation: Batch processing stages.[01:15:48] Dark Horse Comics and creative freedom.[01:17:29] Economy of line work and elegant minimalism.[01:20:46] On collaborating with Bill Sienkiewicz on Elektra.[01:25:20] Billboard wisdom: “Ask every question,” and “Why?”[01:27:08] Challenging pathological conformity.[01:27:39] Parting thoughts and where to find Frank’s work.*For show notes and past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show, please visit tim.blog/podcast.For deals from sponsors of The Tim Ferriss Show, please visit tim.blog/podcast-sponsorsSign up for Tim’s email newsletter (5-Bullet Friday) at tim.blog/friday.For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts.Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books.Follow Tim:Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferrissYouTube: youtube.com/timferrissFacebook: facebook.com/timferriss LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/timferrissSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferriss show where it is my job to deconstruct world-class performers across all different disciplines. And my guest today is in a sense my lifetime, a lifetime in the making, since I've been a fan since I was a wee lad, and certainly many, many months in the making to do this in person with the one and only Frank Miller. Frank Miller is one of the most influential and awarded creators in entertainment, first gaining notoriety in the late 70s for his transformative. work on Marvel's Daredevil. And in the world of comic books, Frank is a rare breed. He's kind of like Bo Jackson in that sense. Not only was he one of his generations, probably across multiple generations, one of the most influential artists in that entire industry, but one of the most influential writers. And that is a very, very, very uncommon combination of talents, particularly in the West. And I'll provide more context. After Daredevil, he went on to create some of the industry's most groundbreaking titles, including Ronan, Batman, the Darknet Returns, and Batman Year 1. So if you've seen the later Batman movies, that sort of anti-hero positioning,

the imagery, a lot of it comes straight from his work. His series Sin City and the award-winning graphic novel 300 were both adapted into blockbuster films with Miller co-directing the Sin City movies with Robert Rodriguez, who is my friend here in Austin, has been on the podcast before. Frank's upcoming memoir, Push the Wall, My Life, Writing, Drawing, and the Art of Story storytelling is now available for pre-order. You can find all things Frank at Frank Miller, Inc.com, and on Instagram at Frank Miller official. And without further ado, please enjoy a long-awaited for me and wide-ranging practical conversation with the one and only Frank Miller. At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking.

Can I answer your personal question? Now I would have seen an appropriate time. What if I did the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal and those gallery. Me too, Ferris show. Frank, so nice to see you. Good to see you. And just got off the phone with our mutual friend, Robert Rodriguez.

I'm sure that name is going to come up again. I heard of him. I'm sure that's going to come up again. And before we even get close to Robert, thank you, Robert, for the introduction, I want to pick up on something we were chatting about briefly before we started recording. And this is Aristotle. Yes. All right. Why did Aristotle come into the conversation?

Aristotle's definition of happiness was a devotion of all of one's energies along lines of excellence. I believe that that is a general application that, you know, in an ideal life would apply that every moment. where you have. But it is a guiding principle to a creative life. Let's then take maybe some of my props that we have here. And I'm going to go to my phone because I was reading an early copy. I've pushed the wall, my life writing, drawing in the art of storytelling. And I took a lot of highlights. And I had to take photographs of the PDF of my Kindle to look at some of them. And I wanted to go through a little list. This might seem strange. but I tend to obsess on the specifics.

These are some of the tools of your trade. Blackwing, graphite pencils, white paint, India black ink, liquid frisket, erasers and sable brushes. And then it goes through description of a lot more. Windsor and Newton Series 7, mostly sizes 3 to 12, et cetera. A few questions that I want to ask about,

including the toothbrush, my trusty spattermaker. What is liquid frisket? Liquid frisket is essentially glue. Okay. It was first called that and used by oil painters to create highlights. What the painter would do,

we would lay down strokes of this glue across the paint, then paint across it. And then before declaring the painting finished, He or she would then wipe up frisk it and you would have this sparkling piece of the underpainting showing through. And so it creates a very dramatic highlight. I like to use it with ink because it creates an element of chaos. An element of chaos. So you seem to be a sense someone who thrives in chaos or by creating certain types of chaos.

and this monster that I'm holding, for those who are listening and not watching, I'm holding something in my lap that feels like it's 20 to 35 pounds. I was carrying it around, walking through New York City, getting a lot of odd looks because it's a rectangle about the size of an x-ray plate you would use to take an x-ray of both lungs. It's gigantic. Then this is Frank Miller's Sin City, the Hard Goodbye. And I want to just open this up, and I'm going to read something from right inside. This is from Jim Lee, another legend in the space, another hero of mine. For another time, I used to have his job at the same college as graphic editor of the Princeton Tiger.

Found some old sketches of his in one of the desks, in fact. But here's this quote, even after 25 years, Frank Miller's Sin City, the Hard Goodbye, showcases the full potential of the comics medium. A stark, brilliant Chiaroscuro, it remains a defiantly timeless, handcrafted, love letter to the days of old and an increasingly slick and digital world. And I segued from the tools because when I look at some of these pages and I'll provide some of these as B-roll and so on, you know, looking at something like this, I'll just show that to the, I mean, it is a masterpiece.

I mean, any one of these could be on a wall by itself, but this is sequential storytelling. And I have many questions, but one of them is about kind of aliveness and that channeling all of your energies into excellence, because I think this came up in the documentary about you as well, American Genius, that you kind of attack the page. there seems to be a real kinetic channeling of energy into the page which you can see in this particular version, the curator's collection. What did it feel like when you were making this that I'm holding? Very physical.

Very physical. Sin City was a real breakthrough that way because it was the first time I decided to work so damn big. The book you're holding is the actual size of the page as I did. So what is the size? It's called twice up. It's four times the size. of the published... I mean, that is...

It covers my entire body on video. Only about a half of it. But that is the size that comic books were originally drawn back in the 1940s. And over time,

in order to pick up the speed of production and just lower the price of making comics, they made them smaller and smaller and smaller until finally they decided they ought to fit

into an 11 by 17 photocopier and made the the page. is very, very tiny to work on, which was about the time I came in. And when I discovered these old originals from the 40s, I went, that's why they looked so damn good. And I decided within city I was going to correct the error. That's amazing.

And toothbrush, I mentioned this at the end of your list, how do you use the toothbrush? because I feel like this, at least in my mind, is one of the hallmark signatures in the minds of many. Some Frank Miller artwork is this particular element. So how do you use the toothbrush? What I do is a lid of a bottle of India ink has a little squirter thing on it.

And I squirt some of that onto the bristles of a toothbrush. When I thought about it's a toothbrush, and it splatters across an effect that could be, texture on a wall texture in the sky splirting blood whatever you choose to make you're just kind of dragging

your thumb across the wristles as you as a child would what I love is that it gives you that lovely element of chaos across a picture across time I would combine

or replace that with simply snapping a brush across my wrist which would create more of an along gated, stretchy. Sort of a slash. It creates, again, something that's unpredictable, but very organic. That's just playing with the materials.

What was your motto, this is from the book as well, your senior year of high school, but I think it was. Get the hell out of my way. Get the hell out of my way. I was impatient to leave school and get to work. Yeah, well, I mean, I don't know if the impatience ended there. So I say that as someone who's also very impatient. It has pros and cons.

