Writer Blocks – Daredevil Visionaries: Frank Miller Volume 2 (part two)

The second half of Daredevil Visionaries: Frank Miller Volume 2 is by far my favorite piece of work from Miller’s run as “writer / artist”. Daredevil issues # 174 – 182 not only conclude the Elektra Saga, they also introduce the visual storytelling techniques and narrative elements that would make Frank Miller become FRANK MILLER!

At this point in his artistic career, Miller began to employ a five-panel horizontal “wide screen” layout to his pages, beginning with page 5 of Daredevil #174.



As if to announce the film-like character of the design, Miller has Daredevil bounding through Times Square, in the middle panel actually paying homage to the films of the time: Thief, Eyewitness, Night Hawks and The Postman Always Rings Twice.  Here we also see the seeds of what Miller would do in his most popular work: Batman – The Dark Knight Returns.  Every page in that book is composed of four horizontal bars broken into sixteen panels, but four horizontal planes nonetheless.  Instead of the movie screens in Daredevil, Miller uses the television screen, naturally mimicking the emerging music video culture of the mid-1980’s, in Dark Knight Returns.  The television screen as window is used sparingly in this Daredevil volume, but it’s the movie screen that dominates the visual style.

The second narrative technique Miller begins is the elimination of thought balloons (remember those) and the omniscient narrator, electing to instead tell a story through inner monologue captions from a single narrator.  The most striking use of this, both thematically and visually, is “Spiked!” in Daredevil #179.  Miller begins the true development of one of his favorite characters, Daily Bugle reporter Ben Urich, with the opening caption: “My name is Ben Urich. I’m a reporter.  This is my story.”



Note the continuation of the five-panel layout. The beauty of this technique is we are being told the story from a character who is not the lead, and who better to “report” on events than a reporter.  Especially striking is the font letterer Joe Rosen used for the text.  We can feel Urich typing this story in his mind, on the hunt for that elusive Pulitzer he knows he could win if he sold-out and revealed Daredevil’s secret identity, Matt Murdock.

Nowhere is the use of this narrative device more evident than in Daredevil #181, and its promise of an end to a major character.



Miller tells the story from the perspective of arch nemesis assassin Bullseye. It’s a tale of jealousy: Bullseye’s jealous that Elektra has replaced him as the Kingpin’s assassin.  It’s a tale of madness: both Bullseye’s homicidal tendencies and the dark shadow that would descend over Matt Murdock from this point forward.  But most importantly, it’s a tale of lost love.

This is a “Special Double-Sized Issue!”, and from the cover one would expect an epic twenty-page throw down between Elektra and Bullseye, but after eighteen pages of suspenseful build-up, the fight lasts just four pages before Bullseye delivers the chilling piece of dialogue:

“Put up . . . pretty good fight, toots . . . you’re pretty good . . . but me . . . I’m magic.”



Then performs his next trick . . .



This page, with its release of the built-up tension through an overt sexual image, would be shocking today, let alone when it was originally published in 1982. What was even more shocking for the time was the death of a character that had been such a narrative force.  Bullseye was a relatively minor villain.  Elektra was the love of Matt Murdock’s life.  Readers of the time must have assumed that it would be Bullseye who perished, not the striking and mysterious Elektra, with so much potential and so many more stories to tell.

And that is the brilliance that was Frank Miller in the 1980’s:  taking established norms and subverting them, evolving them, and creating them to serve the story he needed to tell.

I really miss that guy.

Next Week – The Conclusion