Frank Miller has, understandably, received a lot of comparison to Alan Moore. It’s gotta be like the Beatles and the Stones for them. They’re just larger than life in their artform, and even if you know the difference immediately upon encountering their work, people develop preferences.
Rick Rubin asked Miller to compare himself to Alan Moore in an interview, and the response is perfect:
“[We’re] very different animals. Particularly in the case of Alan, we arrived at similar times. We approached superhero with similar notions superficially, but profoundly, diametrically opposed points of view. His work was an autopsy on the superhero, and mine was an attempted resurrection. I was kind of like the witch doctor calling lightning down to bring the thing back to life, and he was the clinician saying this thing never should have lived. It was just a very different [approach], even though we became fast friends. We love so much of the same stuff.”
Two comic creators, at the same moment, in the same explosion of the medium, with two completely different perspectives.
It’s special. Here’s what I love about it.
Notice how they both saw it their own way. Neither changed course or tried to talk the other out of it. They both contributed. Beatles and Stones - same rhythm and blues, two takes.
The way the world talked about heroes was ready for an update when they entered the scene. That was the zeitgeist. It was in the air.
Moore took the genre apart to see how it worked, with masterworks like his Swamp Thing run and then Watchmen. Miller went the other direction, rebuilding his heroes from the ground up, as with Batman in The Dark Knight Returns, and then building a new kind of hero from scratch with Marv in Sin City.
Miller creates from a well inside himself, and that feels extra relevant in the age of AI. In the same interview, Rubin also asks him about the writer’s trope: aren’t there really only a handful of stories? It’s a question about formulas, to my ear. Miller cuts straight to it:
“I don’t believe so. I mean, I’ve heard that said. I’ve even thought it myself. But the more I do of it, the more I believe that the beauty in what we all do is chaos. The accident, the thing that’s not supposed to happen but works anyway. And there would be no reason to make stories if we were just kicking out an algorithm, to use the language of our time.”
The beauty in what we all do is chaos.
I see creating as an act of love. It’s an outward expression, shared in a messy world, that stacks something pretty on top of the chaos (even if what we make isn’t definitionally pretty). I hear it in the way Miller talks about his own process here. He describes it as channeling. He wrote a line without thinking, and “all of a sudden I’m crying. I don’t know why.” To me, that’s love.
You have to earn it, and you earn IT internally, through love + effort.
These are the creative inspirations I want to draw from. I especially feel like I want to look to people who created when the tools were simpler, or at least less tempting. The formulas and shortcuts are calling out to us so hard right now. I don’t think we have to go all the way back, but I really want to dwell on what the process means.
We need new versions of the old ideas. We can’t dwell exclusively on who did it before. And we don’t just want imitations of people doing the old thing, again, in the now. We want innovators. We want artistes. The ones who will take the chaos and remind us that they’re human, just like us. Miller has something to say about the shortcut version of this, too:
“I’ve got a real gripe against this new church of AI, because to me it is disavowing the creative act itself. For us to have the hubris to think that we can understand the human mind and the creative process, and recreate that mind and that creative process, that is us saying we are gods.”
We’re having a man and machine moment in culture right now. It’s making us ask all sorts of questions about art and creativity. Temper your hubris and go inside. That’s the answer the great artists keep leading me back to. That’s where the work happens. That’s where the work is worth doing.
Then, be proud of what you share, because you found it in the chaos in your head, inspired by whatever chaos you felt in the world, and you forged something that you and only you could take out to share.
