Darren Aronofsky has been doing the rounds for his upcoming Black Swan, but once one commits to directing the next installment in a major superhero franchise, it’s hard to escape.

Which is why we now know a few new and interesting things about the next Wolverine movie.

Last week Gucci debuted the trailer for the TV spot advertising its new fragrance, Gucci Guilty, and revealed that the commercial is being directed by none other than Frank Miller, cinematicauteur of the comic book world.

Frank Miller’s work is consistently, offensively, shockingly misogynistic.

I say this as someone whose first graphic novel was a copy of Batman: Year One, and I say this as a girl who has been in love with comics from the age of eleven.  There are two kinds of women in Frank Miller stories:

1. Women who are employed in the sex industry.
2. Women who are beaten and/or brutally murdered by the end of the piece.

Frank Miller likes Noir, a genre which is rife with virgin/whore dichotomies, but there comes a point when one must draw the line.  Take the stories selected for the Sin City movie.  The only woman who is not a prostitute or a stripper is a lesbian parole officer who likes to walk around her apartment naked.  Elijah Wood amputates her arm and eats it in front of her.  She is then gunned down by corrupt cops.

Frank Miller introduced us to Catwoman as a former prostitute.  He created the first female Robin and the formidable assassin Elektra, only to eventually torture and kill them, respectively.  Wonder Woman in The Dark Knight Strikes Back is mostly just around for Superman to have sex with. Successful print reporter Viki Vale in All Star Batman and Robin dictates a story about idiotic playboy Bruce Wayne while lounging around in her underwear, but drops her evening plans immediately when Bruce Wayne requests that she join him in five minutes with all possible excitement and not a trace of bother.  And then there’s this cover.  Note the placement of his signature.

It seems that the only woman Frank Miller feels safe with is one who is dependent on a man’s attention for her survival.

>>>Read the full essay at Styleite.

Blame Kevin Smith: The sixth issue of Batman: The Widening Gyre, a twelve-part, official DC miniseries written by the Clerks director and illustrated by Walt Flanagan, features this charmer of a panel, which etches Batman’s avowed bladder spasm in the annals of comics history. What’s worse, this is actually a flashback to Frank Miller‘s path-setting Batman: Year One — to Batman’s pivotal first speech to the corrupt gangsters who control Gotham, which TVTropes identifies as the comic’s “Crowning Moment of Awesome.” Not anymore.

Comics fans being what they are, this exchange has inspired quite some controversy:

In an interview with the LA Times and in a Twitter based Q&A session, Frank Miller has revealed some details of his upcoming Xerxes, a graphic novel prequel to the groundbreaking 300 with a decent shot at becoming another movie if all goes according to plan.  For example, while Xerxes is the title character, the “lead character” is Themistocles, whose historical role is actually super interesting.  Even Miller admits that the intellectual Athenian statesman Themistocles is the polar opposite of the Spartan war-king Leonidas.  The story will begin at the Battle of Marathon and cover ten years’ time, presumably wrapping up somewhere around the Battle of Thermopylae (i.e., 300).  Both Leonidas and Ephialtes will appear.

Well, that’s all the facts.  But we’d be remiss if we didn’t point out the details in there that stirred the sleeping beast of our nerdrage.  Stirred it, but did not rouse it to full wakefulness.

Also, why is it that even unaltered stills from 300 look like bad Photoshop mock-ups?

Read on...

This week, at the annual New York Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art Festival, Frank Miller took part in a panel on the “art of superheroes,” where he grumpily confirmed that he is no longer making his 122 page “Batman Fights Al-Qaeda” opus.

Fellow panelist Kyle Baker mentioned that he prefers to keep politics out of his superhero comics, leaving such heady subjects as religious extremism and the war on terror to his self published work.  When he acknowledged that “trying to shoehorn Batman into Afghanistan” was more Miller’s speed, Miller replied “No, I’m not doing that anymore.”

This weekend is Wondercon and of course announcements are rolling out to let us know what to expect from the world of comics, movies, and science fiction. The two that have caught our eye are not exactly what we would call reassuring.

DC Comics has announced that Frank Miller and Jim Lee are still dedicated to the long running “deadline challenged” series of All-Star Batman and Robin, and will be starting up a new series Dark Knight: Boy Wonder, to begin running in February 2011. They promise that these issues will ship on time. Without, you know, switching to a bi-monthly schedule halfway through. And then a five month delay on the last issue which ultimately has to be recalled.

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To the joy of every fan who’s still sort of hoping for a Jurassic Park IV (10 years ago I heard there was going to be a Velociraptor/motorcycle chase and have clung to the idea ever since) IDW Publishing has announced that they will have a new Jurassic Park based series starting up in June.

The title is Jurassic Park: Redemption, and I can’t decide if that’s more awesome than it is hilarious, or more hilarious than it is awesome.

Fresh on the heels of Alice in Wonderland‘s box office success, rumors are flying about not one, but two feature film remakes of The Wizard of Oz.  Now, there’s more than one way to retell a story, and there are a few ways to redo Wizard that would probably work.  The odds of Hollywood actually finding those particular ways is unlikely.

More and more often these days, I find myself shouting at movie trailers and announcements: “WHY would you remake that?” Clash of the Titans?  The Karate Kid? My Fair Lady?

I’d like to take some time and explain when a remake generally isn’t a good idea, and when it generally is, and whether or not this means that The Wizard of Oz is something we should revisit.

Legendary graphic novelist Frank Miller — you may know him as the guy behind The Dark Knight Returns, Sin City, and 300, appears to have recently joined Twitter with the username FrankMillerInk.

The account has yet to be verified, so it may just be a hat-clad impostor, but MTV’s Splash Page reports that ““The Spirit” movie producer F.J. DeSanto and “Fanboys” director Kyle Newman have lightly verified the account with their own tweets.”

A few more points of evidence in favor of this being the real Miller: