Frank Miller is now sorry about his graphic novel Holy Terror, which was published in 2011. Miller is known as a comic book genius, the man who revolutionized Daredevil, created 300 and Sin City, which became great movies, and gave the world The Dark Knight Returns, a classic 1986 Batman story. Miller has just published an autobiography, Push the Wall: My Life, Writing, Drawing, and the Art of Storytelling.
Miller has often produced comics that offend liberals, and in Push the Wall he apologizes for one of his most realistic and brutal works. Holy Terror depicts a vigilante named “The Fixer” who goes around Empire City—i.e. New York—beating down Islamic terrorists. Here’s Miller’s explanation:
This doesn’t mean that what I dream up is always hatched in joy, fully conceived, and/or well-received. Remember: some things land, others don’t. Later in my career, I created something that sparked a fire of criticism, some of it warranted. When I created Holy Terror, I was in a rage—a crazy-ass blood rage. Sure I was—I had just moved back to Manhattan, my one true home, when nineteen terrorists hijacked four fully fueled commercial jets full of passengers, crashing one into the Pentagon, one into a field in Pennsylvania, and two into the Twin Towers in lower Manhattan. 2,977 people died on September 11, 2001, and 2,753 of those perished in Manhattan. Like so many other New Yorkers, I wasn’t far from the scene of this horrendous atrocity. The stench of it—the burning metal and plastic, the burning human meat—these are things that I will never forget. It lingered for weeks, a sickening, sensory stew, a daily reminder of mass murder, of lives lost, of the open wound to my city, to my country. The comic features The Fixer, a vigilante who takes on Islamic terrorists after an attack on New York, thinly disguised as Empire City. It was my ferocious gut-level reaction to 9/11 and the ongoing jihad activity that followed. Holy Terror was done is a state of unbroken trauma.
Though perhaps an over-the-top apology, his emotions at the time of writing the book, in fact, sound reasonable.
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