And I'm wondering, like, the visceral violence that is channeled into creating, say, what we see on the page in Sin City, the kinetic aspect of it is so palpable. How do you relate to anger, using it the right dose, if there is a right dose, channeling it versus being controlled by it? How do you think about that fire maybe is a better way to put it within? No, no, no, no. I mean, anger is a good word, too. It's an important and powerful component, drama. Drama is essentially conflict. If you go all the way back to, like, the Norse myths and the,

but you can take it all the way from the Norse myths through to, like, terms of endearment or whatever else, those are all full of storm and drunk. And comics are a purely visual medium and also a not very, on the face of it powerful did no way a comic book compete with the sheer spectacular firepower of cinema that is that you do a cinema completely involves so many of your senses and it involves images that are perceptibly real and real people expressing these emotions at you and then when they want to do spectacle

they started proving it way back with D.W. Griffith and sealed the deal with Star Wars nobody can touch them and they can outdo anything in stage in any other form so comics had to come out

with like little Jack Kirby swinging and just showing okay you know we can't really do that so we're going to go even more crazy. And, you know, he made up characters who could eat planets. And in the case of what I've put it after with my comics,

is to have the drawing itself be so emotional and extreme. I'm trying to make it out-act an actor. Well, what I love about your comics, first of all, I should just point out to people that don't know anything about this world. you seem to me to be an outlier on a number of different levels, one of which is that you're very well known for your art and you are very well known for your writing. How common is that in the U.S. comic world?

In Japan, it's a little more typical, but in the U.S., where would you? More common than it used to be. Because it used to be almost not allowed. There were a few exceptions. There was Will Eisner, for instance, who was really outstanding in that he clearly ran the whole show. For people who have no context whatsoever, why is Eisner such an important figure? I mean, he's one of the founding fathers, for one thing.

Because he could do the entire thing. Other people could as well, but he decided to keep doing the entire thing rather than just becoming part of a factory. Of course, he ran his own factory, but that's a whole other story. But ultimately, he settled on doing his one series, The Spirit, which was known as the Wheel Eiseners of the Spirit. And even though he employed other people along the way, he always ran the show and supervised it completely. And as he got older, he started doing work that he did inch, top to bottom, by himself.

That was a much more personal nature, where he once again turned comics in. new direction. Let's explore other figures who have helped showcase the potential of this medium through innovating because I love this terrain because people listening may not be comic lovers, but there's some medium that they're fascinated by. And whether it's in the realm of fiction and, let's just say novels, whether it's in film, whether it's in comics, there are things that we might take for granted now that were not at all obvious a decade or two ago. And it seems like a good time to maybe talk about Jack Kirby and how he impacted the world

of comics. And correct me if I'm wrong, but I was reading, and this is straight from your book, that for long-time comics were set panels in a sense, right? And you kind of filled in the blanks to the extent that artists would sometimes get pre, I don't want to say cut, but sort of outlined pages within which to place there are There were a lot of various ways they were restricted. I mean, it's in various ways. A lot of this happened before I was around, so I don't know.

But I think the reason you bring Kirby up in this respect was he was a guy who came in when comics all had either a nine-panel grid or a six-panel grid, there were all the panels with the same page. And more than anybody, he blasted that to pieces.

He was like our DW Griffith. He just, you know, ripped the camera off the floor, and all of a sudden he would use two pages for a single image. For a kid like me, it was mind-expanding. It was, I was, you know,

this one guy just kept coming back decade decade decade I mean he started way before I was born I mean he served in World War II with my parents not side by side but you know he had several comebacks and each time he seemed to reinvent the whole McGillah you have seems like a few different guiding phrases we have one of course from the book title itself push the wall another one that comes to mind is defy the code can you expand on both of these please why these two

pushing the wall or pushing the walls is just colleagues have always been this strangely schizophrenic field where on the one hand you have artists

cartoonish writers are such people who want to explore and try new things. The nature of these fantasies is exploratory, but the business has always been very conservative, and the people who grew up on comics became themselves, very tradition-bound. They would fret over things like what we call continuity, worrying about if you're working on Issue number 385 of a Spider-Man, you can contradict something that was done in issue 14, which is on the face of it absurd,

because the character would be 85 of it, give it around that long. And so you had this hidebound on one side, and this is this like enthusiastic experimental field on the other. And I've always just wanted to pose more toward people looking for a future and for trying on new stuff. just a quick thanks to our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show not to be a salty old dog but in the early 2000s back in the day when i was running my own e-commerce business the tools were

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One more time, 8Sleep.com slash Tim. how did you and we're going to jump around chronologically of course but let me see if i can find this particular paragraph from your book relates to a name that you all recognize and that is uh neil adams so neil was a hard taskmaster utterly ruthless in his criticism he was a godsend i just want to read another paragraph we'll get into the the description of who this is, but you cold called his office. Is that right? Yes. Okay, cold called his office. This is when no one knows who you are. And then ultimately, I think it was his daughter who answered the phone. She says, this is, dad, we got another one. Yeah. Somehow you ended up in the office.

You show him your work. And then, and I'll quote here, he told me just how awful my stuff was and didn't bother with using any sugar coating either. Where did you say you were from? Vermont. Go back to Vermont. Pumped gas. Get married. You're no good and you never will be. End quote. I gulped. This is referring to you. And then asked, can I fix it and show you again tomorrow? To which Neil responds, yeah, I'll see you tomorrow. He growled. Okay. Who is Neil and why did you reach out to? Oh, that's Neil Adams. Yeah, who is he? He was the outstanding artist of, he was in a way, a one man generation. Because there was a long period where nobody entered the comics business because it didn't pay well.

And believe me, the common wisdom would be out of business soon. We'd just been through the horrors of the comics code and the public humiliation and the self-censorship of that time. Been disgraced going from a mass medium and being turned into just a punchline, you know, a dirty punchline. And there were just a few people keeping the light alive and still doing these old titles, like The Flash and so on. But the books were looking pretty crummy.

But there were these glimmers. There were these guys. Some of the old guys just stayed there and kept doing great stuff of an artist named Gil Cain, for instance. But there was Neil Adams. He was this new guy who came in young and brought such enthusiasm, an all new look. It had a whole new take me see. seriously look. It was much more, you know, a much more realistic look. And he dragged a whole generation with him in a lot of ways, not just with his work. He did it with his speech

and with his actions. He opened up a studio in Manhattan called Continuity, which did advertising work, and essentially became a halfway house for comic book artists. to come in and get his training in, where he became the guru of this place. When I called up, I looked up his number in the phone book, as you said, spoke to his daughter, got to see him that day, and started hanging out there.

And I started living on little advertising jobs. Sometimes I'd just color them, and then eventually I'd get to draw them and so on. And then he'd lined up my first comic book work. And I was hardly the only one. So I'm so fascinated by this exchange and his willingness to help for a few different reasons, right? Number one is, I wonder, how did this guy muster the bandwidth to do his own work, run a business, and also mentor, just that question alone? And then I also think about the sliding door moment of what if he had just had a really,

bad day, and he was like, you're not coming back tomorrow, kids. Sorry, what a different life. Sorry, I'm sorry, I got to build my own horn. Yeah, play your own horn. I was a pretty determined little bastards. So, you know, I would have been back anyway. You would have been back anyway? Yeah. I had banged on many doors before this. Well, okay, so this was actually going to be my next question, which was like, why do you think he agreed to let you come back? He was like, go pump gas, go back to Vermont. And then you're like, let me fix it and come back to. And he's like, oh, okay, fine. Actually, no, it was because I asserted that I wanted to.

Okay, got it. Because I didn't cry and leave. How many interactions like that? How many different visits showing him work did it take for him to finally say that your work was not for throwing away? I wasn't all that many, I don't think. And, you know, then did I work on short little jobs for Gold Key comics? that was an old publisher a long time ago and so on, where they would hire you for a three-page job

where you got $25 a page, that kind of thing. That was what they called paying your dues. Yeah. We're going to hop around a little bit. But, I mean, people need to read the book. They need to see the doc. But I know a lot of people have covered certain aspects of your bio.

You first gained notoriety in the late 70s for your transformative work on Daredevil, right? now i also this is pulling from the book read a bit and this is i'm putting a character you'll have to explain but electra in kind of brackets because i'm inserting that but now i'm quoting you was the true genesis of my career in comic books could you speak to that chapter of your life that involved electra and what the significance of that was oh i think that was because i i didn't come in as the writer on there i just simply came in He was an artist for hire and realized fairly early on that this was no way to do it

because the pictures and the words are one thing. I mean, the words were obvious once I drew the pictures and I very quickly took plotting the stories and so on. I felt that Daredevil needed a counterpoint, a femme fatale, and I came up with Electro, but I realized I was going to hold her back until I was ready to. to book myself, and I'd get it that way. I suppose what I'm trying to unpack is, and maybe I'm overstating the importance,

but was that sort of introduction of Electra an important inflection point for you in some way? Yeah. In what way was it important? Well, if you look at those old comics, that's when, in a way, I started understanding what a Marvel comic was. And Marvel comic isn't a story.

every month. A Marvel comic is an ongoing sub-operate that you're following. And as soon as, you know, with my first issue that I wrote, it was called Electra, and it was all about them. From then on, the whole thing becomes one sprawling. I mean, sprawling in both good and bad ways. It's sort of epic where characters come and characters go, but it's focused around a really small cast. You know, there's a diabolical kingpin who runs all the gangs. There's the deadly enemy bullseye, neither of whom I made up. And there's, you know, charitable and Electra. And all of this is like a tortured romance that the hero is in love with a psychotic assassins.

So it's his boundary, I have trouble. Bound to have some tears involved at some point. It was very adolescent. It came from a very atlust and state of mind. But I'm very proud of it. I mean, I loved Electra. He was really inspired. I have a lot of comics with Elektra at my childhood home on Long Island to this day,

polybagged with backing in the whole line. Whenever I'm asked to draw her or anything, it's just great, you know. So for folks who don't have any familiarity, and also because I want to better understand it, I mean, there are different approaches to making a comic and also crafting a story, right? And so I want to pull up something that I have. have here and it's going to take me a second to read but i'd love you to walk people through this after i read at least some of it all right everything starts with and proceeds from story some simple story rules number one start your story as late into the action as possible and it is early

into the action as possible to get your hero into trouble fast that or give the hero a pressing problem to solve i work on the spine of the story that's a phrase that i'd love for you to define work on the spine of the story and figure out how it starts and ends and then roughly plot the in-between. And I'll just read one more sentence and then I'll let you kind of fill. To do this, I make notes and create scenes

that will advance the storyline but allow room for digressions and narrative side streets. And then you talk about preliminary sketches and so on. Can you expand on this and just maybe give an example of how you would do that,

whether it's with a book like Sin City or any other that comes to mind? How I do what? How you actually start from step one in creating a story and then proceed through that. It seems like also in the introduction that having a very good idea of where your story ends is a critical piece of that. I knew at the beginning of Sin City that Marvel would die. For instance, it's very important.

Of course, when I started dark and I thought Batman was going to die. It didn't work out, though. Yeah. My methodology has changed over time. It used to be as rigid as, you know, more rigid than what you just read. I mean, I used to really believe there was a way. I was seeking the way to do it. Now I do believe in letting a story nudge me in another direction.

I believe in trusting them used more than I used to. How does that show up then in practice? Do you have, you know, the starting. point, you know, the end of the story, you have characters in a situation, do you draw your way through and then figure out kind of the narrative arc? What is the proper blend for you now of structure and serendipity? Commenting yourself as being the generator of the story shortly and saying that these are the pieces of clay and this is what I want to do with them, but to realize that the artistic

process is not at its best when it's an ecominical process. and sometimes the characters talk back and sometimes they know more than you do and always be aware that there will be that just that flash, that thing that happens where all of a sudden you're in a different story and you realize this is the one. No, this isn't the one I was looking for,

but this is where I want to be. I don't know. To me, it's sort of like being a space explorer and being ready for things and knowing that the whole job is really, you know, he's trying to figure out what to ignore and what to follow. I like the mystery of storytelling

more than the power I used to see in it. Well, let's talk about picking and choosing and specifically would love to hear. I lived in Japan as an exchange student and learned to

read and speak Japanese largely from reading comic books. So, Zareal Comey must keep you busy. I mean, I was busy reading all sorts of comic books with my little electronic dictionary. I would love to read Kuzorioka in Japanese. Oh, yeah. It's a different experience, of course. How did you first get exposed to, for instance, Mobius, Otomo, any others you want to mention? How did you get exposed to those influences and who were or who are

the? The two main invasions, well, three. There's three, actually. The first was the English because DC Comics started publishing Brian Balland and Mike McMahon and all the rest. But they were the easiest for everybody to see because they were all American comics fans. And they, you know, the language was the same and everything. It started getting a lot wilder when Forbidden Planet comics opened. In New York. In a Forbidden Planet. Yeah.

And when Marvel started publishing Mobius, then the floodgates, open because it was Europe, just knocked everybody's socks off. It was Mobius, Mobius, Mobius, Mobius, Mobius, Mobius. But there are the other guys, too, that nobody was paying attention to. Mobius obviously was a tidal wave that swept through culture. It is a film cinema and so on. And for me, the other event was I had a girlfriend. Her father was a businessman who did a lot of businessmen.

who did a lot of business in Japan. And she tossed me a, like, phone book that was a Japanese comic, and it was Kozoriyoka. And I opened it and studied it and fell in. And like Ronan was born that day. My storytelling style changed everything. And, you know, from that, I helped bring the title over and helped with the Asian invasion. Seeing it all become so much more international, it's just been fascinating. And with the Asian stuff, you've got just a completely different sense of time and space.

