Frank Miller came from the same generation as Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird, and much like them began his career with little interest in doing superhero comics in a time when comic books were refocusing almost exclusively on superheroes. One story of his early career has coming into a publisher's office with a portfolio of "guys in trench coats and old cars" and being asked "where are the guys in tights?" His earliest credits as an artist including Gold Key Comics' Twilight Zone series and DC's Weird War Tales, before joining Marvel on their John Carter, Warlord of Mars series. Eventually, being a comic book artist meant drawing the guys in tights, and so Miller found himself doing a few issues of Spectacular Spider-Man and eventually becoming the main artist for Daredevil in 1979.
At this point, Daredevil was doing very poorly in sales largely due to the terribly uninspired writing of Roger McKenzie. His writing wasn't exactly bad, but he kept things pretty straight-laced and uneventful, and with a character as limited in ability and personality as Matt Murdock, you can't afford to play it safe. The worst you could say about McKenzie's run was that all the secondary characters revolve around Murdock despite the character being too boring to justify it. This included a large cast of attractive white women all madly in love with Murdock, rather shockingly resembling a harem anime.
This extended to the villains as well, resulting in repetitive plots. When Frank Miller came on board as artist, the first two story lines he worked on involved older villains, Death-Stalker and Bullseye, hiring minor criminals to stage a trap for Daredevil for revenge for a past defeat. Alright, but if you want to want to keep readers interested, you probably don't want to run the same story twice in a row. Speaking of reruns, this was also a period in which McKenzie was retelling Daredevil's origins through the character of reporter Ben Urich, who spends half a dozen issues uncovering what led Matt Murdock to become Daredevil, with no changes to the original origin story all the way back in 1964. McKenzie brought nothing new to the table.
Frank Miller, on the other hand, infused the pages he was given with darkness and detail. It's often been refereed to as a film noir style, with characters obscured in deep shadow and sharp contrasts. He also added a level of detail to the New York City that set it apart from the New York City seen in other Marvel titles, giving the oft-traveled rooftops water towers, piping and cracked stonework that ground the setting with its real-life counterpart. He also had a tendency towards long vertical panels, emphasizing the dizzying heights of buildings rather than flat cityscapes. Visually, Daredevil was about rising and falling, fitting for one of Marvel's more acrobatic characters.
Miller disliked McKenzie's scripts and asked to be taken off the title, but after a change in editor, McKenzie was canned and Miller took over as writer. One of the first things he did was take advantage of McKenzie's "origin story rerun" by following it up with Daredevil's "secret history," new details about Murdock's life between being blinded and actually becoming Daredevil. The first of these was the introduction of Elektra, an old college flame who, after her father was killed after a hostage situation gone bad, became a ninja assassin. In many ways, this was a redo of McKenzie's Black Widow arch, who just before Miller took over was part of Daredevil's "harem." Both were independent heroines struggling to reconcile their chosen career paths with their feelings towards Murdock. Where Elektra differed was that she wasn't defined by her longing for Murdock, but rather that her feelings for him were getting in the way of her being a professional killer. She was a career woman first, a love interest second.
The other secret history was the introduction of Stick, Daredevil's old mentor who trained him in using his other senses. Not the first elderly blind Asian mentor/martial arts teacher in comics, that would go to I Ching in Wonder Woman, though Stick is far less of a stereotype. Elektra and Stick were just two of several Japanese elements Frank Miller brought into the comic, ranging from small details like Bullseye using shurikens to new enemies like the Hand, a ninja clan moving into the city. There is a concern about how much Miller actually understood these elements (Elektra murders a lot of people with sais, even though they are traditionally a blunt weapon or a tool for disarming), but never goes so far as to turn things into a nasty 1980s "yellow peril."
These are the elements that Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #1 is often cited to be parodying. The Hand wound up becoming the Foot Clan, and Stick became Splinter. That's pretty much it, the names are the extent of the jokes. Stick and Splinter have very little in common, and the Foot Clan actually has more detail and character than the Hand ever had. In reality, Daredevil's influence on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles runs a lot deeper than the initial parody. Frank Miller's focus on street-level crime set the stage for much of the conflicts in the Mirage-era of the Turtles, include his "Gangwar" arc which would serve as one of the building blocks for Eastman and Laird's "City at War" arc. Meanwhile, on the Archie Comics side of things, a lot of Elektra would wind up going into the secondary character Ninjara.
.jpg)
(In fairness, most of the people involved with all that have largely tapped out, and with the exception of McCloud, Miller remains the most vocal of them today.)
Miller's actual impact for comic book creators and creator rights was through a heightened lionization of comic celebrity. There had been popular comic creators before, but no one that had gotten this big this fast. The reason for this was two-fold. First, Miller saving Daredevil was seen as nothing short of a Christmas miracle by Marvel, making him the first must-have of his generation. Second, Miller came in when major publishers began to sell shorter-form comics. The rise of the limited series and graphic novel started in 1979, when the major publishers began to realize that running dozens of titles non-stop forever might not be the easiest thing to manage. At one point, DC Comics was juggling sixty monthly ongoing titles, which became too financially unsound and resulted in what has become known as the DC Implosion, which saw over half of those titles suddenly taken off the market over a six-month period.
With a lot of freed resources, DC Comics began to experiment with shorter four-to-six issues series. These proved to be both profitable and pretty low-risk, since there was no obligation to expand any characters or ideas into a years long soap opera. This opened the door for more experimental, artist-driven works in DC, and one of the first people to be swept up in it was Frank Miller and his 1983 six-issue series, Ronin. What was most important about Ronin was that it was made by Frank Miller. His name was in big letters above the title on the cover, it was always the first thing you read on every issue, much like Eastman and Laird would wind up doing. The back cover included quotes from other big names in comics, like Will Eisner and Harlan Ellison, praising the work and Miller as something new and revolutionary.
It was a scale of creator promotion that had only been seen in Hollywood. It was a level of self-branding that many young creators might strive for, and here's one of their own doing just that. For Frank Miller, that led to The Dark Knight Returns, which led to the "grimdark" period for comic books, which led the Image Comics stable of creators, which led to the rise and fall of the early 1990s comic book bubble. It's funny what a strong declaration of "HEY EVERYBODY, PAY ATTENTION TO ME" can do.
Ronin also happens to be of the four comics credited as influence on the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and out of the four, it's certainly the one the series most visually resembles. Both share an over-abundance of line shading to give a sense of heavy grit and constant shadow. There isn't a single human face that isn't subtly grotesque, and both series are in love with their sewers and large establishing shots of New York City.
Ronin also cranked up Miller's interest in reappropriation of Eastern imagery that started with Daredevil. The story involved a ronin, a masterless samurai, whose ancient battle with a demon spills into a half post-apocalyptic/half cyberpunk future New York City. Miller spent a lot of time looking into martial arts movies, samurai stories and untranslated volumes of Lone Wolf and Cub, and from that drew what how he assumed a stoic samurai character would act in a mess of American genre excess. There's a lot of surface coolness to it, but reading Ronin over something like Lone Wolf and Cub is like listening to Carl Douglas' "Kung-Fu Fighting" over watching an actual kung-fu action film, you only end up with a very surface understanding of things.
Frank Miller played a major role in changing the comic book landscape in the early 1980s, but he, along with everything else we've covered to the point, is part of the mainstream, and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles most certainly did not start that way. To better understand it, we'll have to look at some of its neighbors...
[Yes, I know, I said January 6th, but things in my life keep getting out of hand. For the time being, the blog will be updated whenever I can get it, and hopefully will settle into the original Monday-Wednesday-Friday schedule when my personal schedule settles down]
