Notes by Frank Miller
[The following is from the book The Complete Frank Miller Batman, published by Longmeadow Press in 1989, which included all three Frank Miller Batman series in a hardbound book.]
If your only memory of Batman is that of Adam West and Burt Ward exchanging camped-out quips while clobbering slumming guest stars Vincent Price and Cesar Romero, I hope this book will come as a surprise.
For me, Batman was never funny. I was eight years old when I picked up and 80-page annual from the shelf of a local supermarket. The artwork on one story looked good and scary.
Gotham City was cold shafts of concrete lit by cold moonlight, windswept and bottomless, fading to a cloud bank of city lights, a wet, white mist, miles below me. The street sounds were a soft, sad roar, unbroken and unchanging.
Then somewhere, somewhere in the stone rat's maze down there, tiny but unmuffled, a pane-glass window shattered. The sound was almost pretty, like chimes. The chimes became a single ringing bell, a burglar alarm, the old kind.
A Thompson machine gun spat at the bell. A madman laughed wildly, maliciously. The laughter echoed forever.
A shadow fell across me, from above. Wings flapped, close by and almost silent.
Glistening wet, black against the blackened sky, a monster, a giant, winged gargoyle, hunched forward, pausing at a building's ledge, and cocked its head, following the laugh's last seconds.
Moonlight glanced across its back, across its massive shoulders, down its craned, cabled neck, across its skull, striking a triangle at one pointed bat's ear.
It rose into space, its wings spread wide, then fell, its wings now a fluttering cape wrapped tight about the body of a man.
It fell past me, its shadow sliding across walls, growing to swallow whole buildings, lit by the clouds below.
The shadow faded into the clouds.
It was gone.
...the 80-page giant comic cost 25 cents, but I bought it anyway.
Frank Miller
Los Angeles 1988
This excerpt © DC Comics Inc., 1989. All rights reserved. Batman and all related characters and indicia are trademarks of DC Comics, Inc.
MILLER
Introduction to The Complete Frank Miller Batman
Wanted:
Santa Claus
-- Dead or Alive
Notes by Frank Miller
