Let's Go Exploring! 11 Things About Calvin and Hobbes

A while back, we spoke about comics that were huge when they came out, made a huge cultural impact, and  forgotten eventually, declining further more in recognition as their time in the sun passed, until all we were left with were the iconography or what they added to our lexicon. Bill Watterson's Calvin and Hobbes is not one of those strips. Despite only running for 10 years and having been over for almost 20, it's still discovered today and is still popular, and all on the strength of its comics, because it was never licensed into ads, toys, and animated series, among other things.

I've been saving this column for a while. It was only a matter of time before I ran something about, in my opinion, the greatest daily comic strip of all time. (Objectively, what're the choices? Using 1950 as a cutoff point, because before then, comics got a full page for Sundays so I think that's a different conversation, it's between Calvin and Hobbes and Peanuts, isn't it? Pogo would be the clear number 3 in that discussion, but there are no other contenders, right?)

So anyway, here, allow me to mention 11 of my favorite types of Calvin and Hobbes strips. Why 11? Well... you'll see.

The 11 Best Types of Calvin and Hobbes Strips

by Duy

1. The advice from Dad

There's one strip early on where Calvin asks his dad about clouds, and his dad doesn't know the answer.

July 21, 1987

Reading the whole collection in order, it seems to have been a misstep (or maybe it explains what came after), because a staple of the strip eventually was his dad's crazy advice, which would just be completely made up, and always a joy to read. My favorite is this one, about black and white pictures.

Here's one about sunsets, for good measure.

July 30, 1989

2. The actual heartfelt ones

The "norm" of the strip is Calvin being carefree, reckless, and unapologetic. So any time it breaks this convention, it takes you by surprise and gets you right there a bit, in the organ that pumps your blood. Here's Calvin getting chewed out by his dad for wrecking his binoculars.

May 24, 1988

And of course, when it's a heartfelt one with Hobbes and it takes place in the autumn, that's even better. Prettier to look at. Just beautiful imagery.

3. The animals

I love when Watterson drew animals because a lot of the time it just felt like he went "Hey, I want to draw an animal!" and just drew the hell out of those animals until it was time for a punchline. The most common, of course, was the dinosaurs.

My favorite though is the one with the dead bird. (Okay, maybe I'm morbid.)

4. The snowmen

There probably isn't one type of strip in Calvin and Hobbes that made me laugh more consistently than the ones with the snowmen.

5. Tracer Bullet

I have absolutely no factual basis to back this up, but I'm going to assume that most people's favorite alter ego for Calvin was Spaceman Spiff. But my favorite one was the one that showed up least, Tracer Bullet, private eye.

Watterson could have been doing crime comics if he'd wanted.

6. The deep but obvious

Calvin and Hobbes is often praised for being "philosophical," but if you think about it, a lot of their discussions are fairly obvious. It's just nice to see and read, and if you were a kid, they could be eye-opening and revelatory.

March 23, 1986

And most of them involve a wagon or a sled.

Then there are the times Calvin will make a deep point and undermine it at the end.

October 16, 1990

7. Christmas

The Christmas ones, aside from the snowmen, are a nice microcosm of what Calvin and Hobbes is about. There's a lot of pondering and discussion, like this one where Calvin is wondering about Santa (and God).

December 21, 1987

And he tries to be good, but he just can't resist temptation.
 

December 21, 1990

And of course, Christmas hits, and things are great.

I love Christmas, myself. So these always get to me.

8. The ones with the box

If there's any one specific aspect of Calvin that a young me would have agreed with, it's this: the cardboard box is the greatest toy in the world. You can make it into anything. Calvin has made his a transmogrifier, a time machine, and a cloning machine.

March 24, 1987

January 8, 1990

September 2, 1987

Action figures and video games are great, but very little can compare to the imagination of a child.

9. The ones where Watterson draws differently

This is my all-time favorite Calvin and Hobbes strip.

February 28, 1993

It's got not only one of my favorite themes (imagination), but, man, it's just beautiful.

Watterson was just a great artist. He could do any style. A lot of the time, as with the animals, it seemed he just wanted to draw a particular style and wrote a strip around that. Here are a few.

January 31, 1993

10. Susie Derkins

Have any two fictional people been so bad at hiding how much they actually like each other despite all effort? Susie and Calvin tease each other and hit each other with snowballs and water balloons, but they just can't stop trying to spend time with each other and hang out.

February 14, 1994

Every fan-made Calvin and Hobbes spinoff I've seen has set Calvin up with Susie, and why not? They clearly like each other.

