When the young Frank Miller, a Vermont kid who had been drawing his own comics since the age of six, first made his way to New York in 1978, he was given a stern talking to by the men who controlled the industry. "All the editors at DC and Marvel comics told me I was completely insane," he says. "'In five years, comics will cease to exist,' they all said. Sales were terrible. Everything was in the doldrums."
Miller took over Marvel's ailing Daredevil title and managed to turn the book around. With other innovators such as Alan Moore, Miller preceded to launch a new golden age for comics. Here are the five titles of which he is most proud.
The Dark Knight Returns (1986)
An ageing Batman returns to the fray. "People say writing Batman is like carrying a Ming vase. I think Batman is more like a diamond. You can throw it against a wall and it may chip the wall, but the diamond stays intact."
Martha Washington: Give Me Liberty (with Dave Gibbons, 1990)
In the future, fast-food chains will be so powerful they will have their own armies. The US is in a state of chaos and only a young black girl from the projects, Martha Washington, can restore order. Bleak satire, good jokes.
Hard Boiled (with Geoff Darrow, 1990)
Carl Seitz is an ordinary bloke, an insurance investigator with a nice suburban family. Nixon is a deranged tax collector who kills without remorse. Can these two men be the same person? Geoff Darrow was a conceptual designer for The Matrix, and the comic's illustrations have the same intricacy.
Bad Boy (with Simon Bisley, 1997) Obscure, hard-to-track-down collaboration with Bisley, one of the most distinguished alumnus of the 2000 AD comic. From what we can gather, it involves a young chav on a motorised tricycle creating all kinds of beautiful havoc.
Sin City (from 1992)
Bad men and worse women interact in a noir hell. "A guy told me there was this comic guy back in the 1930s who would always lay in the black areas first and work out to the line, and that's what I did. The whole aesthetic was to have a black-and-white book that eliminated the line."
