GRAPHIC NOVEL: Holy Terror,By Frank Miller, Legendary Comics, 120pp. €32
A TERRORIST attack interrupts a superhero tryst while hijacked jets bring down an ersatz Statue of Liberty, and nail bombs send their deadly cargo careening across a blood-red sky. These are some of the starkly rendered images from Holy Terror, Frank Miller's belated right-wing response to 9/11, a graphic novel that initially appeals but ultimately appals.
Thanks to his genre-redefining work on Batman ( The Dark Knight Returnsand Batman: Year One) and the successful film adaptations of his books Sin Cityand 300, the writer and artist is one of the few comic-book creators who enjoys recognition beyond the boundaries of comic-book fandom. (His work is steeped in noir tropes of buxom femme fatales and laconic men of action.) After a brief, ultimately unsuccessful, sojourn behind the camera for a Will Eisner adaptation, The Spirit, Miller returns to comics for his 10-years-in-the-making Holy Terror.
One might argue that a medium as ephemeral as comics has no business addressing real-world conflicts, but many graphic novels have offered fresh perspectives on complex topics, from Art Spiegelman's Pulitzer Prize-winning Holocaust analogy Mausto the journalist Joe Sacco's Palestineto the Iranian expatriate Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis. These books have used graphic simplicity to renew images that have become worryingly familiar in footage and photographs. Even mainstream comics have, for better or worse, addressed wider issues, with superheroes enlisted during the second World War to sell war bonds, plant victory gardens and, on the cover of the first issue of Captain America,sock Hitler on the jaw.
Similarly, while most mainstream entertainments hid behind safe analogies immediately following 9/11, Spider-Man and other costumed heroes were touching down at Ground Zero within a month. Comics have always enjoyed a special relationship with New York, as creators such as Miller, who live and work in the Big Apple, are largely responsible for this American art form. Thus whether the city charter says Gotham, Metropolis or Star City, most comics are thought to be set in New York. Accordingly, Holy Terror, which is a superhero war-on-terror revenge fantasy, might be understood as the work of a creator still struggling to process the events of that terrible day – though that might be a more sympathetic reading than this difficult book deserves.
The novel was originally conceived of as Holy Terror, Batman! This planned DC Comics publication, the title of which plays on Robin's chirpy quips from the camp 1960s TV series, was a "Batman versus al-Qaeda" narrative that Miller unashamedly placed in the propagandist tradition of second World War comics.
Somewhere around Bush’s second term, however, Miller admitted (or was forced to concede) that Batman was no longer a tenable protagonist. So the story opens with the Fixer (a costumed vigilante who is essentially Batman minus the pointy ears) as he pursues a female cat burglar (not Catwoman) across the rooftops of Empire City (née Gotham). When the hero and city are left studded with projectiles from a terrorist explosion, the Fixer promises, “not on my watch”.
The opening section, in which Miller marries the chiaroscuro of Sin Cityto the ballet of his superheroes, is the book's most successful. The story soon descends into crass caricature and dangerous simplifications. It also perpetuates the myth, fostered through bomb's-eye footage of aerial attacks, that counterterrorism is surgical and clean and that the casualties are confined to terrorists and insurgents, with the Fixer reflecting that "we give them exactly what they want – minus the innocent victims".
By the time Miller throws in an Irish terrorist the book has long since descended into a hateful mess of controversy-baiting caricatures that makes his earlier war-on-terror parable seem nuanced by comparison.
As he is both a writer and an artist, the comic channels Miller's world view more effectively than prose could (the book is coloured by Dave Stewart, although he is given little to do except add occasional splashes of claret), with scenes increasingly conveyed in chunky, chaotic lines that elevate the "hero" while demonising his enemies. Perhaps Miller felt that by evoking second World War comics he could deflect criticism and channel his anger unfettered on to the page. What he seems to ignore is that reactive second World War comics were rarely knowingly developed and that their storytelling methods are viewed by even the most ardent of enthusiasts as anachronistic. Miller's citation of these earlier comics is tantamount to a film-maker using DW Griffith's Ku Klux Klan epic The Birth of a Nationas a defence against charges of racism. And while other 9/11 comics, such as Art Spiegelman's In the Shadow of No Towers, were grounded in the real world, terrorist attacks have little impact in a genre of comic books populated by men of steel who topple buildings every time they stretch.
Holy Terroris the first publication from Legendary Comics, a subsidiary of Legendary Pictures, which produced the successful adaptation of Miller's 300. Perhaps the production company picked up the book, after Miller parted company with DC Comics, with an eye to emulating their 2007 collaboration. And had the story been published immediately after 9/11 it may have found a receptive audience, but by now Holy Terror, and any potential film, are woefully out of sync with an industry and readership that finally seem to have outgrown Frank Miller.
Liam Burke teaches media studies at NUI Galway