It is the dead opposite of the European. When was Mobius sort of at his peak of influence? What would have been the timing roughly on that? I couldn't name the exact date. Certainly, he's up there with Jack Kirby in terms of being one of those people who, it's like if you're listening Beethoven and Mueller and all that. I'm trying to figure out if the timing is such, because I've looked at tons, of Mobius' artwork

that Mobius could have... When did? Alien come out. When did? Alien. Oh, alien. Good question. I mean, it would have been post-Star Wars. I was just trying to think,

because, like, Mobius also a lot of his artwork makes me think of, like, Tatween and some of these things in Star Wars. I'm wondering what the directionality is. Well, Mobius' Zint was a Star was huge. Yeah, okay, great. That's what I was trying to answer for myself because it seems so obvious

when you look at it. And to come back to the Japanese, A comic book that I use, it's not a well-known title, certainly outside of Japan, even within Japan. A lot of Japanese people kind of scratch their head when I tell them. It's called Rokodenashi Blues, which is about high school gangs, which aren't really a thing, but they pretend like it is. And, you know, the bad kids wear different types of uniforms called Choran or like, anyway. But it's a hyper-violent.

There are a lot of fight scenes in this, which made it a little less intimidating for someone who couldn't yet really read Japanese, right? So my translating burden was lower with this comic, and the art was spectacular. What blew my mind, because I had read comics all the way through my childhood up to that point, and I was 15 when I got to Japan, like you said, it was how time and space and speed and motion were depicted so differently. And how they captured, say, the swing of a leg or created the effect of blur was so captivating to me. It was unlike anything I had seen. One of the things I've got to say is that amazes me about the manga stuff is that they could draw people relax so well that so much of the drawing and lone wolf and cub people aren't blazing around and stuff. And even in combat, what they're capturing is the fluidity and grace of the movement. I mean, it's the opposite of Kirby, where everything is angles and force.

And so it's a very Asian violence. And in Europe, you'll often see a very elegant. Mobius's violence, when he went really violent, it would be jarring and horrible. But it would still be gorgeous. And it would still be, the wrist would be. cooked just that much, you know, as it slammed into the person's face and so on. And it's just the difference of cultures reflected in every aspect of cartooning is fascinating. How did the European and Japanese styles that would incorporate lone wolf and cub influence then

how your approach changed after that? I was very young. I was in my 20s. And so I sat down and I did a book that imitated them shamelessly in Ronan. I did Kojima with the samurai scenes. I mean Mobius with the science fiction scenes. Now I discovered Augie B. Law and did him all over the place. What was that experience like for you in doing that? Did you find it energizing?

Oh, it was great. It was like any transition that big is a rebirth. All right, I'm going to ask you a lot more about Ronan, which I have in my suitcase back at my hotel. But before we get there, I want to talk about, because I believe I saw this in the book as well, like, effectively, if you're boring yourself or if you're bored, you're going to bore your audience and, like, throw it out and start over. When do you know if something is working?

and I'll pull out an example of what seems like something that was working and what was the name of the colorist? Is it Glynnis? Is that how you say her name? Yeah, Glynness is Oliver Glynis Queen. Right, so during some of the work on Daredevil would call you up and say how excited she was

working on it. That seems like a signature of something working. Yeah. How do you tell if something is working or not working? What do you want to get out of bed and do it or not? Yeah. I mean, it's not really a problem I have had so long I can't remember. Yeah. So if you look back at what you've ended up being happiest with or less happy with with hindsight 2020, this doesn't necessarily mean audience response, right? Not talking about

market response. It's like intrinsic working for you. I suppose what I'm looking for is just any thoughts for folks who have trouble throwing things away because they just have a high default level of excitement. So they get wedded to something and they're like, I'm not going to throw this away. And they have trouble killing their darlings or murdering their darlings, right? Which is another line that you like. Yeah, I love that line. Maybe some example.

Way of backing into this would be, what are some examples of things that you have thrown out? How do you decide when it's time to cut your losses or get rid of something? It's like when it doesn't get me out of bad. It's that simple. It's that simple. All right. This is my primary function on Earth. If I'm not enjoying it, then there's no reason to do it.

Time to switch gears. Ronan seemed like such an all-in, bold adventure on a lot of levels. And I just, this is lesson six in your book, The Dark Night Comeeth, smash expectations, but here's where it starts. And there's a quote from Rudyard Kipling from If, which is if you can meet triumphant disaster and treat those two impostors just the same. Now, here's the first part

that I wanted to quote and I won't do the whole thing, but there's nothing like a broken nose to clarify the mind. As a creative experience, Ronan was a fascinating, exhilarating exploration, and it goes on.

So why was Ronan a broken nose? Because I got, I got excoriated for it. A guy had an angry audience, you know, people who wanted to be like a daredevil. Yeah, they wanted the same from you. Yeah. And after initial high sales, they dropped, and it was not the reception D.C. wanted. They were like, you know, playing funeral music, and it would go on.

And I had nothing but a run of successes before. How did you feel after that? I mean, I'm not comparing my books to anything you've done. These are iconic pieces of work that you've produced. But I remember having my first two books succeed, expectations for the third, sky high, initially does really well. And then, for whatever reason, just doesn't meet expectations. And I took it so incredibly personal. I had a really hard time with it.

And I'm just wondering. End of the world. Yeah, what was it like for you? End of the world. End of the world. Yeah. Oh, yeah. How long did it feel like the end of the world?

I don't know. It was a while. But the thing is that it was useful because I started examining it and said, what didn't work? You know, you didn't connect. It's like you did something. It made me go, okay, let's go for broke and put something together and, you know, develop the theories, do something that will work. And I ended up doing the most structured, ruthlessly structured thing I've ever done my life. dark night and which is you know i mean it's so structured it's ridiculous it breaks into

16 page increments across you know four 48 page books and and each one has a three-act structure so it's a four-act structure with three three-act structures it's basically it's a trilogy and was that that was a conclusion or a direction you chose after and analyzing Ronan or some of the reasons why didn't Ronan work what do you think are some of the reasons it didn't work I think that it drifted into surrealism and it was also it was a fantasy and it was out of its time you without question you lick your wounds it's the end of the world for a little while but then you do a post-mortem and and you come out of it better your job and you come out of it and then moving into the Dark Night Returns, how are you thinking about getting back

in the ring and working with this? You mentioned the structure as one aspect of it. Anything else that was important for you to keep in mind personally as you moved into working on that particular project? I was into it. The complexity of it was something I had never attempted before there's so many goddamn characters in that thing and they're all moving in 18 directions it once it's a i did once i was into it i was into it i wasn't thinking about ronan or anything else i mean it's a hell of a all-consuming scope right so it's like you have to keep your hand on the wheel and pay attention yeah am i getting the timeline right that you were working on the Dark Night returns at the same time that Alan Moore is working on Watchmen, or am I getting

that timeline off? It was a little before, but they overlapped. They overlapped. Yeah, they overlapped. I think they started affecting each other in a subtle way. In what types of ways? I don't know exactly. It's like, because Alan and I knew each other.

We met while we were doing those two books. I had launched Dark Night, and he was boiling over with Watchmen. and his British stuff all over the place and it was all part of this whole I don't know what you can call what we did as a superhero but it was reconstruction

deconstruction, you know, whatever it was and so his approach seemed more to really go at the underbelly of it and mine was to reconstitute in an uglier world to reconstitute the basic

gist of the hero. I know why this came to mind for me and to give credit again where credits do. Frank Miller, American Genius, Salan Thomas, sitting about 15 feet away. Glowling. Always making amazing things happening. Make an ugly face. She's behaving for the time being. But got some great footage from Alan who basically said he heard these murmurs about what you were working on and that it was amazing.

