by Carla Occaso, republished from the November 26 Montpelier Bridge

This author started as a U-32 seventh grader two years after comic book artist, author, and Hollywood director Frank Miller graduated in 1975. Miller’s reputation was still lingering in the halls as students and teachers who knew his work spoke admiringly of him for years to follow. Miller was already selling his comic art as a teenager to publishers including D.C. Comics and Marvel, according to his website frankmillerink.com. But it was his re-imagining of the Batman character in “Batman: The Dark Knight Returns,” released in 1986, that gave him worldwide recognition. 

The publication, released as a four-issue mini-series, became a New York Times bestseller, according to britannica.com. He had taken a superhero character created in 1939 and brought him out of retirement to fight crime in his older years, according to a 2016 Hollywood Reporter interview by Borys Kit titled, “A Rare Interview with Frank Miller: ‘Dark Knight,’ the unmade Darren Aronofsky Batman Movie, and Donald Trump.” The Batman movie that came on the heels of the popularity of Miller’s books was directed by Tim Burton and released in 1989.

But that “Batman” movie wasn’t made from the screenplay Miller wrote with Darren Aronofsky. Miller’s script was too dark for Warner Bros., according to the Hollywood Reporter interview.

“The executive wanted to do a Batman he could take his kids to. And this wasn’t that. It didn’t have the toys in it. The Batmobile was just a tricked-out car. And Batman turned his back on his fortune to live a street life so he could know what people were going through. He built his own Batcave in an abandoned part of the subway. And (he) created Batman out of whole cloth to fight crime and a corrupt police force,” Miller told Kit.

But before all that, back home in Vermont in the 1970s and 1980s, cartooning and comic art was serious business at U-32. My (and most likely Miller’s) U-32 English teacher, Jeff Danziger, was nominated in 1987 and 1993 for a Pulitzer Prize for Illustrated Reporting and Commentary for his cartooning skills.

VDC Editor’s personal note: Unless you read comics in the 1980’s (as I did), it’s hard to understand the seismic impact Frank Miller had on the industry and the emergence of the ‘graphic novel.’ My now deceased friend Roger Olsen grew up in Berlin. His best friend Eddie Miller had a little brother named Frank who used to run around with a towel around his neck saying, ‘I’m Batman! I’m Batman!’ When Roger wondered aloud whatever became of little Frankie Miller, he was surprised to hear ‘the rest of the story.’

The Washington County connection with Batman also includes (of course) fanboy Patrick Leahy, who appeared in five Batman films during his tenure in the U.S. Senate. Leahy, the son of a Montpelier printer, began reading the Batman comic as a boy in the 1940’s, purchasing the latest edition from a bookstore owner who would tap the window as he walked by to let him know it had arrived.

According to Wikipedia, Miller was born in Olney, Maryland, on January 27, 1957, and raised in Montpelier, the fifth of seven children of a nurse mother and a carpenter/electrician father.

Republished with permission from The Montpelier Bridge, the community newspaper for Montpelier and surrounding towns.