January 16, 1987

11. The last one

This is the last strip that ran for Bill Watterson's 10-year masterpiece.

December 31, 1995

And it's a great way to go out. It says the world is full of possibility, and there's a lot left to do, a lot left to see. Watterson knew that, and so he left, to explore other options.

Which is why there are 11 things on this list and not 10, because I really wanted to tack that last one on. This month marks the fourth anniversary of The Comics Cube, but it also marks the end of my regularity as a writer for it, meaning I won't be doing columns on a weekly basis anymore.. I've recently taken on a new, more demanding job, and lately it hasn't left me enough time or energy to keep writing for the Cube the way I've been doing and still pursue all the other things I want to do, which is a considerable number of things, and I've always felt (and by always, I mean the last year) that Calvin and Hobbes would be the only comic to semi-go out on.

I'll still write columns; they just won't be weekly.  Ben and Travis and Matt will still be around. In the meantime, I made a tag for myself so you can check out my archives more easily. And of course, you can still find me on Facebook and Twitter.

People are always asking me for evergreen recommendations, and I usually get requests to just name what I think are the greatest comics of all time, but I never do them, because my tastes change all the time. Here now, though, gun to my head, if I were asked: the greatest comic ever is Bill Watterson's Calvin and Hobbes. And it would be my ultimate recommendation, for anyone who's never read it. (The Complete Calvin and Hobbes, which my friend Aviva gave to me a few years ago as a gift, is beautiful, especially the Sundays. If you have the money, get it — you won't regret it.)

Let's go exploring!

Interview/Podcast: Charlie Adlard

Thanks to Fully Booked, I was lucky enough to sit down with Charlie Adlard, artist of The Walking Dead, for 15 full minutes. The link below will take you to the podcast, hosted on Soundcloud, but I'm working on a transcript right now so you guys can read it. This post will be updated when the transcript is up.

The best anecdote though came after the recorder had stopped rolling. I asked him what his advice was for the creator-owned people who look at him thinking, "Oh man, I can get rich by doing creator-owned comics!" And he said "Keep at it." Then he told me a story about the time he stayed at Michael Avon Oeming's house, back when Oeming and Powers were at its height, and Oeming told him that creator-owned comics were the way to go. Adlard gave him a speech that went something to the effect of "That's easy for you to say up in your ivory tower, but I have a wife and kids, and I can't just do three issues of something for potentially no money." Then he said,  really jocularly, "But that's okay, because now I can talk to him from my ivory tower." I asked him, "Yeah, I was gonna say, if he had an ivory tower, what do you have?" His answer? "An ivory... castle."




The Comics Cube: Can you take me through a typical day in the life of Charlie Adlard?

Charlie Adlard: My dull life! Okay, I get up around about quarter to seven in the morning, 'cause that's about the time we have to get my children ready to go to school. My children go to school on a bus, and it's very far away, so I drop them off at the bus at 7:40. So by the time I get back home, I'm in the studio quite early, around 8 to half past 8 in the morning. I procrastinate for a bit, check my emails, hack around, and around 9 or 9:30, I get to work, and pretty much work through until six o'clock until it's time to pick the children up from the bus. And I do five days a week, try not to work weekends because that's family time, try not to work evenings 'cause I prefer daylight rather than nighttime.

That's kind of ironic.

It is quite ironic! I lead a very normal, happy-go-lucky life for the artist of The Walking Dead.

When you get a script from Robert Kirkman, how do you visualize it in your head, and what's that process like?

It's a very simple process. It's very rare that I get more than four or five pages from Robert at a time anyway, because obviously we're both busy, and Robert is more busy with the TV show and more than one comic book, so he's gotta kinda stagger everything. So when I get those pages, obviously I'll read them first, just read them once through, kinda starting to visualize it already. Unfortunately, because of the time constraint, we have to get 22 pages a month, I don't really have the time to do thumbnails or anything like that, so I tend to just go straight to pencils. The storytelling is very — this is not a thing of speed, but I favor nice, simple storytelling. Nice, square, rectangular panels — whatever, tall, horizontal, doesn't really matter — but set in a nice, clear pattern, so things are really clear, because in the end, story is everything. That's what comics are for. If you're not telling a clear story, you've failed in your attempt to be a comic artist. You might be a great artist, but not a comic artist. And then I just go from the top lefthand corner and work my way down to the bottom right! It's as simple as that.

If I'm inking my work, which I was until All-Out War, when we went biweekly — even I'm not fast enough to pencil and ink two issues a month — I would lay it out first in pencil, which would take about between half an hour and an hour, depending on how complicated the stuff going on in the panel is and go straight to inks after that. It would take about another hour and a half to two hours to ink.

You like straightforward storytelling. Spoken like a true disciple of Alex Toth. I heard he's one of your main influences. Where did that love come from?

Yes, he is one of my main influences. Alex Toth wasn't my first love, I have to admit. I came to him later on in life, probably with a greater eye of appreciation for him. I think I'd seen a few of his designs here and there, because obviously back in the 70s, that's what he was doing. You know, mainly all the cartoon stuff. But I appreciated his linework then and his design sense, then obviously looked back and learned more about his comic strip work, and that yeah, this guy also used black as a design tool to design atmosphere. And used it in a way that still looks modern today. He's one of the few artists in the 60s and 70s that don't really look dated. It's very rare to say that about an artist of that period, and I think it's because he had such a modern idea of how to do comics, but with a very classic eye to storytelling and what makes a page, and everything like that. The guy's a genius.

Do you ever look at when other people ink your own work and think, "No, that's not how I would've done it"?

Put it this way: the only time someone has inked my work was the first ever thing I did for Marvel UK, which was way, way back in my career, and it was just one issue of something. As soon as I finished that issue, the editor said, "Do you want to ink the rest?" And I said, "Yes, please!" So he gave me the rest to ink anyway.

I did one issue of Batman just before I did The Walking Dead which was inked by somebody else, purely because I was a fill-in artist for the penciller, and they felt they couldn't not give work to the inker for a month just because I wanted to ink it myself. So they said "Do you mind if the guy who's inking the book inks your work?" And I said, that's fine, I was just thankful for the work at the time.

So it was only twice until Stefano (Gaudiano) came aboard for The Walking Dead. It's weird. It is weird, because I like finishing my own stuff. But Stefano's doing a fantastic job. He's the best we could possibly have on my artwork. His style of inking suits my style, which is great. It's no secret I'll ever be fully happy with an inker, no matter how genius they are, unless they were aping me completely. But that would be me, then!

So there's always elements where I think "I wouldn't do it like that," but I can't think in those terms, if you know what I mean.

Otherwise you'll never get product out.

Yeah, exactly. I appreciate it from an artistic standpoint as well. I don't want to criticize an artist for making an artistic decision that's not necessarily bad, it's just different from what I'd do. So I can't criticize him for doing something I wouldn't do, 'cause I know how that would feel if someone did that to me. So I'm not gonna say, "Stefano, don't do that because that's not how I would do it." I leave him to it. And most of the time, he does make a decision which looks like how I would do it. The decisions he makes where it looks like that's not how I would do it, it doesn't make it bad. It just makes it different, not necessarily, like I keep saying, how I would do it. But looking back on what Stefano's done, every issue to my eyes has looked better and better. He's getting better used to how I work and he seems to be getting more on my wavelength, which is fantastic to me. And for an inker with a penciller, and especially for somebody like myself who doesn't normally have an inker, I couldn't be happier.

Do you have any intentions of branching out into different genres, like less horror-type stuff?

Yeah, definitely, one thing I'm very conscious of is being typecast.

That was gonna be my next question. 

I'll answer both at the same time! You work on a book for this long, there is that danger. Okay, it's no secret I could stop working on The Walking Dead and not work again, and I'd be perfectly fine and happy financially. But that's not the point, I'd rather continue working, obviously. But what I look for outside The Walking Dead is stuff that's different to The Walking Dead. No matter how good it would be, I'd always refuse to do another zombie story, for instance.

Do you have anything in mind?

Well, there's a few projects that are coming up. I mean, it would have to be a really good horror story, that would be the next proviso. I'm reluctant to do horror, because obviously The Walking Dead is horror, but I'm not closed off to horror. I'm closed off to zombies, because I just don't want to repeat myself, but I'm not so closed off to horror, because there's plenty of variety in that medium that you can work with it. Obviously is someone comes up to me with a drama or a science-fiction thing or a fantasy thing, I'm obviously a lot more open to that. The more I get away from what I do, with other things, the more appealing it could potentially be. Having said that, I've got a couple of things coming up.

Robert and I are doing another book together called The Passenger. I have a big love of European, specifically French, comic book albums, so I persuaded Robert to do one in that style. The Passenger will be a one-off science-fiction thriller, basically. Hopefully that'll be out next year. I've done 43 pages out of a potential 56-page book, I think it is.

Close to being done.

Close to being done, I'm basically waiting for Robert to finish writing it now. So the ball's in his court at the moment. So I'm doing that, that's quite exciting. And it's European sized, so it's a lot more intense storytelling, there's a lot more detail. It's nice to work differently.