And he was like, oh, shit, basically. better really up my game. And the reason I wanted to bring this up is that I just find having at least some other player on the field who's really good forces you to improve. Oh, Alan made me so much better at so many things. Because when I came back to Daredevil, for instance, it was like, all of a sudden it was like, oh my God, I'm just writing. And there's Alan Moore out there now.

and all of a sudden I was just trying so much you know trying so hard to be a writer he also brought back horror

brought back horror yeah there hadn't been any horror in comics for generation what makes Alan interesting to you

just to take a sidebar on that okay he's the smartest fan the smartest fan

yeah what does that he inside all of that he is a guy who grew up on comics but he's just so damn smart that he's able to take the stuff of his child and joy

and to take it down into places that nobody's ever dreamt it going for and transform anything he's ever done, he's transformed utterly. I mean, the first time he sat down to write Swamp thing, he changed the entire precept of the character. That's something a lot of people miss. It had always been this guy who fell into the muck and got transformed into a swamp guy. In his very first issue of a swamp thing,

Alan transformed him into a collection of swamp weeds that used this human as a model to construct a new body for itself. There was no human in there at all anymore. And he did look like, first time it's bad. The first time I ever saw his name. It's just completely reinventing a character. Scared the crap out of me.

Yeah. He was something when you show. Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. Many of you know how deeply I love Japan and its culture of unwavering dedication to craft, refinement, commitment to continuous improvement. But why do I bring this all up? Well, the same focus on improving one thing over the span of years is found in today's sponsor, AG1. They are now unveiling AG1 next day. gen, the same single scoop, once a day product that I use myself, but now with more vitamins, more minerals, and five new clinically studied probiotic strains shown to support digestive and

immune health. AG1 is also NSF certified for sport, one of the most rigorous independent quality and safety certification programs in the supplement industry. So check them out. Subscribe today to try the next gen of AG1. Listeners will also get a free bottle of D3K2, an AG1 welcome kit, and five of the upgraded AG1 travel packs with your first order. So start your journey with AG1's next gen and experience the difference firsthand. Simply go to drinkag1.com slash Tim. That's drinkag1.com slash Tim. I promised I would bring back Robert at some point. And feel free. If there's anything you'd like to dive into that I'm bouncing around and not hitting, let me know. No, but you've described Robert as an angel of sorts.

Why is that? Robert Rodriguez. Well, for one thing is he's to be around him. You're around a man of constant goodwill and of generous energy. He's very generous. He, just a quick, sorry to drop, but people might find this funny. When I moved to Austin in 2017, the very first person I had over for dinner at my house, And I was very excited about it.

It was Robert, who I had known for a while. Vivided him over. He was on his way. And then I realized, wait a second, I have no plates and I have no silverware. So he brought over two plates from his house plus silverware, which I still have to this day. So that's Robert. That's Robert. He's like, keep the plates in the silverware.

I think you're going to need it next time. Oh, my God. So, Frank, you were mentioning Robert's generous spirit. And I wanted to underscore something that I only learned after watching the documentary, which is that Rodriguez, as I understand it, quit the Directors Guild so that you could receive co-director credit. I had no idea. That seems wild. I remember the day he did it. Yeah.

Well, can you describe what happened on that day? No, he just told me he just did it. He said, he said, they said you didn't have the, what was the? the word for it. It wasn't credentials. Somebody along those lines. He just grinned and said, so I quit because he didn't want anything to stand in the way of us

just moving head. He knew that I needed the authority on the set because they were his people. And everybody there, they were so loyal to him that he need to be able to bequeathed that to me to or things to really work the way both of us needed them to. what was it like working on that film with robert how did you divide or mesh your duties at one point

somebody in production made this ridiculous poster of the two of us as a two-headed beast because we were working right on top of each other the all time there was another point where we were shooting orders right past each other, although we were almost always saying the same thing. But there was one point where we weren't saying exactly the same thing. And there was Brittany Murphy in the middle of her. One of the actors. Yeah, and she, there she was as a scantily clad barmaid.

And she just tossed up her, I think she tossed her tray in the air and says, there's toe off of them. But generally it was just, it was just a dream. After a while, they tended to know which one to go to, for which kind of problem. The actors did.

Yeah, oh yeah. And so did production. So would they cut, what were those different types of problems? I'm so curious. Well, certainly anything to do, it's really the mechanics of making the movie.

It was Robert. Robert, right. you know um but when it came to the internal workings of the characters the motivations of the characters the histories that the the uh and you know or if they wanted to try something out i could really quickly tell them whether it was in character or not and then we would often just get together the two of us go over a bunch of stuff and there were any number of cases where robert would come to me and say i need a new shot here i need new scene i remember one time He said, I need something new here, Frank.

It's got to be quick. It's got to be cheap. It's got to be brilliant. And we just sat down with a sheet of paper. It was some of the fun I ever had. Working so damn fast. And knowing Robert, having spent a good amount of time with it, we both live in Austin, I can see both of you working together.

Yeah. It's very easy for me to see. Yeah, yeah. And I encourage people to listen to my, episodes I've done with Robert, start with the first one about his creative process in bio, but he used to draw comics, right? He drew comics. He's very unorthodox. He doesn't feel like he has to follow a fixed set of rules. And I don't know if he did this on set for Sin City, but he'll often have actors painting. He'll be playing guitar. Oh, no, that was so important,

yeah. He always wanted to keep the creative juices flowing. You know, there was one time when, when he rented out a hall in Austin Bruce Willis in his band play oh really yeah so there's Bruce Willis up there you know pounding it out like you're doing his springsteen you keep the creative juices flow yeah yeah and he really walks the talk and also I may be stating the obvious for people but when I look at say Sin City as you created it here it's so inherently cinematic and directorial in terms of angles, framing.

I've always felt that way, even looking at, say, storyboards, I'm like, okay, well, I mean, there's the, if not the same, certainly, I mean, but there's a lot that rhymes. And so when I'm looking at these innovations with, say, whether it's

back in the day with Jack Kirby, or looking at some of the Japanese influences and how they capture motion differently, it makes me think of innovation in film at the same time where you think of like a Kurosawa doing like a Roshamon and inserting multiple perspectives and you're like, okay, I mean, you're solving a lot of the same problems and exercising seemingly a lot of the same creative muscles. Yeah.

Well, and that's the way media works, though. It's the way art forms work. It's funny because it's like, you know, so many people strive so hard to act as if they work in a vacuum, and no one does. And the influences are constant and inexorable. That's kind of the beauty of the beast, really. I mean, occasionally this one piercing person will come through. But even Hitchcock came from somewhere.

You can even, you know, cut back to what he sprung from or Wells or whatever. And even those two were in pretty tight competition and did a lot of the same tricks. It's like, you know, it's all a big mishmush. Outside of the films you've been involved with, what are some of your favorite films, whether they are scripted, documentary, or otherwise? I'm a big fan of Old Blackmore. It's no secret, you know. But that's not just the all of film noir.

