Why Your Hero Needs Dead Parents
I don't do in-person podcasts anymore.
I did this one.
I flew up to the city. My producer, Jay, drove up from Atlanta.
We did all of this to sit in a room with Frank Miller, because Frank Miller is the reason I think about stories the way I think about them. And I've never told him that.
So I told him.
In 1986 he wrote Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, and the comic book industry split into two halves. Before it, and after it.
Every Batman movie you've ever seen has his fingerprints on it, whether the director admits it or not. He took a campy detective in a costume and turned him into a psychological condition.
Dead Parents
I asked Frank why so many heroes are orphans. Luke Skywalker, Daredevil, Spider-Man, Batman. He gave two answers, and they're different in kind.
The first is emotional, and he called it the real heart of it: there's nothing like a child alone against the elements.
A kid with no protection, no fallback, facing the world at full size. It's the most primal setup you can hand an audience because everyone has a version of it in their nervous system.
The second answer: Parents are a problem. Parents are kind of boring.
The only time Frank could think of it working was Spider-Man's Aunt May—and it worked because she was so frail she'd never look up and see him on the ceiling. A parent-shaped object that couldn't parent.
Here's another thing that got me. He corrected me on air.
The Myth of Obsession
I said Batman was obsessed. Frank said no. "He's possessed."
Sit with that. Obsessed is a guy who can't let go of a thing. Possessed is a guy filled with a force bigger than himself. That's the whole game. That's the difference between someone with a hobby and someone with a life.
I asked him how you turn a character into a myth. Not a character people like. A myth. Something that outlives the generation it was born in, like Sherlock Holmes or Zorro or Luke Skywalker.
His answer was almost insultingly simple.
You find one word.
Superman is hope. Batman is vengeance. Or justice. The great characters can be summed up in a single central theme, and then every other piece of them springs from that one seed. Superman wafts down from the clouds in sunlight. Batman gorges up from the bowels of the earth. Same universe. Opposite gravity. All from one word.
I've been writing for twenty years and nobody ever put it that cleanly.
Then he gave me the line I'm going to steal for the rest of my life.
Egoism vs. Egotism
We were talking about mentors.
His mentor, Neil Adams, used to trash his drawings.
Part of the training was making it a test of character—if you weren't tough enough to come back, you'd never survive the industry anyway. And Frank kept coming back.
I asked how you survive that.
"It takes egoism but not egotism."
Egoism to keep showing up after someone tells you your work is garbage. Not enough egotism to quit the second they do.
I've watched a thousand talented people die on exactly that hill. They had the ego to make the thing and none of the ego to survive the criticism of it.
He also told me to steal.
Nobody is Special
He walked it back a little—said he was being dramatic—but he meant it.
Nobody gets touched by heaven and handed powers no one's had before.
Drawing and writing are crafts you learn piece by piece, like building with Legos.
You learn from the people who came before.
Kirby ripped the panel across two pages. Neil Adams shattered the border. Frank followed them, then went further.
He called it a "tradition of revolution," and I haven't stopped thinking about the phrase.
But the advice that I think about most was his answer for a 20-year-old starting today.
Don’t Chase the X-Men
Don't run at the number one title.
"Find something you think is a loser, figure out why it's a loser, then do it right—and you've got a new creation."
It works great for comic books, but it’s also an entire life philosophy. It’s a business strategy. It’s the only strategy I've ever seen actually work.
Frank found Daredevil, a nothing character in a yellow suit, and poured samurai movies and Greek tragedy and crime noir into him until he became something people build shrines to.
Everything great lives at the intersection of the specific things you personally love.
I asked what skill mattered most, past the drawing and the writing.
"Determination." No plan B.
Failure was never an option because there was no version of his life where he wasn't telling these stories.
His new book is Push the Wall. Read it.
Frank—thank you. You have no idea.
And yes, he signed my Dark Knight Returns.
Watch the whole in-person interview. Even if you hate Batman. It’s an entire career’s worth of wisdom from a legend packed into 43 minutes.
