Frank Miller’s rise tracks superhero comics’ failure to create new mythic characters

Evidence

Miller’s legacy for comics has been ambivalent at best. Reflect on the fact that his rise coincides with the almost total failure of superhero comics to produce any new characters with mythic resonance. The “maturity” for which Miller has been celebrated corresponds with comics’ depressive and introspective adolescence, and for him, as for all adolescents, the worst sin is exuberance. Hence his trademark style is deflationary, taciturn: consider all those portentous pages stripped of dialogue in which barely anything happens and contrast them with the crazed effervescence of the typical Marvel page in the Sixties. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 407