I can give you chapter in person, don't know what, but that's all over the book and everywhere else. Cajun I see an absolute masterpiece, like, Dane Mutiny comes to mind. I'm not familiar with it. What is the came mutiny? Game Mutiny is a World War II story featuring an absolutely brilliant Humphrey Bogart playing exactly the opposite of the kind of character you'd expect him to play. He plays an almost Richard Nixonian figure of a World War II destroyer, minesweeper, pilot, who is completely paranoid.

Fred McMurray plays a character you would never expect him to play. This is not my three sons. This is Frederick Murray is a very serious actor playing a military lawyer. And it's a study in paranoia on the high seas. What appeals to you about the movie, or do you just get swept on it? Is it that these actors are doing what seems diametrically opposed to what people associate them with? Is it something else? Well, I just love high drama.

And I often do love to see an actor like Bogart play a character who you don't. don't expect. Maltese falcon typecast him for the rest of his career. Before that, he played many, many roles, which were often shifting nasty little men. And he played a paranoid killer once in an adaptation, I believe, of a James Evan Kane novel. And, you know, I love to see the actors when they aren't trapped by the audience's expectations, the things that Robert Mitchon was capable of. He was pretty extraordinary. But also, I like to see

the movies that really were discovering what they could do. And we'll are finding them. If you look at grapes of wrath, that movie is hunting for what it is. But it's doing so in such a compelling way. It's going in such a aching way.

Henry Fonda is extraordinary in that movie. And also, I just like to get in the hands of a great director. That's why I do keep getting back to Hitchcock. I love falling back into one of his old movies. I get a lot watched Rebecca, I swear, every night. I've never seen it. So that's got to be on my...

Oh, it is so good. To watch this. And it is one most romantic movies you'll ever see. And it's occasionally very spooky. It's a date movie. Done. Thanks for doing my homework for me. What artists or art forms have,

influenced the work that you do outside of comics themselves? Well, movies, a lot. And lots of books I've read. Lots of books. What types of books? When I grew up, you make these spelling novels, and from that, all the other prime stuff. And somewhere along I, I fell in love with ancient history. And, you know, that's where I got 300 and all of that.

History is just, it's endless wealth. It's like everywhere you turn, there's more. more and more to get. It's very breathtaking. When I was a kid, I watched a lot of TV, but I don't know. Yeah. Let's come back to 300 and your other adventures in Hollywood. What have you learned, because I asked this selfishly, when I work on my stuff, I'm a control freak, complete control freak. And a lot of my friends are control freaks, and I've just seen a number of different train wrecks when Hollywood and the structures in Hollywood collide with a creative who has a story or something that they view as their baby. I've just seen a lot of messes and I'm

wondering what you have learned about working in entertainment or Hollywood. Oh, well, I've got one overriding thing. Okay. Which is just, I mean, more important than anything else is, you know, the right people. It's like when I've worked with the right people, The experiences have been wonderful. The results have been wonderful. How do you know for you who the right people are? Because there's so many slick folks in L.A. I know.

No offense to anyone in L.A. I know. But, man, do you get told what you want to hear? Uh-huh. And I'd love to know how you identify having spent some time in the trenches. I don't know, man. All I can tell you is that is that I've been exceedingly lucky once. I've been unspeakably lucky the other.

time. I was exceeding lucky with Zach Snyder, because in his case, he was taking control, he was going to do it, okay, and he did a brilliant job. In the case of Robert Rodriguez, that was heaven because it was a adventure for a life, as I said, a lifetime. When it's been more distant than that, it's been bye, bye, baby more. You know, it's been, that's been the same thing, that it just happens. But it's something I did like, you know, it's something that I did in a Marvel or you see comic that gets adapted,

that I end up seeing pieces of what I did mixed in with things that feel like that came out of a dirty airing movie mixed with things that came out of Scooby-Doo, and it all gets a little, you know, less exciting. Let's just say you created a masterpiece in the next 12 months that everyone in Hollywood's

fighting over. How do you make some of the important decisions about who to work with? Do you call Robert and you're like, hey, what do you think about these people? Do you call Zach Snyder and ask him the same question? The answer is right across the room. I mean, so Lynn Thomas runs my company and she really knows what she's doing. And before I really hear about anything, she already knows all these people and what they're doing and everything. I wouldn't even call it a hire. It's a partnership. Yeah. All roads lead to Slend.

She's bowing in the background. She's waving us away. I want to ask about alcohol. What is your relationship to alcohol? What is it done for or against you? Oh, that's, I wouldn't call it an easy question, but it's a simple enough one, especially the way you phrased it. Simple answer, or against me, a lot.

For me, nothing. Nothing. It's taking a long time to come to that conclusion. It's a big old aspect of my life. It's a genetic condition that I allow to get out of control. I would say I did use it to disinhibit me and probably worked very, very productively because of it and did stuff that was inspired and occasionally reckless. but the deleterious effects and the ways it's affected other parts of my life,

no, they had done me a goddamn bit of good. I was coerced to stop. I was, I was, Cilene and others decided I was going to die and arranged for me to be put in a place and watched. And, you know, the time had to pass. And, you know, medicine's given and that sort of thing. it takes well I will tell you this in all sincerity

this is not posturing a bit for either one of you I'm having a time of my life in that respect creatively it's just like now I'm going like okay now I can get serious

okay you know it's like for one thing is what happens when you get off the sauce I imagine any addictions like this you don't realize how much anger that has been bubbled up in it and now what you thought was fuel

I mean I thought I was fueled by all this you know this kind of like fire oh it doesn't fuel you it doesn't feel you it's like saying well it's great to have my stomach

feel this way when you're constipated it's a lot better to be focused and moving clarity is quite lovely so did the getting off of alcohol in and of itself dissipate the fire or the anger or did the getting sober allow you to better deal with that in some way it helps you understand when and where it's appropriate there's plenty of you angry about but he's not this free floating and I'm mad at myself. I'm mad at the world. What advice would you give to a dedicated novice who's looking to get into comics?

I thought you really look looking, get into drinking. Get into drinking. What's your favorite cocktail? No, comics. Yeah. And they're a student of the craft. They're obsessed. They're dedicated.

They have the raw ingredients that maybe Neil. saw on you, right? What advice would you give to them? It's what I said in the book, which is story, story, story. First, think of it as one craft. Don't think of writing and drawing. There's one thing and it will become clear what it is. But beyond that, it's cartooning is making things that are very complicated and making them quite simple. That's where your mind should be going more than anywhere else. At this stage, Complication is not different. The convey information.

Then learn that, I mean, pick up Scott McLeod's book on understanding comics, for instance, and see how he breaks down how comics work. At the same time, pick up Sid Field's book on screenby. Get a good sense for a simple approach to three-act storytelling.

You'll use for a year or two, and then, you know, and you won't be using it anymore. But it gets you somewhere. Learn how to draw. How do you learn how to draw? I think this is in the book, but Neil Adams

telling you to go out and buy some toy cars so you can learn how to draw cars correctly. That was great advice. Great advice, right? What great advice? So what a simple solve? What a simple solution? How does someone learn to draw up?