And after that, I signed a deal with the French publisher Soleil to do a book called Vampire State Building. To be honest, they gave me the title and I instantly saw it. Unless the script is seriously crap — I haven't seen the script yet, I saw the synopsis — unless the script is seriously bad, how could I refuse that one? If I'm instantly seeing stuff visually when somebody proposes something, I think that's half the battle. I'm gonna do it.

In your spare time, you play the drums. Do you ever find that the creative process for drumming plays into the way you think about laying out a page, maybe like you're controlling the tempo or the pacing?

I never thought of it in that way, I gotta admit! Obviously, they're both a creative thing, but I think what's interesting is as a comic artist, you're on your own. You're 100% you. When you're drumming in a band, generally — because drumming on your own is, it's the worst instrument to have if you want to do it on your own, just because at least with a guitar and other instruments, you can tune and all that, whereas drumming is just (bangs on table). It gets boring quite quickly, just sitting there on your own, unless you have music to drum to. But anyway, it's a group dynamic. However many of you are in the band, whether it's three, four, it's a different way of working, all of a sudden, because you have to work with a bunch of people. And it's quite hard, doing what I do, which is solitary and everything is on you and you control everything you do, to going to something where you have to communicate with other people, to be creative. It's interesting. But again, it's good, 'cause it's different. I think if I was going to do music solitary, if I could play another instrument — which I can't — I wonder if I would prefer to do it on my own or with a gang people, but obviously as a drummer, you have to go play with other people anyway.



Thanks to the crew of Fully Booked (Jaime, Vicky, and company) and Comic Odyssey for the opportunity.

Reclaiming History: David Lloyd on V for Vendetta

David Lloyd on V for Vendetta

Reclaiming History

by Duy

So I'm going through my list of articles that I've written for the last four years, right? And I realize I've never written anything substantial about V for Vendetta. So then I start thinking about what to write about, since, you know, just about everything you can write about V, both the comic and the movie, have already been written. And then I reread this old piece I did about the contributions of Dave Gibbons to Watchmen, and how I feel he's often undervalued despite the book not even existing without him (as in, it wouldn't have been made at all, not "wouldn't have been made the way it was").

I feel the same is true with David Lloyd on V for Vendetta. Look, Alan Moore is my favorite writer, and I love his work, and I'll give most of his stuff a shot if it doesn't involve Lovecraftian takeoffs published by Avatar, and I'll defend his controversial statements when I think he's in the right and look past his questionable statements, like his random railing against sports (I like basketball, and so should you) and it won't affect how I read his work (side note: how many creators have public personalities that actually affect how you see their work? I can name two off the top of my head, and no, Grant Morrison isn't one of them.). But the man doesn't walk on water and  every single one of his greatest works has been done in concert with a talented artist. Yes, in a lot of these cases, these artists achieved the greatest success with Moore, and they were rarely as good or as inspired afterwards, but Moore understood the medium was collaborative and made sure to always work closely with his artists to the extent that the artists were responsible for a good portion of the ideas and execution.

I want to clarify, because some Moore fans actually find it offensive when you say that he didn't turn water into wine or anything, this is not a knock against Moore. Being able to play to your artist's strengths and knowing when to step back when your artist is hitting all cylinders, is a strength. For all the talk that Stan Lee never didn't do more than hand his artists a basic plot, well, why would you have wanted him to? He had Steve Ditko and Jack Kirby; why would you want Stan to constrain them some more?

So, a lot of Lloyd's contributions were outlined by Moore in the back matter of V, in the essay "Behind the Painted Smile," but I think it's worth mentioning them here.

V started out when Lloyd was given a brief to create a 30's mystery strip. He suggested Moore as the writer and made clear his dislike of needing to do research, which is how Moore decided to set the strip in the near future instead of the recent past. After Moore went through a whole slew of ideas, including calling the main character "The Doll," Lloyd finally suggested having the main character wear a Guy Fawkes mask, and things flowed from there.

David Lloyd came up with this at one point.

Lloyd also was the one who suggested leaving out thought balloons and sound effects, giving the whole thing a more cinematic feel than it would have otherwise (although I still contend that thought balloons aren't really so different from first-person narrative captions), and letting Lloyd's artwork do the bulk of the storytelling.

Moore mentions in The Extraordinary Works of Alan Moore that Lloyd's style, while maybe not as commercial in terms of its polish as that of other British superstars like Brian Bolland, had such a strong sense of storytelling to it and that the two of them shared a desire to experiment with the medium. Lloyd's strength, to me, is the sense of atmosphere and mood he can create. There's a texture to V that Moore's other "greatest" commercial work, Watchmen, doesn't quite achieve, and it's because of Lloyd's art style. The lack of sound effects and, even in some cases, outlines for speech bubbles, accentuates that.

