An Open Letter to Frank Miller

by: Jesse Baruffi

Dear Frank,

Stop. Just stop, seriously. You used to write really awesome comics. Sure, some of them were kinda weird about gender issues, what with every grown woman being a nun or a whore and all, but despite that, the art and the soul was there, and there were some very noble ideals underneath the noirish skin.

But now...geez. It's like you watched Dave Sim's meltdown and thought, "I bet I could do that!" You've gone from a great writer with some eccentricities to a cranky, bigoted old man and a parody of your former self. I mean, the people who defend your more recent work pretty much have to say, "Oh, he's doing it as a joke." But you're not, are you?

At this point, you should probably retire. Let the good parts of your career eventually outshine The Spirit, Holy Terror, The Goddamn Batman, and all that is probably to come. But I suspect that won't happen. Any resistance to you now will just drive you further into certainty that you're right. And you'll wonder why all the ungrateful bastards turned on you, when in fact it was you who turned on them.

No, I'm not saying I'm going to boycott your work. A boycott implies that I might buy it otherwise. But to be honest, whatever absurd screeds you levy against the Occupy movement, you wear your madness on your sleeve, and every bit of it just shoves The Dark Knight Returns and Born Again and the first couple volumes of Sin City further back into the recesses of memory to be replaced by whatever it is you're saying now.

Look, I don't need to agree with everything a creator says, and they don't need to hug puppies and kittens. But seriously, if you can't be both a nice person and a talented creator, at least be one of them. That way, when you die, people will be able to say, "Though his work may have waned in later years, Miller remained a likeable and helpful figure in the comics community," or, "Though a man of controversial opinions, Miller's talent remained second-to-none." At the moment, you're working pretty hard on having neither.

In short, if you can do nothing else, leave me with my ability to enjoy your work from when it was good. The last thing I want to do is have to sell those enjoyable TPBs just because you couldn't stop talking about how much you hate Muslims or liberals.