Yeah, like humans. Humans are the big problem, you know? And, Oh, man, every dirty trick there is. I mean, I can give you some names of some books. Yeah, that'd be great. Okay. George Bridgman.

George Bridgman. Yeah, okay. There's no E in it in Bridgman. There is an in George, and it's the complete guide to drawing from life. It's only about the figure. Why do you like that book? There's so many books on drawing. Why do you like this one?

This one's good for, because he said, The heart of cartoonist, he treats the body like a machine, so it's easier to understand. You do get the gesture, but you'll have to bring that yourself anyway. Stuff's completely non-photographic. It's somewhere between the thinking of Michelangelo and the thing you're a comic book artist. That's cool. So that's the non-photographic. That seems critical here.

Hey, you know, there is another person, people like a lot named Andrew Loomis. Andrew Loomis? Yeah. And it's L-O-O-M-I-S. I favor him less because he's worked as a sleeker, more, sleeker smoother look than I favor the more mechanical, muscular style. But usually any kind of aspiring couple of hours, about both those books on the shelf.

How did you learn perspective structures? How did you learn how to work with perspective? The trick to perspective is you realize that it is a trick. It's a completely lie. Perspective does not exist. I mean, it's an invention by mathematical ficticians. So do keep that in mind when you worry about perspective. So it's a device that you apply to a drawing.

But you know that when you look at that, this room, the lines seem to converge and so on. So what you do is you rough out the basic shape of what you think something is. And then you converge a couple of those lines. They hit at a point, and that becomes the horizontal. And you can keep your verticals straight up, or you can give it an upper or lower tilt and so on. There are books on perspective, too. I just don't know the names.

but how did you develop your abilities with perspective I'm a dead deal as a comic book artist yeah and you know I have to say and hopefully this doesn't sound strange but looking at this gigantic beast here

looking at for instance you know this is one of many many different pages that I captured just to revisit but when I look at some of these I'll show this is the one I showed before I'll show it again but

oh yeah one here so you look at this two-page spread and i'll describe it for folks but these are really stark very almost inverse color palettes but although they're black and white of a dancer and the elegant minimalism and some of the line work in this book makes me think of certain really old school illustrators like Liondecker. And it's just, there's like an archetypal energy to this type of work. And I remember in the documentary to invoke Jim Lee's name again, he said something like he was talking about, I don't know if it was Sin City or your work in general or you, but he said, and then I could try A, B, or C, and then I'm sure that Frank would tell

me I'm using too many lines. It was something like that. And I thought it was. I Give the hard time. Something like that. I can't do what he does, so I make fun of it. Yeah, so I recall collecting, people should check out Jim Lee's penciling, too. I mean, back in the day, I collected when he was working on the X-Men and stuff. I mean, just looking at the anatomical work he did with, like, Colossus and stuff. Jesus Christ.

It's amazing, amazing. This seems to access something different, and I'm wondering how you developed the economy of, sort of elegant line use and use of negative space like this use of black and white because part of the reason I asked about the perspective is I noticed which is something you can only really notice in something that's large format and produce this way is all of the perspective lines that have been erased there's a million perspective lines that have been erased yeah in this and maybe the thing is that makes you feel the exactly and then you have something like like this here yeah yeah right and this oh if you can see this one i'm hitting with my knee

now we see how i got those arms yeah where you see where you your mind is creating all the perspective you need to make sense of this as a three-dimensional experience in your brain but it looks like probably 40 50 60 lines of perspective have all been erased how did you develop this style I remember one time I was talking with, I was early on in Sin City, and I was talking with Dick Tradano. You know what he was? I know the name. Yeah, he was, he was a comic book artist for a long time, mostly known as being an associate of Neil Adams. And he was looking at the early Sin City stuff.

And you notice the early Sin City work has much more line work in it than the later stuff. He said, and he was, he was like the best teacher in comics, okay? He was, I mean, he was a good artist and everything, but he was a great editor. He mentored Klaus Jansen, for instance, and it was a terrific influence over a lot of people. He said, Frank, real New York Italian, all the way of this guy. He said, Frank, I'm looking at this in city you're doing. And he said, I'm thinking about some of the old guys.

And I'm thinking, there was this old guy. And he names on my camera right now. And he was doing stuff kind of like yours, only eventually he just started laying in all the black areas first, put the lines in later. And he found out he didn't need so many lines. That's interesting. I went home, and the real look of since Ziegletborn.

because once the black was down I went hey I'm more than a half way I'm there you know I'll just add a few little things here and there and that was when that was when I've worked that way ever since on everything and at what point did you also it seems like innovate with a because I understand I kind of start to finish first to last page batch processing we're in Instead of doing the penciling, the lettering, the inking, the coloring on a per-page basis, you're basically doing the penciling for the entire book. That was in city as well. That was in city as well. Yeah, yeah. It's just so mind-blowing. Like, it seems to me, I guess in retrospect, that that makes so much sense to do it the way that you did it.

I decided to do all the tissue layouts, trace them all off into pencil drawings, then do all the panel borders. You don't want to be around me on those days. And then lay all in all the flat black areas. And what this did was it made it more fun every step of the way. And it spent the whole thing up like crazy. And it made the work so much better. It was idiotic.

By the end of it, the line work was so spontaneous. Man. What is that first step that you mentioned with tissue? No, well, that's where I solved the basic compensation. and drawing issues on a separate piece of tissue. Which is just a type of paper. Well, it's a vellum. It's not really a tissue.

It's stronger than that. It's a type of drawing paper, but it's nearly transparent. I place that marker rough. My drawing board is a light table. And I put the actual piece of Bristol board on top of that. And, you know, trace that off. so that I can move things around. I can change the size.

I can replace things and so on. So that was also done on Sin City. That's wild. So a lot of innovation happened on Sin City. Oh, yes. That was a transformative pieceworked. Why did so much coalesce during Sin City in that way? Well, therein lies a tale.

I love tales. Well, it's, no, it's, it's, because everything was happening. I had broken away from the major publishers. I was working with the then-young Dark Horse comics. And we tested the waters with each other with Martha Washington series. And with hard-boiled. And I decided I was going to take my baby there. And so I just decided, okay, it's time to reinvent the wheel.

I'm going to apply the stuff that I haven't told. And as I said to Mike Richardson, I said, look, we've done two science fiction series. And I know everything is the superheroes of science fiction. I want to do a crime comic and in black and white. And he did influence. And so we were, you know, we were rolling with that. So was it the ability to take that creative leap that seems like it been building inside you? for a very long time.

Is that the kind of creative unlock that then led to these various innovations? Is that the way that you would think about it? Well, one thing does lead to another, but most of creative work is problem-solver. It's not, God is speaking to me. It's, you know, how do I get that? No one is to look right.