But wait, Duy! you say, it's common comics knowledge among us Mooreniacs (I just made that up. I demand royalties if anyone uses it.) that Alan writes these superdetailed scripts! Wouldn't that mean David was being written for and Alan still deserves most of the credit?

Well, first of all, hypothetical Mooreniac I don't know, I have to ask why you absolutely need to give Moore most of the credit like it will improve your life any (yes, I'm aware of the irony of someone saying that while writing a column about proper credit), but it's likely you missed the part where Moore continually tells his artists to go ahead and do whatever they think is better. The detailed style of writing is to ensure a greater level of control because he came up at the time when he didn't know who was going to be drawing his strips, but later on he kept it because it was a way for his artists to have a starting point if they were feeling uninspired. But still, Moore recognizes the artist is the artist, and gives them the keys to the car if they feel like it:

I always in my scripts will give instructions saying: “Look, despite the fact that there's all this previous detail, if you've got a better way of doing this panel, then as long as you basically understand the effect I was going for here and can think of a better way to achieve it, then please do, I'm counting on you, if you've got a better idea than me to throw it in, because that'll make the story better”.

Here's the thing though. It's not true for V, because in V, Moore's scripts apparently were not that detailed. Lloyd recalled in 2005, prior to the release of the movie:

There's this legend that he writes this incredible detailed script.Alan did not have this detailed style, and as we got closer to the end, I used to joke it got kind of wordy. Alan wasn't writing that sort of stuff, and if he had been, I would not have wanted to work with him. If he can tell you exactly what to do, what the hell are you doing there? If you're working as a team, not just as an individual artist, you need to both have your creative freedom, it's very important. We both thought the same way, me and Alan. You need to have your creative territory.

He continues:

I do like to work on a Marvel method, so if I've got the opportunity, and the writer is happy to do it, I like to have a writer detail what happens on a page, but not saying what happens in every scene.

That kind of method works for Lloyd, and Moore's the type of writer who actually will accede to his artist's preferred method (his wife, Melinda Gebbie, apparently had trouble visualizing his scripts, so they worked by personally speaking to each other in person and him demonstrating what he had in mind). And this leads to serendipitous choices, one of which shows up in my personal favorite chapter in the book, "Valerie":

That whole Valerie Page sequence happened almost by accident. The scene in the cinema was something that wasn't written. The whole point that V would be anyone, and Alan said 'put him anywhere you like' and I suggested he could be in a private cinema, watching someone who had the same things done. I like that whole organic process.

Until recently, "Valerie" is the only comic book scene that had been able to make me cry (I'm old now, and I'll cry at anything. The first ten minutes of Up, the ending of Toy Story 3, a random episode of The Wonder Years, Superman destroying Metro--wait, no, not that one. You know that episode of Friends where Chandler refused to cry ever, but once he started, he just cried at everything because the floodgates have opened? That's me. And yes, I watched Friends. Go away now.). It just felt so heartfelt and full of passion and it just came together. And that's great.

In the end, Moore said it best:

V is something that happens at the point where my warped personality meets David's warped personality, and it is something that neither of us could do either by ourselves or working with another artist or writer. Despite the way that some of the series' admirers chose to view it, it isn't "Alan Moore's V" or  "David Lloyd's V." It's a joint effort in every sense of the word, because after trying the alternatives, that is the only way that comics can ever work.

Unfortunately, in my experience, it has been seen as Alan Moore's V. Even after Moore took his name off the movie credits and had David Lloyd get sole credit, people spoke about Moore and whether or not Warner Bros. was right to make the movie in the first place, whether or not they should respect Moore's wishes or do what's best for the company bottom line, everyone pretty much forgetting that David Lloyd gave the movie his approval.

David Lloyd deserves more credit for V. And I want that said for a simple reason: when I ask friends who only ever read the evergreen comics what their favorite comic is, the most frequent answer, by pretty much a wide margin, is V for Vendetta, and it should be known: it's not Alan Moore's V; it's Alan Moore and David Lloyd's V, and that's the way it should be remembered.

How Frank Miller Won Me Over

When I started the Cube just about four years ago, I made it pretty clear that I didn't like, and have never liked, Frank Miller. At the time, the words I'd have used to describe his work included "overrated," "ugly," and "terrible."

