Frank Miller Biography

Date of Birth: January 27, 1957

Although Frank Miller was born in Olney, Maryland, he grew up in Montpelier, Vermont. Like many other fantasy and comic creators, Miller was a dreamer growing up. In his early teens, he had stopped reading comics and began reading thrillers and watching movies to re-adjust himself to the 'real world.'

In the beginning, Miller's career in comics was uncertain, which was evident by how infrequent his early work was while working with major publishers, including Gold Key, DC and Marvel. He first drew attention to his work with two issues of Marvel's Spectacular Spider-Man, teaming the comic hero with another popular character, Daredevil. On account of this assignment, a year later, Miller was offered a regular penciling position on Daredevil's own comic book. Shortly after, he took over the writing of the story. In collaboration with inker Klaus Janson, Miller stayed on in his position for several years and they attracted an increasing number of fans. It was during this period that Miller also created the ninja assassin-for-hire Elektra.

In 1986, Miller's most notable comic book work was the groundbreaking Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, an alternate history story about the caped-crusader in a grim future. He wrote and penciled the story. In 1988, he wrote Batman: Year One, about Batman's first year on the job. Around this time, Miller also produced Ronin, a futuristic high-tech samurai pop adventure. He also worked on Elektra: Assassin, Elektra Lives Again, Give Me Liberty, Hard Boiled, and Bad Boy.

Following his work on the Elektra books, Miller wrote the screenplay to Robocop 2 (1990), as well as the script for the sequel, Robocop 3 (1993). Miller's long-running independent series, the stylistic black and white series Sin City debuted in 1991. This was Miller's first entirely solo venture. In creating it, he drew upon his love of film noir and pulp detective stories. He has cited some of his inspirations to be noir writers Mickey Spillane, Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. Other influences include Eastern art and literature, as well as Akira Kurosawa, Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima.

In 1998, Miller created 300, a historical work about Spartans during the Persian Wars. Miller also returned to Batman in 2001 with the very successful The Dark Knight Strikes Again.

Miller's first work as a director was on the film adaptation of his comic series, Sin City (2005). He turned down co-director Robert Rodriguez's proposals to do the adaptation several times before agreeing. However, Rodriguez was dedicated to making a film faithful to the comic. This not only meant Miller being on set everyday, but the original comics being used as definitive storyboards. In addition, Miller was so happy with the resulting film, he is not opposed to working on a sequel.

Filmography:

Sin City (2005)