You know, that's it. And in this case, it was how to get the look I'm after as efficiently as possible. i won't show it again but i can pull it up on the screen as as b-roll but that right-hand page in particular of that female figure oh yeah yeah and the black kind of left portion of the torso which is framed with black lining and the right side from our perspective framed with the white i mean just the economy the amount of meaning that is transmitted with such a relatively small amount of ink i know it's in some

some cases, a lot of ink. It's a lot of ink. I know. But in terms of line work that is sort of the lattice work of the perception, it's just so incredible. In the early pages in Sin City, there was a lot of linework underneath all that. Towards the Gant. It was clicking along. That was what it was going to be from Earth. Also something that, you know, it comes to mind, at least for me, in the Japanese way of doing things. and there's a lot of variability, of course, among Japanese artists and so on, but it's very interesting how they apply detail, right?

You might see a ton of detail in a small portion of a panel, and then very little on the rest. You might see, right? Or you might see a page. It's like a more Imari approach to it. Yeah, exactly. And then you might have a page where it's very fast-paced,

the line works pretty sparse, and then there's one panel that has a lot of detail. And the beauty in this comes also up in understanding comics with McLeod is how much work the brain does really effortlessly between the panels. Well, it's also where McLeod was applying, applying McLuhan. Because, you know, because there's a lot of McLuhan thinking in McLeod. I've been loving the book. So thank you for sending me an early copy, Salen. and I can't wait until I can actually export all my highlights

because there are so many highlights that I put into it. And what I want to also emphasize for folks, I really believe this, is that if you want to be good at anything, study people who are excellent at something. It does not have to be the same thing you are hoping to pursue. Right. Like if you study GiroDreams of sushi or something like that,

in an effort to become better at X and aim for the top of your field that seems totally disparate, there's still so many lessons you can take. And if humans are storymaking machines and that we often create meaning, almost always from stories, then studying your work

within the realm of comics and film, even if someone is not involved explicitly in comics or film, the lessons can still be applied. and I'll be very curious and excited to see how people in industries and areas that may not can't even be guessed at this point will implement some of the life lessons from the book. I'll be very curious to see. It'll be very fun.

You know, I have to also mention, and I've wanted you to pronounce this name for me, well, I never thought I would meet you, but since I was a little kid, the Electra that you did that I want to say it was a lot of watercolor artwork Bill, how do you

say his last name? Sinkavich. Sinkavich? Sinkavich. Sinkavich. No. Sinkavich. Sinkavich.

Okay. Sinkavich. Exactly. Think Russian. Pretend you're Russian. Pretend you're Russian. That is a beautiful, that is a beautiful piece of work.

yeah it's pretty amazing it's amazing and it was a berserk experience for both of us tell me because we had such a time you had such time a good time we were like two 12 year olds just making a crazy yeah what was the experience like and why did you work well together maybe that's worth digging into well first of all we like each other a lot okay great starting point so it was one of those times that happened that you know you live for in that comics had been very restrictive for a very long time things like dark night had started busting things open you know watchman was out and so on bill had gone from being the guy who draws like neil adams to being more and more this you know guy who was pulling in ralph stedman and doing all this stuff and really becoming

his own man. He had just worked with that one more. He was looking for a much bluster kind of arrangement, you know, because Alan's a very dominating writer. Dominating in the sense that he has an idea of how the panel, he writes a very tight. I mean, he's a clockmaker when he writes the story. You know, Watchman plays off that constantly. And Bill is his bucking bronco. So when Bill and I got together, it was, they just opened Epic Comics at Marvel, back when Marvel was actually trying to loosen up a little bit before it became Marvel again, you know, and, and, it's easy for people to forget. I mean, Marvel went through some very hard times. Yeah. Before the technology caught up sufficiently to end up with Marvel Studios

and so on. No, no, I'm talking about when Marvel was really trying to bring in the European influences and stuff like that. It was quite an exciting time. Archie Goodwin was running a fascinating division there. I came up with a mini-series, supposed to be four issues, Electra, for Marvel Comics. And Marvel couldn't,

when they saw what it was, the script was, they went, this can't be part of Marvel Comics. This is just like too goddamn weird. And so it bumped over to the Epic Division. Kennedy McCrary. They didn't just say, we won't do it. and then went from four issues to eight issues,

you know, they were where it was, and the top blew off the, I mean, the lid flew off the pot that was in the stove. How did you give Bill enough rain as a bucking bronco? Didn't. You didn't? I wrote full scripts. He just drew over the fucking one,

and I had to pull the whole thing back. Can you explain what full script means? Well, full script is like a screen. It is, right? Yeah. Only a little stricter because he tells you what each panel number is and exactly what goes in it and what the captions are. So you would send that to Bill and you'd be like, thanks, appreciate the effort. Which is what would come back would be much more abstract and much more daring.

Cool, but it wouldn't break the clock. It would still work. It did not say I wouldn't like send him an exploding tank and get back a bunch of tomatoes rolling down the street. no but it required reinterpretation of my script and I welcomed it though yeah that sounds fun it I saw brilliance was happening yeah that sounds like a lot of fun and it's just because of that though the excitement grew and I kept expanding the story because all these unexpected elements that he'd throw in it I want to turn them into characters and stuff and luckily argy goodwin was long for the ride and you know it was an absolute guess I love that book oh I mean I still

have it. I literally still have it on Long Island. Let me ask you a question. It may go, no, this may be a dead end of a question, but I'm going to ask you anyway. This is a question I often ask as we start to kind of wind towards landing the plane here. If you had a billboard on which you could put anything non-commercial, right, metaphorically to get a message or something in front of billions of people, could be a statement, a quote, a word, an image, combination what might you put on that billboard does anything come to mind well a motto a mantra anything i'm gonna get very broad on this okay it's just say ask every question ask every question what does that mean to you just means that we live in a time of silence people are leaving things

on questions, unspoken, and a good bit. It's not a good line. I can't come up with a good one, it seems. I think you ask every question is pretty good. But we can take a couple bites at the apple if you like. Yeah. That about just challenge. Challenge?

Yeah. Okay. What does that mean to you? That, when you are confronted with things that everybody's, says, be ready to challenge. Challenge, push the wall, defy the code. If everybody says do X, everybody says you must do Y. At least, at least say, well.

Yeah, why. Why is a pretty good one, do you want to go with that? Why is a good one? I guess they go together. Both of them go together pretty well. Why don't you go why? Okay. With the question mark.

Why, question mark. Ask. Where's the camera? There it is. Or why's it got to be that way? Why is it got to be that way? Why is it got to be that way? They all converge sort of in the same theme.

Just trying to go against an age of pathological conformity. Yes. Yes. Often subconscious, too. Pathological conformity. Yeah. Ask the why. Why does it have to be this way?

Also with your own thinking. It applies everywhere. Everywhere. Yeah, everywhere. Frank, thank you so much. It's great to see you again. real pleasure man and everybody you can find frank on instagram at frank miller official the website is frank miller inc i nk dot com and you can now where's the camera you can now pre-order so absolutely

check out push the wall my life writing drawing and the art of storytelling i've been reading it i'm going to finish it over the next couple of days have really been taking a lot of notes I also took a bunch of notes from this conversation, and we will have links to everything that we talked about in the show notes, as per usual, at tim.blog slash podcast. Frank Miller will be the only Frank Miller. If you search by name for guest, you will find this episode. And until next time, be just a bit kinder than is necessary to others, but also to yourself and ask why, why, why.

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