Things have changed though, as things are wont to change. The problem with the internet is that things are forever, but we change, as people. Our tastes change. We don't like the same foods all our lives, we don't play the same games, and we don't like the same movies. Why should we like the same comics all our lives?

So, in short, here's...

How Frank Miller Won Me Over

or the Effects of Expectations

by Duy

The funny thing is that Frank Miller wrote one of my first comics ever,What If...? #35, featuring a story in which Elektra was not killed by Bullseye. It was an introduction to comics and is one of the examples I use to show that you can actually jump on most titles in the middle of the action, and was the first exposure I had to Frank Miller's legendary Daredevil and all the characters herein.

It is also the greatest issue of What If...? ever,
and I actually encourage comments arguing otherwise.

I was young though, so it's not like I took notice of Miller's name. When I finally started hearing about who Frank was, it was when I was about 15 years old, and looking for comics that were more "sophisticated" and "grown-up," because of course that's what you do as an adolescent: try to prove to people you're grown up.

The thing though, is that I always heard Miller's name in conjunction with another comic book legend: Alan Moore, who quickly became my all-time favorite writer. Next to the technical precision of Dave Gibbons' art in Watchmen and the sheer passion that exudes from David Lloyd's art in V for Vendetta, Miller's Dark Knight Returns looked... well, ugly. And next to Moore's sublime, calculated, close-to-poetic scripts, Miller sounded like he was writing for a Clint Eastwood movie, or a promo for a WWE wrestler.

"You don't get it boy. This isn't a mudhole. It's an operating table. And I'm the surgeon."

Miller and Dark Knight Returns were frequently mentioned in the same sentences as Moore and Watchmen and to a lesser extent V for Vendetta, but where I absolutely got the hype for the other two, I didn't get the hype for Dark Knight Returns at all. The buzzword used for it was "realistic," but I could see Watchmen as superheroes in the real world. I could see that world as an extrapolation of what would really happen if these characters truly existed. The Dark Knight Returns felt like a kids' cartoon taken to the adult extreme, and to top it all off, it ends with Batman kicking Superman's ass — not the best way to win me over, even if Miller did admit to structuring the story in such a way that serviced Batman at the expense of Superman.

The next Miller story I read was Batman: Year One, which was expertly drawn by David Mazzucchelli. But for all the talk about it being a great Batman story, it was barely a Batman story at all. As great a Commissioner Gordon story as it was, I didn't shell out the money for a Commissioner Gordon story, in much the same way that I would be annoyed if I paid money for a Black Widow movie and it was actually about Hawkeye.

Despite all that, I kept trying out Miller. In 2002, I read the second volume of his Daredevil run, which contained the original run of Elektra, from her first appearance to her death at the hands of Bullseye. It was, at the time, my favorite thing he'd done, but only because I thought everything he'd done that I'd read was overrated. Even back then, I still didn't really get it. I couldn't really divorce from it the fact that it was written for a monthly series that was never meant to be collected, so it just felt really dated. I wasn't quite at the point yet where I could appreciate something that created a blueprint or changed the game, still couldn't quite see Miller's supposed mastery at work.

I skipped Miller for a long time after that. 300 and Sin City didn't interest me for the same reasons: I really hated his art. I thought it looked ugly. I did my best, in college, to write about Dark Knight Returns just to see if I could understand it, but while I could distill its themes, such as its meditation on power and the power of the media, I still could not, for the life of me, find its appeal.

It was because of Miller, almost singlehandedly, really, that I realized when people used the word "realistic," they really mean "grim" or "dark," with lots of shadows and a lot of violence. Nothing in Dark Knight Returns is realistic in the sense of being truly believable, short of internal character logic prevailing, which is true for all good stories and is not something to be considered exceptional. We're talking about a story where Batman gets physically bigger with each chapter, and where a fifty-year-old man magically gets better just by feeling the thrill of fighting. How is that believable? Look, I've seen Michael Jordan play for the Wizards, okay? I know it's possible to do it in bursts, but that kind of walks the line of disbelief suspension.

So I ignored the sequel, Dark Knight Strikes Again. I ignored The Spirit movie, because it felt like Miller was just doing a Sin City spoof and not actually any sort of adaptation of the Spirit of any kind. As mentioned, I skipped 300 and Sin City. But the one thing I couldn't avoid was All-Star Batman and Robin, simply because this panel went viral.

"What, are you dense? Are you retarded or something? Who the hell do you think I am?
I'm the goddamn Batman."

At this point, I was just convinced that Miller had a classic case of overcompensation, and that this was why he always went overboard with the testosterone. I left it alone for a long time, until one day, someone — I forget who, exactly — told me, "You really should be reading All-Star Batman and Robin. Just don't take it too seriously. Just think of it as Frank Miller tripping." (That was a translation. Filipinos tend to use the word "trip" in the colloquial sense a lot, as in "just having fun for the hell of it.)

And you know what, that guy was right. Once I looked at it that way, All-Star Batman and Robin instantly became one of the most fun comics I ever read, similar to how Adam West's Batman all of a sudden was brilliant to me once I actually realized they were having fun.

Actually, that's a good comparison — Adam West Batman and Frank Miller's All-Star Batman seem like polar opposite takes on the character, though they equally fall into parody.

All-Star never finished, and I didn't bother with Miller after that. At some point in the last two years, though, my friend Benj, artist of Fallen Ash, and Cube Columnist Travis, told me to give The Dark Knight Strikes Again a shot, along with The Spirit movie. I knew these two guys well, and knew what  got them to enjoy stuff, and among them were guts, energy, and creative risks. So I went into Strikes Again with that in mind, no expectation of "realism" and "plausibility" at all. And you know what?

I enjoyed it. A lot. I didn't love it, but it had some of the most creative uses of superpowers I'd ever seen (the way Green Lantern kept himself hidden for years was an "Aw yeah!" moment, and the Flash's speed was so efficiently shown), and it was just filled with so much energy that, despite its lack of any semblance of narrative cohesion (not Miller's fault — apparently DC changed a bunch of stuff at the last minute due to 9/11), it became a real page-turner. I was finally getting it. Miller was having fun.

Then I watched The Spirit movie, and guess what? It was fun. I ignored it for a long time because it wasn't Eisner's Spirit, but Miller's love for the material actually shone through. Yes, it's campy — but so was Eisner's Spirit. And it's the second greatest campy comic book movie of all time. If you're like me, who ignored it because it looked truly cheesy, give it a shot and keep an open mind. I think you'll have fun.

Also? Easy on the eyes.

So I looked at the Miller runs I'd found overrated back in the day, and how did I miss it? Seriously? How did I miss that Miller was one of the first to do things like this,where he clearly was wearing his influences on his sleeve? This is badass, action-movie dialogue when Bullseye kills Elektra, and it's perfectly appropriate.

How did I miss all the Romance behind Dark Knight Returns? All the magic under the surface and the genuine love Miller had for Batman and all of Batman's influences? I mean, Batman on horseback!

Then I read Daredevil: Born Again and Daredevil: Man Without Fear. And reread Year One. And I realized how I had missed the mark on Miller all along: it's the effect of expectation. Everyone used the word "realistic" on Miller a lot. It's not realistic. There's "dark." A lot of his stuff isn't even dark. (Hello, Batman on horseback!)

When I stopped looking at Miller in those terms, I kind of saw Miller how I should have always seen him. A supremely talented craftsman who was so good at visual storytelling and who genuinely loved what he was doing, and who loved gigantic moments and badass dialogue.

Would my assessment of Miller work for everyone? I wouldn't expect it to. I'm sure some people buy into the plausibility of his stories, or will say that "I'm your worst nightmare. The kind that makes you wake up screaming for your mother" is something they hear every day. But learning to appreciate Frank Miller reminded me that it's important to have fun. That long-lasting and revered works can come just out of a love for old material and a desire to be true to it. That panned material can be enjoyable, and even great, if you just remove your preconceptions of it and look for the positives. And you know, rereading World's Funnest now, where Miller parodies himself, he's also reminded me that you can make fun of yourself.

So if you're creating comics, throw caution to the wind! Put your urban hero on horseback and don't be afraid to go the other way with it when it's run its course! Use all the dialogue you wanted just 'cause it sounds cool and see what sticks! Maybe you'll end up with an all-time classic, maybe you'll end up with a cult hit, or maybe everyone will hate it — except you'd be having fun, regardless.

Read some of Frank Miller's stuff here:

Six Comics Characters that Used to Be Huge and You've Forgotten About

Sometimes, comics will give you someone like Superman, who was huge when he came out and will still be going strong in the public consciousness almost a century later. Sometimes, though, you'll get characters who'll take the world by storm, and then some decades pass and the new generations either only have a passing knowledge of him, or don't know him at all. It happens, of course, because people move on from fads. But they were there. So let's name...

Six Comics Characters that Used to Be Huge and You've Forgotten About

by Duy

6. Blondie

Blondie's still in today's newspapers, mostly as an institution, really. But cartoonist Chic Young's strip about Blondie and Dagwood Bumstead was huge back in the day, not only spawning 28 — twenty-eight! — movies and two TV shows, but also coining the term "Dagwood sandwich," which is just a sandwich with a gajillion fillings.

(Re)Discover Blondie here:




5. Pogo

I recently watched two documentaries. One was The Cartoonist: Jeff Smith, BONE and the Changing Face of Comics, about Jeff Smith and Bone, arguably the most important all-ages comic book cartoonist in the last thirty years. The other one was Dear Mr. Watterson, about Bill Watterson and Calvin and Hobbes, almost inarguably the most important comic strip of the last thirty years. You know what those two guys have in common? They were both directly influenced by Walt Kelly's Pogo. And Pogo was huge back when it was coming out — many a comic strip enthusiast I know would rate Kelly as the most important funny animal artist ever. Pogo, about a possum who lives with his friends in the swamp, would delve into social and political commentary and was notable for making fun of Senator Joseph McCarthy. Asterix was also influenced by Pogo, and Alan Moore paid homage to the strip in a classic issue of Swamp Thing. In a true case of "Out of sight, out of mind," it's hard to imagine how big Pogo was when it was coming out. But it was there.

Perhaps its most enduring legacy is the famous quote, "We have met the enemy, and he is us."

(Re)Discover Pogo here:




4. Barney Google

Barney Google, with the goo-goo-goo-ga-ly eyes, is a perfect example of a strip fading from the public consciousness even if its influence is still being felt.

Google, the search engine, was named after the mathematical number googol, which is a one followed by a hundred zeroes. However, the term googol was coined officially in 1940 by Milton Sirotta, nephew of mathematician Edward Kasner. And as Brian Cronin points out, it is extremely unlikely that Sirotta came up with the term "googol" on his own, because ubiquitous at the time in so many media (including sheet music!) was Barney Google, the short fellow who had bad luck.

Sometimes things get so big that when they leave, something lasting is left behind.

(Re)Discover Barney Google here:




3. Li'l Abner

Seriously, how many of you know Li'l Abner? Okay, I see some hands. How many of you have only heard of Li'l Abner? How many of you have actually read a Li'l Abner book? Pretty much most of the hands went down, I'm sure, but this comic strip about a young hillbilly named, uh, Li'l Abner was huge at the time and sparked some trends. In addition to adding new words to the American lexicon, such as "shmoo" (a generic kind of good that reproduces itself), "schmooze," and "no-goodnik," Al Capp's strip also created the Sadie Hawkins Dance, which became an American tradition (it's the dance where the girls ask out the boys). There's a whole load of other things that started and was given life in the pages of Li'l Abner, including, if you believe Al Capp, the miniskirt, which he put Daisy Mae in in 1934.

(Re)Discover Li'l Abner here:




2. Popeye

I already see this one going unrecognized by a lot of the younger generations, and I'm weirded out by it because I never thought it would happen. Popeye, created by EC Segar in the pages of Thimble Theater, used to be immortal. He'd fight Bluto over Olive Oyl, gain strength by eating spinach,take care of Swee'pea, and have an awesome cast of characters.

Popeye was so huge that they coined words like "jeep" and "goon." J. Wellington Wimpy's catchphrase, "I would gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger to-day!" was a catchphrase.

Anyway, Popeye's still around, but that's the challenge with a society where everyone is more in control of what they tune into and where it's easier to filter everything. You can't be as widespread as you once were just by "being around."

(Re)Discover Popeye here:




1. Just About Everyone from Harvey Comics

How many readers of this site even know a company called Harvey Comics existed? Not a lot, I'd bet — but how many readers would recognize Richie Rich, Casper the Friendly Ghost, Wendy the Good Little Witch, and Hot Stuff the Little Devil?

Probably a lot. Casper actually showed up in a cartoon first, but he quickly became a fixture in the comics (with some postulating that he was Richie Rich's ghost). And they were huge. Their iconography still permeates to today. They still get put on merchandise (one strip club in the Red Light District over here has a neon Hot Stuff on the entrance), Richie Rich and Casper were in fairly successful movies, and Casper even spawned imitators, because clearly, "friendly ghost" has a ton of mileage.

It's weird to think they're basically remembered as huge now only by the people old enough to remember them, or only by name or concept, dismissed by the younger generations as fads of bygone ages. But they were there, and they were huge.

So the next time you're enjoying your Walking Dead or Game of Thrones and talking about it with everyone, the next time you talk to someone about Spongebob Squarepants, think a bit about how huge and ubiquitous they are, and how, in all likelihood, people your age in twenty years probably won't know them by more than name.

(Re)Discover Harvey Comics here: