#831: Frank Miller, Comic Book Legend — Creative Process, The Dark Knight Returns, Sin City, 300, and Much More

Frank Miller is regarded as one of the most influential and awarded creators. He began his career in comics in the late 1970s, first gaining notoriety as the artist, and later writer, of Daredevil https://www.amazon.com/Daredevil-Again-Marvel-Premier-Collection/dp/1302965980/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20 for Marvel Comics. Next, came the science-fiction samurai drama Ronin https://www.amazon.com/Frank-Millers-Ronin-Black-Label/dp/1401290973/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20, followed by the groundbreaking Batman: The Dark Knight Returns https://www.amazon.com/Batman-Dark-Knight-Returns-Anniversary/dp/1401263119/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20 and Batman: Year One https://www.amazon.com/Batman-Year-One-Frank-Miller/dp/1401207529/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20 with artist David Mazzuchelli. Following these seminal works, Miller fulfilled a lifelong dream by doing an all-out crime series, Sin City https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00A7H2NC4/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20, which spawned two blockbuster films that he co-directed with Robert Rodriguez. Miller’s multi-award-winning graphic novel 300 https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00A7H2MG6/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20 was also adapted into a highly successful film by Zack Snyder. His upcoming memoir, Push the Wall: My Life, Writing, Drawing, and the Art of Storytelling https://www.amazon.com/dp/1668065290?tag=offsitoftimfe-20, is now available for pre-order. This episode is brought to you by: Eight Sleep Pod Cover 5 https://www.eightsleep.com/tim/ sleeping solution for dynamic cooling and heating: EightSleep.com/Tim https://www.eightsleep.com/tim/ (use code TIM to get $350 off your very own Pod 5 Ultra.) 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Timestamps: [00:00:00] Start.[00:02:14] Aristotle’s definition of happiness: Devotion to excellence.[00:03:02] Tools of the trade: Blackwing pencils, India ink, liquid frisket.[00:04:45] Sin City‘s physical creation at “twice up” size.[00:08:06] The toothbrush spatter technique.[00:09:24] Channeling impatience, anger, and violence into dramatic creative work.[00:10:33] What Jack Kirby knew about making comics competitive with cinema’s spectacle.[00:11:56] Will Eisner and The Spirit‘s influence on the US market where writer-artist duality is rare.[00:13:33] How Jack Kirby blasted apart the panel grid (and a young Frank’s mind).[00:15:49] Push the wall and defy the code.[00:19:54] The ruthless mentorship of Neal Adams.[00:24:57] The genesis of the Elektra amd Daredevil “soap opera.”[00:27:56] Story structure: Start late, end early.[00:29:10] Trusting the muse over rigid methodology.[00:31:15] European invasion: Moebius and Forbidden Planet.[00:32:52] Japanese influence: Lone Wolf and Cub‘s impact.[00:34:30] Cultural differences in depicting violence and motion.[00:36:38] Ronin: Shameless imitation and rebirth.[00:37:28] How does Frank know if something is working (or not working)?[00:39:27] The critical reception of Ronin as a “broken nose.”[00:42:37] The ruthless structure of The Dark Knight Returns.[00:43:40] Mutual elevation with “smartest fan” Alan Moore.[00:48:26] Robert Rodriguez: Angel of goodwill and generosity.[00:49:28] Sin City film: Co-directing and the Director’s Guild sacrifice.[00:50:31] Working as a “two-headed beast” with Rodriguez.[00:55:27] Favorite films.[00:58:19] Books and ancient history inspiring 300.[00:59:00] Hollywood lessons: The importance of working with the right people.[01:01:13] The partnership and guidance of Silenn Thomas.[01:02:01] The clarity and creative rejuvenation of getting sober from alcohol.[01:04:48] Advice for aspiring comic artists: Story, story, story.[01:06:20] Learning to draw: Bridgman and Loomis books.[01:08:07] Perspective as a mathematical trick and lie.[01:11:00] Dick Giordano’s advice: Lay in blacks first.[01:13:52] Sin City workflow innovation: Batch processing stages.[01:15:48] Dark Horse Comics and creative freedom.[01:17:29] Economy of line work and elegant minimalism.[01:20:46] On collaborating with Bill Sienkiewicz on Elektra.[01:25:20] Billboard wisdom: “Ask every question,” and “Why?”[01:27:08] Challenging pathological conformity.[01:27:39] Parting thoughts and where to find Frank’s work. * For show notes and past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show https://tim.blog/podcast, please visit tim.blog/podcast https://tim.blog/podcast/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=podcast-description. For deals from sponsors of The Tim Ferriss Show https://tim.blog/podcast, please visit tim.blog/podcast-sponsors https://tim.blog/podcast-sponsors Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (5-Bullet Friday) at tim.blog/friday https://go.tim.blog/5-bullet-friday-1/. For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts https://tim.blog/transcripts. Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books https://tim.blog/books. Follow Tim: Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss https://twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferriss https://instagram.com/timferriss/ YouTube: youtube.com/timferriss https://www.youtube.com/timferriss Facebook: facebook.com/timferriss https://www.facebook.com/TimFerriss/ LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/timferriss http://linkedin.com/in/timferriss See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Tim Ferriss?

  Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job to deconstruct world-class performers across all different disciplines. And my guest today is, in a sense, my lifetime, a lifetime in the making, since I've been a fan since I was a wee lad, and certainly many, many months in the making, to do this in person with the one and only Frank Miller. Frank Miller is one of the most influential and awarded creators in entertainment, first gaining notoriety in the late 70s for his transformative work on Marvel's Daredevil. And in the world of comic books, Frank is a rare breed. He's kind of like Bo Jackson in that sense. Not only was he, one of his generations, probably across multiple generations,

• 0:42Tim Ferriss?

  one of the most influential artists in that entire industry, but one of the most influential writers. And that is a very, very, very uncommon combination of talents, particularly in the West. And I'll provide more context. After Daredevil, he went on to create some of the industry's most groundbreaking titles, including Ronin, Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, and Batman: Year One. So if you've seen the later Batman movies, that sort of anti-hero positioning, the imagery, a lot of it comes straight from his work. His series Sin City and the award-winning graphic novel 300 were both adapted into blockbuster films, with Miller co-directing the Sin City movies with Robert Rodriguez, who is my friend here in Austin, has been on the podcast before. Frank's upcoming memoir, Push the Wall:

• 1:26Tim Ferriss?

  My Life, Writing, Drawing, and the Art of Storytelling, is now available for preorder. You can find all things Frank at FrankMillerInk, that's I-N-K, FrankMillerInk.com, and on Instagram, at FrankMillerOfficial. And without further ado, please enjoy a long-awaited-for-me and wide-ranging practical conversation with the one and only Frank Miller.

• 1:50Speaker 01

  At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half-mile before my hands start to shake. Can I answer your personal question?

• 1:57Speaker 02

  Now would be an inappropriate time.

• 2:01Speaker 01

  I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

• 2:13Tim Ferriss?

  Frank, so nice to see you.

• 2:15Speaker 02

  Good to see you.

• 2:17Tim Ferriss?

  And just got off the phone with our mutual friend, Robert Rodriguez. I'm sure that name is going to come up again.

• 2:22Speaker 02

  I heard him, yeah.

• 2:24Tim Ferriss?

  I'm sure that's going to come up again. And before we even get close to Robert, thank you, Robert, for the introduction. I want to pick up on something we were chatting about briefly before we started recording, and this is Aristotle.

• 2:39Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:40Tim Ferriss?

  All right. Why did Aristotle come into the conversation?

• 2:43Speaker 02

  Aristotle's definition of happiness was the devotion of all of one's energies along lines of excellence. I believe that that is a general application that, you know, in an ideal life would apply every moment you have. But it is a guiding principle to a creative life.

• 3:02Tim Ferriss?

  Let's then take maybe some of my props that we have here. And I'm going to go to my phone because I was reading an early copy of Push the Wall, My Life Writing, Drawing in the Art of Storytelling. And I took a lot of highlights and I had to take photographs of the PDF on my Kindle to look at some of them. And I wanted to go through a little list. This might seem strange, but I tend to obsess on the specifics. These are some of the tools of your trade: black wing graphite pencils, white paint, India black ink, liquid frisket, erasers and sable brushes. And then it goes through description of a lot more. Windsor and Newton series seven, mostly sizes three to 12, et cetera.

• 3:47Tim Ferriss?

  A few questions that I want to ask about, including the toothbrush, my trusty spatter maker. What is liquid frisket?

• 3:59Speaker 02

  Liquid frisket is essentially glue.

• 4:02Tim Ferriss?

  Okay.

• 4:03Speaker 02

  It was first called that and used by oil painters to create highlights. What the painter would do would be he would lay down strokes of this glue across the paint, then paint across it. And then before declaring the painting finished, he or she would then wipe up frisket. And you would have this sparkling piece of the underpainting showing through.

• 4:36Speaker 02

  And so it creates a very dramatic highlight. I like to use it with ink because it creates an element of chaos.

• 4:43Tim Ferriss?

  An element of chaos. So you seem to be a sense, someone who thrives in chaos or by creating certain types of chaos. And this monster that I'm holding, for those who are listening and not watching, I'm, I'm holding something in my lap that feels like it's 20 to 35 pounds. I was carrying it around, walking through New York City, getting a lot of odd looks because it's, it's a rectangle about the size of an X-ray plate you would use to take a X-ray of both lungs. It's gigantic. Then this is Frank Miller's Sin City, The Hard Goodbye. And I want to just open this up and I'm going to read something from right inside.

• 5:26Tim Ferriss?

  This is from Jim Lee, another legend in the space, another hero of mine. For another time, I used to have his job at the same college as graphic editor of the Princeton Tiger. Found some old sketches of his in one of the desks, in fact. But here's his quote, "Even after 25 years, Frank Miller's Sin City, The Hard Goodbye showcases the full potential of the comics medium. A stark, brilliant chiaroscuro, it remains a defiantly timeless, handcrafted love letter of the days of old in an increasingly slick and digital world." And I segued from the tools because when I look at some of these pages,

• 6:08Tim Ferriss?

  and I'll provide some of these as B-roll and so on, you know, looking at something like this. I'll just show that to the, I mean, it is a masterpiece. I mean, any one of these could be on a wall by itself, but this is sequential storytelling. And I have many questions, but one of them is about kind of aliveness and that channeling all of your energies into excellence, because I think this came up in the documentary about you as well, American Genius, that you kind of attack the page, like there seems to be a real kinetic channeling of energy

• 6:48Speaker 02

  Right.

• 6:49Tim Ferriss?

  into the page, which you can see in this particular version, the Curators collection. What did it feel like when you were making this that I'm holding?

• 6:57Speaker 02

  Very physical.

• 6:59Tim Ferriss?

  Very physical.

• 7:00Speaker 02

  Sin City was a real breakthrough that way, because it was the first time I decided to work so damn big. The book you're holding is the actual size of the page, as I did.

• 7:10Tim Ferriss?

  And so what is the size?

• 7:12Speaker 02

  It's called twice up. It's four times the size of the published

• 7:15Tim Ferriss?

  I mean, that is, it covers my entire body on video.

• 7:19Speaker 02

  Only about half of it. But that is the size that comic books were originally drawn back in the 1940s. And over time, in order to pick up the speed of production and just lower the price of making comics, they made them smaller and smaller and smaller, until finally they decided they ought to fit into an 11 by 17 photocopier and made the pages very, very tiny to work on, which was about the time I came in. And when I discovered these old originals from the 40s, I went, that's why they looked so damn good. And I decided with Sin City, I was going to correct the error.

• 8:03Tim Ferriss?

  That's amazing. And toothbrush?

• 8:07Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 8:07Tim Ferriss?

  I mentioned this at the end of your list. How do you use the toothbrush? Because I feel like this, at least in my mind, is one of the hallmark signatures in the minds of many of some Frank Miller artwork is this particular element. So how do you use the toothbrush?

• 8:27Speaker 02

  What I do is a lid of a bottle of Indian ink has a little squirter thing on it. And I squirt some of that onto the bristles of a toothbrush, run my thumb across a toothbrush, and it splatters across an effect that could be

• 8:43Speaker 02

  Texture on a wall, texture in the sky, splurting blood, whatever you choose to make.

• 8:48Tim Ferriss?

  Just kind of dragging your thumb across the.

• 8:51Speaker 02

  Spray it like as you as a child would.

• 8:54Tim Ferriss?

  Yep.

• 8:54Speaker 02

  What I love is that it gives you that lovely element of chaos across the picture. Across time, I would combine or replace that with simply snapping a brush across my wrist, which would create more of an elongated, stretchy.

• 9:15Tim Ferriss?

  Sort of a slash.

• 9:16Speaker 02

  It creates again, something that's unpredictable, but very organic. That's just playing with the materials.

• 9:23Tim Ferriss?

  What was your motto, this is from the book as well, your senior year of high school? But I think it was.

• 9:31Speaker 02

  Get the hell out of my way.

• 9:33Tim Ferriss?

  Get the hell out of my way.

• 9:34Speaker 02

  I was impatient to leave school and get to work.

• 9:37Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, well, I mean, I don't know if the impatience ended there. So I say that as someone who's also very impatient and it has pros and cons. And I'm wondering, like, the visceral violence that is channeled into creating, say, what we see on the page in Sin City, the kinetic aspect of it is so palpable. How do you relate to anger, using it, the right dose, if there is a right dose, channeling it versus being controlled by it? How do you think about that fire, maybe is a better way to put it within?

• 10:11Speaker 02

  No, no, no, no, I mean, anger is a good word, too. It's a, an important and powerful component of drama. Drama is essentially conflict. If you go all the way back to like the Norse myths and the, but you can take it all the way from the Norse myths through to like Terms of Endearment or whatever else. Those are all full of storm and drunk. And comics are a.

• 10:36Speaker 02

  Purely visual medium and also a not very on the face of it powerful. There's no way a comic book can compete with the sheer spectacular firepower of cinema. That is, the YouTube of cinema completely involves so many of your senses and it involves images that are perceptibly real and real people expressing these emotions at you. And then when they want to do spectacle, they started proving it way back with D W Griffith and sealed the deal with Star Wars.

• 11:17Speaker 02

  Nobody can touch them and they can now do anything in stage, in any other form. So comics had to come out with like, with like a little Jack Kirby swinging and, and just showing, okay, you know, we can't really do that. So we're going to go even more crazy. And, you know, he made up characters who could eat planets. And in the case of what I've put after with my comics is to have the drawing itself be so emotional and extreme. I'm trying to make it out act an actor.

• 11:56Tim Ferriss?

  Well, what I love about your comics, first of all, I should just point out to people that don't know anything about this world. You seem to me to be an outlier on a number of different levels. One of which is that you're very well known for your art and you are very well known for your writing. How common is that in the U S comic world?

• 12:19Speaker 02

  It's not that common.

• 12:20Tim Ferriss?

  In Japan, it's a little more, it's a little more typical, but in the U S, where would you?

• 12:27Speaker 02

  More common than it used to be.

• 12:30Speaker 02

  Because it used to be almost not allowed. There were a few exceptions. There was Will Eisner, for instance, who was really outstanding in that he clearly ran the whole show.

• 12:43Tim Ferriss?

  For people who have no context whatsoever, why is Eisner such an important figure?

• 12:49Speaker 02

  I mean, he's one of the founding fathers, for one thing. Because he could do the entire thing. Other people could as well, but he decided to keep doing the entire thing rather than just becoming part of a factory. Of course, he ran his own factory, but that's a whole other story. But ultimately, he settled on doing his one series, The Spirit, which is known as the real Eisner's of The Spirit. And even though he employed other people along the way, he always ran the show and supervised it completely. And as he got older, he started doing work that he did inch, chopped the bottom by himself. That was a much more personal nature, where he once again turned comics in a new direction.

• 13:33Tim Ferriss?

  Let's explore other figures who have helped showcase the potential of this medium through innovating, because I love this terrain, because people listening may not be comic lovers, but there's some medium that they're fascinated by. And whether it's in the realm of fiction and let's just say novels, whether it's in film, whether it's in comics, there are things that we might take for granted now that were not at all obvious a decade or two ago. And

• 14:18Tim Ferriss?

  Seems like a good time to maybe talk about Jack Kirby and how he impacted the world of comics. And correct me if I'm wrong, but I was reading, and this is straight from your book, that for a long time, comics were set panels, in a sense, right? And you kind of filled in the blanks to the extent that artists would sometimes get sort of pre, I don't want to say cut, but sort of outlined pages within which to place their artwork.

• 14:47Speaker 02

  There were a lot of various ways they were restricted. I mean, it's in various ways, and a lot of this happened before I was around, so I don't know. But I think the reason you bring Kirby up in this respect was he was the guy who came in when comics all had either a nine-panel grid or a six-panel grid. They were all panels with the same page. And more than anybody, he blasted that to pieces. He was like our D.W. Griffith. He just, you know, ripped the camera off the floor. And, and all of a sudden, he would use two pages for a single image. For a kid like me, it was mind-expanding. It was like, I was, you know, this one guy just kept coming back.

• 15:31Speaker 02

  Decade, decade, decade. I mean, he started way before I was born. I mean, he served in World War II with my parents. Not side by side, but you know, he had several comebacks. And each time, he seemed to reinvent the whole Magilla.

• 15:48Tim Ferriss?

  You have, seems like a few different guiding phrases. We have one, of course, from the book title itself, Push the Wall. Another one that comes to mind is Defy the Code. Can you expand on both of these, please? Why these two?

• 16:11Speaker 02

  Pushing the wall, or pushing the walls, is just, comics have always been in this strangely schizophrenic field where, on the one hand...

• 16:26Speaker 02

  You have artists, cartoonists, writers are such people who want to explore and try new things. The nature of these fantasies is exploratory, but the business has always been very conservative. And the people who grew up on comics became themselves very tradition bound. They would fret over things like what we call continuity, worrying about if you're working on issue number 385 of Spider-Man, you can't contradict something that was done in issue 14, which is on the face of it absurd because the character would

• 17:08Speaker 02

  be 85 if it around that long. And so you had this hidebound on one side and this like enthusiastic experimental field on the other. And I've always just wanted to pose more toward the people looking for a future and for trying out new stuff.

• 17:32Tim Ferriss?

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• 18:15Tim Ferriss?

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• 18:45Tim Ferriss?

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• 19:27Tim Ferriss?

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• 19:54Tim Ferriss?

  How did you, and we're going to jump around chronologically, of course, but let me see if I can find this particular paragraph from your book relates to a name that you all recognize, and that is Neil Adams. Neil was a hard taskmaster, utterly ruthless in his criticism. He was a godsend. I just want to read another paragraph. We'll get into the description of who this is, but you cold called his office. Is that right?

• 20:24Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 20:24Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, cold called his office. This is when no one knows who you are. And then ultimately, I think it was his daughter who answered the phone. She says, Dad, we got another one.

• 20:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 20:35Tim Ferriss?

  Somehow you ended up in the office. You show him your work. And then, and I'll quote here, "He told me just how awful my stuff was and didn't bother with using any sugar coating either. Where'd you say you were from? Vermont? Go back to Vermont. Pump gas. Get married. You're no good and you never will be." End quote. I gulp. This is referring to you. And then asked, "Can I fix it and show you again tomorrow?" To which Neil responds, "Yeah, I'll see you tomorrow." He growled. Okay. Who is Neil and why did you reach out to him?

• 21:04Speaker 02

  Well, that's Neil Adams.

• 21:05Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, who is he?

• 21:06Speaker 02

  He was the outstanding artist of, he was in a way, a one man generation.

• 21:13Speaker 02

  Because there was a long period where nobody entered the comics business because it didn't well and believe me, the common wisdom would be out of business soon. We'd just been through the horrors of the comics code and the public humiliation and the and the self censorship of that time. Been disgraced, going from a mass medium and being turned into a just a punchline, you know, a dirty punchline. And there were just a few people keeping the light alive and still doing these old titles like The Flash and so on. But the books were looking pretty crummy. But there were these glimmers, there were these guys, some of the old guys just stayed

• 21:57Speaker 02

  there and kept doing great stuff of an artist named Gil Kane, for instance. But there was Neil Adams. He was this new guy who came in young and brought such enthusiasm and all new look, a whole new, um, take me seriously look. It was much more, you know, a much more realistic look and he dragged the whole generation with him in a lot of ways, not just with his work. He did it with his speech and with his actions. He opened up a studio in Manhattan called Continuity, which did advertising work and

• 22:41Speaker 02

  essentially became a halfway house for comic book artists to come in and get his training, where he became the guru of this place. When I called up, I looked up his number in the phone book, you said, spoke to his daughter, got to see him that day and it started hanging out there. And I started living on little advertising jobs. Sometimes I'd just color them and then eventually I'd get to draw them and so on. And then he lined up my first comic book work. I was hardly the only one.

• 23:15Tim Ferriss?

  So I'm so fascinated by this exchange and his willingness to help for a few different reasons, right? Number one is, I wonder, how did this guy?

• 23:30Tim Ferriss?

  muster the bandwidth to do his own work, run a business and also mentor? Just that question alone. And then I also think about the sliding door moment of what if he had just had a really bad day and he was like, you're not coming back tomorrow, kid. Sorry, I'm too busy, right? Like what a different life.

• 23:50Speaker 02

  Sorry, I'm sorry, I gotta build my own horn.

• 23:52Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, play your own.

• 23:53Speaker 02

  I was a pretty determined little bastard, so you know, I would have been back anyway.

• 23:57Tim Ferriss?

  You would have been back anyway?

• 23:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:00Speaker 02

  I banged on many doors before this.

• 24:02Tim Ferriss?

  Well, okay, so this was actually going to be my next question, which was like, why do you think he agreed to let you come back? He was like, go pump gas, go back to Vermont. And then you're like, let me fix it and come back tomorrow. And he's like, ah, okay, fine.

• 24:17Speaker 02

  Actually, no, it was because I asserted, I asserted that I wanted to.

• 24:22Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, got it.

• 24:22Speaker 02

  Because I didn't cry and leave.

• 24:25Tim Ferriss?

  How many interactions like that? How many different visits showing him work? Did it take for him to finally say that your work was not for throwing away?

• 24:36Speaker 02

  I, it wasn't all that many, I don't think. And, you know, then, then I worked on short little jobs for Gold Key Comics. That was an old publisher a long time ago and so on, where they would hire you for a three-page job where you got $25 a page, that kind of thing. That was what they called paying your dues.

• 24:56Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. We're gonna hop around a little bit, but I mean, people need to read the book. They need to see the doc, but I know a lot of people have covered certain aspects of your bio. You first gained notoriety in the late seventies for your transformative work on Daredevil, right? Now, I also, and this is pulling from the book, read a bit, and this is, I'm putting a character, you'll have to explain, but Elektra in kind of brackets, because I'm inserting that, but now I'm quoting you, was the true genesis of my career in comic books. Could you speak to that chapter of your life that involved Elektra and what the significance of that was?

• 25:36Speaker 02

  Oh, I think that was because.

• 25:40Speaker 02

  I didn't come in as the writer on Daredevil. I just simply came in as an artist for hire.

• 25:46Speaker 02

  And realized fairly early on that this was no way to do it. Because the pictures and the words are one thing. I mean, the words were obvious once I drew the pictures and I very quickly took up plotting the stories and so on. I felt that Daredevil needed a counterpoint. A femme fatale. And I came up with Elektra, but I realized I was gonna hold her back until I was writing the book myself. And I did it that way.

• 26:17Tim Ferriss?

  I suppose what I'm trying to unpack is, and maybe I'm overstating the importance, but was that introduction of Elektra an important inflection point for you in some way?

• 26:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 26:30Tim Ferriss?

  In what way was it important?

• 26:31Speaker 02

  Well, if you, if you look at those old comics, that's when, in a way, I started understanding what a Marvel comic was. A Marvel comic isn't a story every month. A Marvel comic is an ongoing soap opera that you're following. And as soon as, you know, with my first issue that I wrote, it was called Elektra and it was all about them. From then on, the whole thing becomes one sprawling, and I mean, it's sprawling in both good and bad ways. Sort of epic where characters come and characters go, but it's focused around a pretty small cast. You know, there's the diabolical kingpin

• 27:15Speaker 02

  who runs all the gangs. There's the deadly enemy Bullseye. Neither of whom I made up. And there's, you know, Daredevil and Elektra. And all of this is like a tortured romance that the hero is in love with a psychotic assassin. So it's is bound to be enough trouble.

• 27:32Tim Ferriss?

  Bound to have some tears involved at some point.

• 27:36Speaker 02

  It was very adolescent. It came from a very adolescent state of mind. But I'm very proud of it.

• 27:41Tim Ferriss?

  I mean, I loved Elektra.

• 27:42Speaker 02

  He was really inspired.

• 27:44Tim Ferriss?

  I have a lot of comics with Elektra at my childhood home.

• 27:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 27:48Tim Ferriss?

  On Long Island to this day, polybagged with backing.

• 27:51Speaker 02

  Whenever I'm asked to draw her or anything, it's just right, you know?

• 27:56Tim Ferriss?

  So for folks who don't have any familiarity and also because I want to better understand it. I mean, there are different approaches to making a comic.

• 28:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 28:05Tim Ferriss?

  And also crafting a story, right? And so I want to pull up something that I have here. And it's going to take me a second to read, but I'd love you to walk people through this after I read at least some of it. All right, everything starts with and proceeds from story. Some simple story rules. Number one, start your story as late into the action as possible. And it is early into the action as possible. Two, get your hero into trouble fast. That or give the hero a pressing problem to solve. I work on the spine of the story. That's a phrase that I'd love for you to define. Work on the spine of the story and figure out how it starts and ends. And then roughly plot the in between. And I'll just read one more sentence and then I'll let you kind of fill.

• 28:48Tim Ferriss?

  To do this, I make notes and create scenes that will advance the storyline, but allow room for digressions and narrative side streets. And then you talk about preliminary sketches and so on. Can you expand on this and just maybe give an example of how you would do that? Whether it's with a book like Sin City or any other that comes to mind.

• 29:08Speaker 02

  How like you what?

• 29:10Tim Ferriss?

  How you actually start from step one in creating a story. And then proceed through that. It seems like also in the introduction that having a very good idea of where your story ends is a critical piece of that.

• 29:27Speaker 02

  I knew at the beginning of Sin City that Marvel would die. For instance, it's very important.

• 29:34Speaker 02

  Of course, when I started Dark Knight, I thought Batman was going to die. It didn't work out though.

• 29:40Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 29:41Speaker 02

  My methodology has changed over time.

• 29:45Speaker 02

  It used to be the most as rigid as, as you know, more rigid than what you just read. I mean, I used to really believe there was a way and I was seeking the way to do it. Now I do believe in letting a story nudge me in another direction. I believe in trusting them use more than I used to.

• 30:04Tim Ferriss?

  How does that show up then in practice? Do you have, you know, the starting point, you know, the end of the story? You have characters in a situation. Do you draw your way through and then figure out kind of the narrative arc? What is the proper blend for you now of?

• 30:21Speaker 02

  Well, the thing is, is to

• 30:22Tim Ferriss?

  Serendipity.

• 30:23Speaker 02

  Come in, think of yourself as being the generator of a story, surely. And saying that these are the pieces of clay and this is what I want to do with them. But to realize that the artistic process is not at its best when it's an egomaniacal process. And sometimes the characters talk back and sometimes they know more than you do. And always be aware that there will be that, just that flash, that thing that happens. Where all of a sudden you're in a different story and you realize this is the one. No, this isn't the one I was looking for, but this is the where I want to be. I don't know, it to me, it's sort of like being a space explorer and being ready for things.

• 31:03Speaker 02

  And knowing that the whole job is really, you know, what is trying to figure out what to ignore and what to follow. I like the mystery of storytelling more than the horror I used to see in it.

• 31:15Tim Ferriss?

  Well, let's talk about picking and choosing. And specifically would love to hear, I lived in Japan as an exchange student and learned to read and speak Japanese largely from reading comic books.

• 31:30Speaker 02

  So, Kazuri Okami must have kept you busy.

• 31:33Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I mean, I was busy reading all sorts of comic books with my little electronic dictionary.

• 31:38Speaker 02

  I would love to read Kazuri Okami in Japanese.

• 31:41Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, yeah. It's, it's a different experience, of course.

• 31:43Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 31:45Tim Ferriss?

  How did you first get exposed to, for instance, Mobius, Otomo, any others you want to?

• 31:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 31:53Tim Ferriss?

  Mention, how did you get exposed to those influences and who were, who are they?

• 31:57Speaker 02

  The two main invasions, well, three, three actually. The first was the English. Because DC Comics started publishing Brian Ballen and Mike McMahon and all the rest. But they were the easiest for everybody to see because they were all American comics fans and they, and you know, the language was the same and everything. It started getting a lot wilder when Forbidden Planet comics opened.

• 32:26Tim Ferriss?

  Man, do I love Forbidden Planet.

• 32:28Speaker 02

  Yeah. And when Marvel started publishing Mobius, then the floodgates opened because it was Europe just knocked everybody's socks off. It was Mobius, Mobius, Mobius, Mobius, Mobius. But there were the other guys too that nobody was paying attention to. Mobius obviously did was a tidal wave that swept through culture. It is about cinema and so on. And for me, the other event was I had a girlfriend. Her father was a businessman who did a lot of business in Japan. And she tossed me a phone book. It was a Japanese comic and it was Kozoryoka.

• 33:13Speaker 02

  And I opened it and studied it and fell in and like Ronan was born that day. My storytelling style changed everything. And you know, and from that I helped bring the title over and helped with the Asian invasion. Seeing it all become so much more international has just been fascinating. And with the Asian stuff, you've got just a completely different sense of time and space. It is the dead opposite of the European.

• 33:41Tim Ferriss?

  When was Mobius sort of at his peak of influence? What would have been the timing roughly on that?

• 33:48Speaker 02

  I couldn't name the exact date. Certainly he's up there with Jack Kirby in terms of being one of those people who it's like if you're listing Beethoven and Mahler and all of that.

• 33:58Tim Ferriss?

  I'm trying to figure out if the timing is such, because I've, I've looked at tons of Mobius artwork that Mobius could hit.

• 34:05Speaker 02

  When did Alien come out?

• 34:06Tim Ferriss?

  When did?

• 34:07Speaker 02

  Alien.

• 34:07Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, Alien. Good question. I mean, it would have been post-Star Wars. I was just trying to think, because like Mobius also, a lot of his artwork makes me think of like Tatooine and some of these things in Star Wars. So I'm wondering what the directionality is.

• 34:21Speaker 02

  Mobius' influence of Star Wars is huge.

• 34:22Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, okay, great. That's what I was trying to answer for myself because it seems so obvious when you look at it. And to come back to the Japanese, the comic book that I. Used, it's not a well-known title, certainly outside of Japan, even within Japan, a lot of Japanese people kind of scratch their head when I tell them. It's called Rokudenashi Blues, which is a Rokudenashi Blues, which is about high school gangs, which aren't really a thing, but they pretend like it is. And you know, the bad kids were different types of uniforms called choran or like, anyway, and it's, but it's a hyper violent, there are a lot of fight scenes in this.

• 35:02Tim Ferriss?

  Which made it a little less intimidating for someone who couldn't yet really read Japanese, right? So my translating burden was lower with this comic. And the art was spectacular. What blew my mind, because I had read comics all the way through my childhood up to that point, and I was 15 when I got to Japan. Like you said, it was how time and space and speed and motion were depicted so differently. And how they captured, say, the swing of a leg or created the effect of blur was so captivating to me. It was unlike anything I had seen.

• 35:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, one of the things I've got to say is that amazes me about the manga stuff is that they could draw people relax so well. That so much of the drawing in Lone Wolf and Cub, people aren't blazing around and stuff. And even in combat, what they're capturing is the fluidity and grace of the movement. I mean, it's the opposite of Kirby, where everything is angles and force. And so it's a very Asian violence. And in Europe, you'll often see a very elegant. Mobius's violence, when he went really violent, it would be jarring and horrible.

• 36:23Speaker 02

  But it would still be gorgeous. And it would still be, the wrist would be crooked just that much, you know, as it slammed into the person's face and so on. And it's just the difference of cultures reflected in every aspect of cartooning is fascinating.

• 36:38Tim Ferriss?

  How did the European and Japanese styles that would incorporate Lone Wolf and Cub influence them? How your approach changed after that?

• 36:54Speaker 02

  I was very young. I was in my twenties.

• 36:59Speaker 02

  And so I sat down and I did a book that imitated them shamelessly in Ronin. I did Kojima with with the Samurai scenes, I did Mobius with the science fiction scenes. And I discovered Ogibisaw and did him all over the place.

• 37:16Tim Ferriss?

  What was that experience like for you in doing that? Did you find it energizing?

• 37:21Speaker 02

  That was great. It was like, it was like, any transition that big is a rebirth.

• 37:28Tim Ferriss?

  All right, I'm gonna ask you a lot more about Ronin, which I have in my suitcase back at my hotel. But before we get there, I want to talk about,

• 37:43Tim Ferriss?

  because I believe I saw this in the book as well, like effectively, if you're boring yourself, or if you're bored, you're gonna bore your audience and like throw it out and start over.

• 37:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 37:53Tim Ferriss?

  When do you know if something is working? And I'll pull out an example of what seems like something that was working. And what was the name of the colorist? Is it Glynnis? Is that how you say her name?

• 38:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, Glynnis is Oliver Glynnis Green.

• 38:06Tim Ferriss?

  Right, so during some of the work on Daredevil would call you up and say how excited she was.

• 38:12Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 38:12Tim Ferriss?

  Working on it.

• 38:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 38:14Tim Ferriss?

  That seems like a signature of something working.

• 38:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 38:20Tim Ferriss?

  How do you tell if something is working or not working?

• 38:23Speaker 02

  Whether you want to get out of bed and do it or not. I mean, it's not really a problem I have had so long I can't remember.

• 38:29Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, so if you look back at what you've ended up being happiest with or less happy with.

• 38:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 38:37Tim Ferriss?

  With hindsight 2020, this doesn't necessarily mean audience response, right? Not talking about market response. It's like intrinsic working for you. I suppose what I'm looking for is just any thoughts for folks who have trouble throwing things away because they just have a high default level of excitement. So they get wedded to something and they're like, I'm not gonna throw this away. And they have trouble killing their darlings or murdering their darlings, right? Which is another line that you like.

• 39:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, I love that line.

• 39:06Tim Ferriss?

  Maybe some example way of backing into this would be, what are some examples of things that you have thrown out? How do you decide when it's time to cut your losses or get rid of something?

• 39:16Speaker 02

  It's like when it doesn't get me out of bed. It's that simple.

• 39:18Tim Ferriss?

  It's that simple. All right.

• 39:21Speaker 02

  This is my primary function on earth. If I'm not enjoying it.

• 39:26Speaker 02

  There's no reason to do it.

• 39:27Tim Ferriss?

  Time to switch gears. You know, Ronin seemed like such an all in,

• 39:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 39:34Tim Ferriss?

  bold adventure on a lot of levels.

• 39:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 39:37Tim Ferriss?

  And I just, this is lesson six in your book, The Dark Knight Cometh, Smash Expectations, but here's where it starts. And there's a quote from Rudyard Kipling from If, which is if you can meet triumph and disaster and treat those two imposters just the same.

• 39:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 39:55Tim Ferriss?

  Now, here's the first part that I wanted to quote and I won't do the whole thing, but there's nothing like a broken nose to clarify the mind. As a creative experience, Ronin was a fascinating, exhilarating exploration. And it goes on. So why was Ronin a broken nose?

• 40:11Speaker 02

  Because I got, I got, um, excoriated for it. I got, I had an angry audience, you know, people who wanted to be like Daredevil.

• 40:20Tim Ferriss?

  Yep, they wanted more of the same from you.

• 40:22Speaker 02

  Yeah. And after initial high sales, they dropped. And it was not the reception DC wanted. They were like, you know, playing funeral music and it was gone. And I had nothing but a run of successes before.

• 40:37Tim Ferriss?

  Hmm. How did you feel after that? I mean, I've, I'm not comparing my books to anything you've done. These are iconic pieces of, of work that you've produced. But I remember having my first two books succeed. Expectations for the third, sky high, initially does really well. And then for whatever reason, just doesn't meet expectations. And I took it so incredibly personal.

• 41:01Speaker 02

  Oh, God, yeah.

• 41:02Tim Ferriss?

  I had a really hard time with it.

• 41:03Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 41:03Tim Ferriss?

  And I'm just wondering.

• 41:05Speaker 02

  End of the world.

• 41:06Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, what was it like for you?

• 41:07Speaker 02

  End of the world.

• 41:08Tim Ferriss?

  End of the world.

• 41:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, oh, yeah.

• 41:11Tim Ferriss?

  How long did it feel like the end of the world?

• 41:14Speaker 02

  I don't know. It was, it was a while, but the thing is, is that. It was useful because I started examining it and said, what didn't work? You know, you didn't connect. It's like you did something. It made me go, okay, let's go for broke and put something together and, you know, develop the theories, do something that'll work. And I ended up doing the most structured, ruthlessly structured thing I've ever done in my life, Dark Knight, and which is, you know, I mean, it's so structured, it's ridiculous. It breaks into 16-page increments across, you know, four, 48-page books.

• 41:59Speaker 02

  And, and each one has a three-act structure. So it's a four-act structure with three three-act structures. It's basically, it's a trilogy.

• 42:09Tim Ferriss?

  And was that, that was a conclusion or a direction you chose after analyzing Ronin? Or some of the reasons? Why didn't Ronin work? What do you think are some of the reasons it didn't work?

• 42:24Speaker 02

  I think that it drifted into surrealism. And it was also, it was a fantasy and it was out of its time. Without question.

• 42:36Tim Ferriss?

  You lick your wounds. It's the end of the world for a little while, but then you do a postmortem and...

• 42:44Speaker 02

  And you come out of it better, you're just...

• 42:46Tim Ferriss?

  And you come out of it. And then moving into The Dark Knight Returns. How are you thinking about getting back in the ring and working with this? You mentioned the structure as one aspect of it. Anything else that was important for you to keep in mind personally as you moved into working on that particular project?

• 43:10Speaker 02

  I was into it. The complexity of it was something I had never attempted before. There's so many goddamn characters in that thing. And they're all moving in 18 directions at once. So I don't know, once I was into it, I was into it. I wasn't thinking about Ronin or anything else.

• 43:30Tim Ferriss?

  I mean, it's a hell of a...

• 43:33Tim Ferriss?

  All consuming scope, right?

• 43:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 43:35Tim Ferriss?

  So you have to keep your hand on the wheel and pay attention.

• 43:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 43:39Tim Ferriss?

  Am I getting the timeline right? That you were working on The Dark Knight Returns at the same time that Alan Moore is working on Watchmen? Or am I getting that timeline off?

• 43:50Speaker 02

  It was a little before, but they overlapped.

• 43:54Tim Ferriss?

  They overlapped?

• 43:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, they overlapped. I think they started affecting each other in a subtle way.

• 43:59Tim Ferriss?

  In what types of ways?

• 44:00Speaker 02

  I don't know exactly. It's like, because Alan and I knew each other. We met while we were doing those two books. I had launched Dark Knight and he was boiling over with Watchmen. And this British stuff, it's all over the place. And it was all part of this whole, I don't know what you can call what we did to the superhero, but it was reconstruction, deconstruction, you know, whatever it was. And, and, and so, uh, his approach seemed more to really go at the underbelly of it. And mine was to reconstitute, you know, in an uglier world, to reconstitute the basic gist of the hero.

• 44:43Tim Ferriss?

  I know why this came to mind for me. And to give credit again where credit's due, Frank Miller, American genius, Solan Thomas, sitting about 15 feet away.

• 44:53Speaker 02

  Blowing.

• 44:53Tim Ferriss?

  Always, always making amazing things happen.

• 44:58Speaker 02

  Making ugly faces.

• 44:59Tim Ferriss?

  She's behaving for the time being, but got some great footage from Alan, who basically said he heard these murmurs about what you were working on and that it was amazing. And he was like, oh shit, basically better really up my game.

• 45:15Speaker 02

  That sounds like it.

• 45:16Tim Ferriss?

  The reason I wanted to bring this up is that I just find having at least some other player on the field who's really good forces you to improve.

• 45:26Speaker 02

  Oh, Alan made me so much better at so many things. Cause when I came back to Daredevil, for instance, it was like.

• 45:34Speaker 02

  All of a sudden, it was like, oh, my God, I'm just writing. And there's Alan Moore out there now.

• 45:41Speaker 02

  And all of a sudden, I was just trying so much, you know, trying so hard to be a writer. He also brought back horror.

• 45:49Tim Ferriss?

  Brought back horror?

• 45:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, there hadn't been any horror in comics for generations.

• 45:53Tim Ferriss?

  What makes Alan interesting to you? Just to take a sidebar on that.

• 45:57Speaker 02

  Okay. He's the smartest fan there ever was.

• 46:01Tim Ferriss?

  The smartest fan?

• 46:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 46:03Tim Ferriss?

  What does that mean?

• 46:04Speaker 02

  Inside all of that, he is a guy who grew up in comics. But he's just so damn smart that he's able to take the stuff of his childhood joy and to take it down into places that nobody's ever dreamt of going for and transform anything he's ever done, he's transformed utterly. I mean, the first time he sat down to write Swamp Thing, he changed the entire precept of the character. That's something a lot of people miss is that it had always been this guy who fell into the muck and got transformed into a swamp guy. In his very first issue of Swamp Thing, Alan transformed him into a collection

• 46:47Speaker 02

  of swamp weeds that used this human as a model to construct a new body for itself. There was no human in there at all anymore. And then he did, first time at bat, the first time I ever saw his name.

• 47:03Tim Ferriss?

  Just completely reinventing a character.

• 47:05Speaker 02

  Scared the crap out of me.

• 47:08Speaker 02

  He was something when he showed up.

• 47:13Tim Ferriss?

  Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. Many of you know how deeply I love Japan and its culture of unwavering dedication to craft, refinement, commitment to continuous improvement. But why do I bring this all up? Well, the same focus on improving one thing over the span of years is found in today's sponsor, AG1. They are now unveiling AG1 Next Gen, the same single scoop, once a day product that I use myself, but now with more vitamins, more minerals and five new clinically studied probiotic strains shown to support digestive and immune health. AG1 is also NSF certified for sport, one of the most rigorous independent quality and safety certification programs in the supplement industry.

• 47:56Tim Ferriss?

  So check them out. Subscribe today to try the next gen of AG1. Listeners will also get a free bottle of D3K2 and AG1 Welcome Kit and five of the upgraded AG1 Travel Packs with your first order. So start your journey with AG1's next gen and experience the difference firsthand. Simply go to drinkag1.com/tim. That's drinkag1.com/tim.

• 48:26Tim Ferriss?

  So I promised I would bring back Robert at some point.

• 48:30Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 48:30Tim Ferriss?

  And feel free, if there's anything you'd like to dive into that I'm bouncing around and not hitting, let me know. But you described Robert as, as an angel of sorts. Why is that? Robert Rodriguez.

• 48:44Speaker 02

  Well, for one thing is he's, to be around him, you're around a man of constant goodwill and of generous energy.

• 48:52Tim Ferriss?

  He's very generous. He, he, just a quick, sorry to interrupt, but people might find this funny. When I moved to Austin in 2017, the very first person I had over for dinner at my house, and I was very excited about it, was Robert, who I'd known for a while. Invited him over, he was on his way, and then I realized, wait a second, I have no plates and I have no silverware. So he brought over two plates from his house plus silverware, which I still have to this day. So that's, that's Robert. That's Robert. He's like, he's like, keep the plates and the silverware. I think you're going to need it next time.

• 49:26Speaker 02

  Oh my God.

• 49:28Tim Ferriss?

  So Frank, you were mentioning Robert's generous spirit, and I wanted to underscore something that I only learned after watching the documentary, which is that Rodriguez, as I understand it, quit the director's guild so that you could receive co-director credit. I had no idea.

• 49:50Tim Ferriss?

  That seems wild.

• 49:51Speaker 02

  I remember the day he did it, yeah, yeah.

• 49:53Tim Ferriss?

  Well, can you describe what happened on that day?

• 49:55Speaker 02

  No, he just told me he just did it.

• 49:57Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 49:57Speaker 02

  He said, I said, he said, I, they said, you didn't have the, uh, what was the word for it? It wasn't, that was something along those lines. He just grinned and said, so I quit. Because he didn't want anything to stand in the way of us just moving ahead and knew that I needed the authority on the set because they were his people. And everybody there, they were so loyal to him. That he need to be able to bequeath that to me to, for, for things to really work the way both of us needed them to.

• 50:32Tim Ferriss?

  What was it like working on that film with Robert? How did you divide or mesh your duties?

• 50:39Speaker 02

  At one point, somebody in production made this ridiculous poster of the two of us as a two-headed beast. Because we were working right on top of each other the whole time. There was another point where we were shooting orders right past each other, although we were almost always saying the same thing. But there was one point where we weren't saying exactly the same thing. And there was Brittany Murphy in, in the middle of her scene.

• 51:13Tim Ferriss?

  One of the actors.

• 51:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, and she, uh, she, you know, she, there she was as a scantily clad barmaid. And she just tossed up her, I think she tossed her tray in the air and says, there's so of them.

• 51:30Speaker 02

  But generally it was just, it was just a dream. After a while, they tended to know which one to go to for which kind of problem.

• 51:41Tim Ferriss?

  The actors did.

• 51:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, oh, yeah. And so did production.

• 51:45Tim Ferriss?

  So would they cut, what were those different types of problems? I'm so, I'm so curious.

• 51:48Speaker 02

  Well, certainly anything to do, it's really the mechanics of making the movie was Robert.

• 51:54Tim Ferriss?

  Robert, right.

• 51:55Speaker 02

  You know, um, but when it came to the internal workings of the characters.

• 51:59Tim Ferriss?

  The motivations of the characters.

• 52:00Speaker 02

  Their histories, the, the, the, uh, and, you know, or if they wanted to try something out. I could really quickly tell them whether it was in character or not. And then we would often just get together, the two of us, go over a bunch of stuff. And there were any number of cases where Robert would come to me and say, I need a new shot here. I need a new scene. I remember one time he said, I need something new here, Frank. It's gotta be quick, it's gotta be cheap, and it's gotta be brilliant.

• 52:32Speaker 02

  And we just sat down with a sheet of paper. It was some of the fun I ever had. Working so damned fast and, you know.

• 52:40Tim Ferriss?

  And knowing Robert, having spent a good amount of time with him, we both live in Austin. I can see both of you working together.

• 52:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 52:48Tim Ferriss?

  It's very easy for me to see.

• 52:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 52:50Tim Ferriss?

  And I encourage people to listen to my episodes I've done with Robert. Start with the first one about his creative process and bio, but he used to draw comics, right? He drew comics. He's very unorthodox. He doesn't feel like he has to follow a fixed set of rules. And I don't know if he did this on set for Sin City, but he'll often have actors painting. He'll be playing guitar.

• 53:15Speaker 02

  That was so important, yeah. Yeah, he always wanted to keep the creative juices flowing. You know, there was one time when, when they, he rented out a hall in Austin. Bruce Willis and his band played.

• 53:28Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, really?

• 53:30Speaker 02

  Yeah. So there's Bruce Willis up there, you know, pounding it out like you're doing his Springsteen.

• 53:36Tim Ferriss?

  You keep the, keep the creative juices flowing.

• 53:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 53:39Tim Ferriss?

  And he really walks the talk. And also, I may be stating the obvious for people, but when I look at, say, Sin City as you created it here, it's so inherently cinematic and directorial in terms of angles, framing. I've always felt that way, even looking at, say, storyboards. I'm like, okay, well, I mean, there's the, if not the same, certainly, I mean, but there, there's a lot that rhymes. And so when I'm looking at these innovations with, say, whether it's back in the day with Jack Kirby, or looking at some of the Japanese influences and how they capture motion differently.

• 54:21Tim Ferriss?

  It makes me think of innovations in film at the same time where you think of like a Kurosawa doing like a Rashomon and inserting multiple perspectives and you're like, okay, I mean, you're solving a lot of the same problems and exercising seemingly a lot of the same creative muscles.

• 54:37Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, and that's the way media works, though. It's the way art forms work. It's funny, it's like, you know, so many people strive so hard to act as if they work in a vacuum. And no one does. And the influences are constant and inexorable. That's kind of the beauty of the beast, really. Yeah. I mean, occasionally this one piercing person will come through. But even Hitchcock came from somewhere. You can even, you know, cut back to what he sprung from. Or Wells, or whatever. And even those two were in pretty tight competition and did a lot of the same tricks.

• 55:22Speaker 02

  So it's, it's like, you know, it's all a big mishmash.

• 55:27Tim Ferriss?

  Outside of the films you've been involved with, what are some of your favorite films, whether they are scripted, documentary, or otherwise?

• 55:36Speaker 02

  I'm a big fan of All Black and White. It's no secret. But that's not just the all of film noir. I can give you chapter and verse of film noir, but that's all over the book and everywhere else. Occasionally I'll see an absolute masterpiece, like Kane Mutiny comes to mind.

• 55:52Tim Ferriss?

  I'm not familiar with it. What is the Kane Mutiny?

• 55:54Speaker 02

  Kane Mutiny is a World War II story featuring an absolutely brilliant Humphrey Bogart playing exactly the opposite of the kind of character you'd expect him to play. He plays an almost Richard Nixonian figure of a World War II destroyer, minesweeper pilot who is completely paranoid. Fred McMurray plays a character you would never expect him to play. This is not My Three Sons. This is, this is Fred McMurray is a very serious actor playing a, playing a military lawyer. And it's a study in paranoia on a high seas.

• 56:33Tim Ferriss?

  What appeals to you about the movie? Or do you just get swept on it? Is it that these actors are doing what seems diametrically opposed to what people associate them with? Is it something else?

• 56:43Speaker 02

  Well, not particularly. I just love high drama. And I often do love to see an actor like Bogart play a character who you don't expect. Maltese Falcon, typecast him for the rest of his career. Before that, he played many, many roles, which were often shifty, nasty little men. And he played a paranoid killer once in an adaptation, I believe, of a James Evans Kane novel. And, you know, I love to see the actors when they aren't trapped by the audience's expectations. The things that Robert Mitchum was capable of. He was pretty extraordinary.

• 57:25Speaker 02

  But also, I like to see the movies that really were discovering what they could do and where they're finding them. If you look at Grapes of Wrath, that movie is hunting for what it is, but it's doing so in such a compelling way. It's going in such an aching way. Henry Fonda is extraordinary in that movie. And also, I just like to get in the hands of a great director. That's why I do keep getting back to Hitchcock. I love falling back into one of his old movies. I get a lot of watch Rebecca, I swear, every night.

• 58:03Tim Ferriss?

  I've never seen it, so that's gotta be on my...

• 58:05Speaker 02

  Oh, it is so good.

• 58:07Tim Ferriss?

  To watch.

• 58:07Speaker 02

  It is one of the most romantic movies you'll ever see. And it's occasionally very spooky. It's a day movie.

• 58:14Tim Ferriss?

  Done. Thanks for doing my homework for me.

• 58:16Speaker 02

  (laughing)

• 58:19Tim Ferriss?

  What artists or art forms have influenced the work that you do outside of comics themselves?

• 58:27Speaker 02

  Well, movies, a lot. And lots of books, Fred. You know?

• 58:31Tim Ferriss?

  Lots of books. What types of books?

• 58:34Speaker 02

  When I grew up, I read Mickey Spillane novels. And from that, all the other crime stuff. And somewhere along the way, I fell in love with ancient history. And, you know, that's where I got Three Hundred and all of that. The history is just, it's endless wealth. It's like everywhere you turn, there's more and more to get. It's very breathtaking.

• 58:56Speaker 02

  Oh, when I was a kid, I watched a lot of TV, but I don't now.

• 58:59Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. Let's come back to three hundred and your other adventures in Hollywood. What have you learned? Because I ask this selfishly. When I work on my stuff, I'm a control freak, complete control freak. And a lot of my friends are control freaks. And I've just seen a number of different train wrecks. When Hollywood and the structures in Hollywood collide with a creative who has a story or something that they view as their baby. I've just seen a lot of messes and I'm wondering what you have learned about

• 59:38Tim Ferriss?

  working in entertainment or Hollywood.

• 59:41Speaker 02

  Oh, well, I've got one overriding thing.

• 59:43Tim Ferriss?

  Okay.

• 59:44Speaker 02

  Which is just, I mean, more important than anything else is, you know, the right people. It's like when I've worked with the right people, experiences have been wonderful and the results have been wonderful.

• 59:54Tim Ferriss?

  How do you know for you who the right people are? Because there's so many slick folks in LA, no offense to anyone in LA.

• 1:00:02Speaker 02

  I know.

• 1:00:02Tim Ferriss?

  But man, do you get told what you want to hear?

• 1:00:05Speaker 02

  Uh huh.

• 1:00:05Tim Ferriss?

  And I'd love to know how you identify having spent some time in the trenches.

• 1:00:11Speaker 02

  I don't know, man. All I can tell you is that is that I've been exceedingly lucky once. I've been unspeakably lucky the other time. I was exceedingly lucky with Zack Snyder, because in his case, it was, he was taking control. He was gonna do it. Okay? And he did a brilliant job. In in the case of Robert Rodriguez, that was heaven because it was the adventure of a lifetime. When it's been more distant than that, it's been bye bye baby more. You know, it's been, that's been the same thing, that it just happens.

• 1:00:52Speaker 02

  But it's something I did like, you know, it's something that I didn't like, you know, Marvel, you see comic that gets adapted, that I end up seeing pieces of what I did mixed in with things that feel like they came out of a Dirty Harry movie, mixed with things that came out of Scooby Doo and it's, it all gets a little, you know, less exciting.

• 1:01:12Tim Ferriss?

  Let's just say you created a masterpiece in the next twelve months that everyone in Hollywood's fighting over.

• 1:01:22Tim Ferriss?

  How do you make some of the important decisions about who to work with? Do you call Robin and you're like, hey, what do you think about these people? Do you call Zack Snyder and ask him the same question?

• 1:01:32Speaker 02

  The answer is right across the room. I mean, Celine Thomas runs my company and she really knows what she's doing. And before I really hear about anything, she already knows all these people and what they're doing and everything. I wouldn't even call it a hire. It's a partnership.

• 1:01:50Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. I mean, all roads lead to Celine. She's bowing in the background.

• 1:01:57Speaker 02

  She's waving us away.

• 1:02:01Tim Ferriss?

  I want to ask about alcohol. What is your relationship to alcohol? What has it done for or against you?

• 1:02:08Speaker 02

  Oh, that's, I wouldn't call it an easy question, but it's a simple enough one. Especially the way you phrased it. Simple answer against me a lot. For me, nothing, nothing. It's taken a long time to come to that conclusion. It's a, a big old aspect of my life. It's a, it's a genetic condition that I allowed to get out of control. I would say I did use it to disinhibit me and probably worked very, very productively because of it. And did stuff that was inspired, occasionally reckless.

• 1:02:48Speaker 02

  But the deleterious effects and the ways it's affected other parts of my life.

• 1:02:57Speaker 02

  No, it hasn't done me a goddamn bit of good. I was coerced to stop. I was, I was, Celine and others decided I was gonna die. And they arranged for me to be put in a place and watched. And, you know, the time had to pass and, you know, medicines given and that sort of thing. Takes a while.

• 1:03:19Speaker 02

  I will tell you this in all sincerity. This is not Pop's drinking bit for either one of you. I'm having a time in my life in that respect. I mean creatively, this is like, now I'm going like, okay, now I can get serious. Okay. You know, it's like, for one thing is what happens when you get off the sauce. Imagine any addictions like this. You don't realize how much anger that has been bubbled up.

• 1:03:49Speaker 02

  And now, what you thought was fuel. I mean, I thought I was fueled by all this. You know, this kind of like fire. Oh, it doesn't fuel you. It doesn't fuel you. It's like saying, oh, it's great to have my stomach feel this way when you're constipated. It's a lot better to be focused and moving. Clarity is quite lovely.

• 1:04:15Tim Ferriss?

  So did the getting off of alcohol in and of itself dissipate the fire or the anger? Or did the getting sober allow you to better deal with that in some way?

• 1:04:33Speaker 02

  It helps you understand when and where it's appropriate. There's plenty to be angry about. But it's not this free floating, am I mad at myself? I'm mad at the world?

• 1:04:48Tim Ferriss?

  What advice would you give to a dedicated novice who's looking to get into comics?

• 1:04:59Speaker 02

  I thought you were looking to get into drinking.

• 1:05:01Tim Ferriss?

  You're looking to get into drinking. Where should they? What's your favorite cocktail? Uh, no, comics.

• 1:05:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:05:07Tim Ferriss?

  And they're, they're a student of the craft. They're obsessed. They're dedicated. They have the raw ingredients that maybe Neil saw in you.

• 1:05:16Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 1:05:16Tim Ferriss?

  What advice would you give to them?

• 1:05:20Speaker 02

  Part it's what I said in the book, which is story, story, story. First, think of it as one craft. Don't think of writing and drawing. It was one thing and it would become clear what it is. But beyond that, it's cartooning is making things that are complicated and making them quite simple. That's where your mind should be going more than anywhere else. At this stage, complication is not your friend. The conveyance formation, then learn, learn that, I mean, pick up like Scott McCloud's book on understanding comics, for instance, and see how he breaks down how comics work. At the same time.

• 1:06:03Speaker 02

  Pick up Sid Fields' book on screen, buy. Get a good sense for a simple approach to three acts storytelling.

• 1:06:13Speaker 02

  You'll use for a year or two and then, you know, and they won't be using it anymore. But it gets you somewhere. Learn how to draw.

• 1:06:21Tim Ferriss?

  How do you learn how to draw? I think this is in the book, but Neil Adams telling you to go out and buy some toy cars so you can learn how to draw cars correctly.

• 1:06:29Speaker 02

  That was great advice.

• 1:06:30Tim Ferriss?

  Great advice, right? What great advice or what a simple solve? What a simple solution. How does someone?

• 1:06:37Speaker 02

  Learn how to draw?

• 1:06:38Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:39Speaker 02

  Like humans. Humans are the big problem, you know? And. Oh, man, every dirty trick there is. I mean, I can give you some names of some books.

• 1:06:50Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, that'd be great.

• 1:06:51Speaker 02

  Okay. Do you do, okay, um, George Bridgman?

• 1:06:55Tim Ferriss?

  George Bridgman?

• 1:06:56Speaker 02

  Yeah. Okay. There's no E in it. In Bridgman. There is an E in George and it's the complete guide to drawing from life. It's only about the figure.

• 1:07:07Tim Ferriss?

  Why do you like that book? There's so many books on drawing. Why do you like this one?

• 1:07:11Speaker 02

  This one's good for, uh. Because he's a hard cartoonist. He treats the body like a machine, so it's easier to understand. You do get the gesture, but you'll have to bring that yourself anyway. Stuff's completely non-photographic. It's somewhere between the thinking of Michelangelo and the thing you look at when a artist.

• 1:07:31Tim Ferriss?

  Mm hmm. That's cool.

• 1:07:32Speaker 02

  You know?

• 1:07:32Tim Ferriss?

  So that's the non-photographic. That seems.

• 1:07:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:07:35Tim Ferriss?

  Critical here.

• 1:07:37Speaker 02

  Hey, you know, there is another person people like a lot named Andrew Loomis.

• 1:07:41Tim Ferriss?

  Andrew Loomis?

• 1:07:42Speaker 02

  Yeah. It's L. O O M I S. I favor him less. Cause his voice, his work has a sleeker. More, um. Sleeker, smoother look. And I, I favor the more mechanical muscular. But, but usually any kind of aspiring couple writers love both those books on the shelf.

• 1:08:07Tim Ferriss?

  How did you learn perspective structures? How did you learn how to work with perspective?

• 1:08:18Speaker 02

  The trick to perspective is you realize that it is a trick. It's a complete lie. Perspective does not exist. I mean, it's invented by mathematicians. So do keep that in mind when you're about perspective.

• 1:08:34Speaker 02

  So it's a device that you apply to a drawing. And, uh, but you know that when you look at down this room, that lines seem to converge and so on. So what you do is you rough out the basic shape of what you think something is. And then you converge a couple of those lines. They hit at a point and that becomes the horizontal. And you can keep your vertical straight up, or you can give it a, you know, an upper or lower tilt and so on. There are books on perspective too. I just don't know the names.

• 1:09:09Tim Ferriss?

  But how did you develop your abilities with perspective?

• 1:09:13Speaker 02

  I'm a deadbeat comic book artist.

• 1:09:15Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. And, you know, I have to say, and hopefully this doesn't sound strange, but looking at this gigantic beast here. Looking at, for instance, you know, this is one of many, many different pages that I captured just to revisit. But when I look at some of these, I'll show, this is the one I showed before. I'll show it again, but

• 1:09:37Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:09:38Tim Ferriss?

  This one here. So you look at this two page spread and I'll describe it for folks, but these are really stark, very, almost inverse color palettes, but although they're black and white of a dancer. And the elegant minimalism and some of the line work in this book makes me think of certain really old school illustrators like Lion Decker. And it's just, there's a, like an archetypal energy to.

• 1:10:17Tim Ferriss?

  This type of work. And I remember in the documentary, To Invoke Jim Lee's Name Again, he said something like he was, he was talking about, I don't know if it was Sin City, or your work in general, or you, but he said, and then I could try A, B, or C, and then I'm sure that Frank would tell me I'm using too many lines. It was something like that.

• 1:10:36Speaker 02

  I give the hard time.

• 1:10:38Tim Ferriss?

  Something like that. And

• 1:10:40Speaker 02

  I can't do what he does. I make fun of it.

• 1:10:42Tim Ferriss?

  So I recall collecting, people should check out Jim Lee's penciling too. I mean, back in the day, I collected when he was working on the X-Men and stuff. I mean, just, just looking at the anatomical work he did with like Colossus and stuff.

• 1:10:55Speaker 02

  Jesus Christ.

• 1:10:55Tim Ferriss?

  It's amazing. Amazing. This seems to access something different. And I'm, I'm wondering how you developed the economy of sort of elegant line use and use of negative space, like this use of black and white. Because part of the reason I asked about the perspective is I noticed, which is something you can only really notice in something that's large format and produce this way is all of the perspective lines that have been erased. There's a million perspective lines that have been erased in this.

• 1:11:29Speaker 02

  And that makes you feel the

• 1:11:32Tim Ferriss?

  Exactly. And then you have something like, like this here.

• 1:11:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:11:37Tim Ferriss?

  Right. And this, oh, if you can see this one, I'm hitting with my knee.

• 1:11:42Speaker 02

  Now we see how I got those arms?

• 1:11:44Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. Where you see, where you, your mind is creating all the perspective you need to make sense of this as a three dimensional experience in your brain. But it looks like probably 40, 50, 60 lines of perspective have all been erased. How did you develop this style?

• 1:12:05Speaker 02

  I remember one time I was talking with, I was early on in Sin City. And I was talking with um, Dick Dredano, you know who he was?

• 1:12:15Tim Ferriss?

  I know the name.

• 1:12:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, he was, he was, he was a comic book artist for a long time. Uh, mostly known, known as being an associate of Neil Adams. And he was looking at the early Sin City stuff. And you notice the early Sin City work has much more line work in it than later stuff. He said, and he was, he was like the best teacher in comics, okay? He was, I mean, he was, he was a good artist and everything, but he was a great editor. He mentored Klaus Jansen, for instance, and, and, and was, and was a terrific influence over a lot of people. He said, Frank, real New York Italian, all the way, this guy. He said, Frank, I'm looking at this Sin City you're doing.

• 1:13:00Speaker 02

  And he said, and I'm thinking about some of the old guys.

• 1:13:08Speaker 02

  And I'm thinking, there was this old guy, and he names, I can't remember right now. And he was doing stuff kinda like yours, only eventually he just started laying in all the black areas first. Put the lines in later. And he found out he didn't need so many lines.

• 1:13:28Tim Ferriss?

  That's interesting.

• 1:13:28Speaker 02

  I went home and the real look of Sin City was born.

• 1:13:32Tim Ferriss?

  Hmm.

• 1:13:33Speaker 02

  Because once the black was down, I went, hey.

• 1:13:39Speaker 02

  I'm, I'm more than halfway up. I'm there, you know, I'll just add a few little things. And that was when, that was when, now I've worked that way ever since on everything.

• 1:13:52Tim Ferriss?

  And at what point did you also, it seems like innovate with the, as I understand, I kind of start to finish first to last page batch processing? Where instead of doing

• 1:14:02Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:14:03Tim Ferriss?

  The penciling, the lettering, the inking and the coloring on a per-page basis. You're basically doing the penciling for the entire book.

• 1:14:13Speaker 02

  That was Sin City as well.

• 1:14:14Tim Ferriss?

  That was Sin City as well.

• 1:14:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:14:16Tim Ferriss?

  It's just so mind blowing, like it, it, I, it seems to me, I guess in retrospect, that that makes so much sense to do it the way that you did it.

• 1:14:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, I decided I'd do all the tissue layouts, trace them all off into pencil drawings, then

• 1:14:32Speaker 02

  Do all the panel borders. You don't want to be around me on those days. And then lay all in all the flat, black areas. And what this did was it made it more fun every step of the way. And it sped the whole thing up like crazy. And it made the work so much better. It was idiotic. By the end of it, the line work was so spontaneous. Man.

• 1:14:56Tim Ferriss?

  What is that first step that you mentioned with tissue?

• 1:14:59Speaker 02

  No, good. Well, that's where I solved the basic compositional and drawing issues on a separate piece of tissue.

• 1:15:05Tim Ferriss?

  Which is just a type of paper.

• 1:15:07Speaker 02

  Well, it's a vellum. It's it's um. You know, it's not really a tissue. It's stronger than that. It's a type of drawing paper, but it's nearly transparent. I place that marker rough. My drawing board is a light table. And I put my the actual piece of Bristol board on top of that. And. You know, trace that off.

• 1:15:33Speaker 02

  So that I can move things around. I can change the size. I can replace things and so on.

• 1:15:39Tim Ferriss?

  So that was also done on Sin City. That's wild. So a lot of innovation happened on Sin City.

• 1:15:45Speaker 02

  Oh, yes. It was a transformative piece of work.

• 1:15:48Tim Ferriss?

  Why did so much coalesce during Sin City in that way?

• 1:15:54Speaker 02

  Well.

• 1:15:56Speaker 02

  Therein lies a tale.

• 1:15:58Tim Ferriss?

  I love tales.

• 1:15:59Speaker 02

  Well, it's no, it's it's it's a. Because everything was happening. I had. Broken away from the major publishers. Was working with the then young Dark Horse comics. And we tested the waters with each other with Martha Washington series. And with hard boiled. And I decided I was going to take my baby there. And so I just decided, okay. It's time to reinvent the wheel. I'm going to apply the stuff that I've been told. And as I said to my greatest, I said, look. We've done two science fiction series. And I know everything is superheroes in science fiction.

• 1:16:42Speaker 02

  I want to do a crime comic and in black and white. And he did influential. So we were, you know, we were rolling with that.

• 1:16:51Tim Ferriss?

  So was it the ability to take that creative leap? That seems like it been.

• 1:16:58Tim Ferriss?

  Building inside you for a very long time.

• 1:17:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:17:01Tim Ferriss?

  Is that the kind of creative unlock that then led to these various innovations? Is that the way that you would think about it? Or was it?

• 1:17:09Speaker 02

  Well, one thing does lead to another, but most of creative work is problem solving. It's not, God is speaking to me. It's, you know, how do I, how do I get that nose to look right? You know, it's that. And in this case is it was how to get the look I'm after as efficiently as possible.

• 1:17:29Tim Ferriss?

  I won't show it again, but I can pull it up on the screen as, as B roll. But that right hand page in particular of that female figure.

• 1:17:38Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:17:38Tim Ferriss?

  And the black kind of left portion of the torso, which is framed with black lining. And the right side, from our perspective, framed with the white. I mean, just the economy, the amount of meaning that is transmitted with such a relatively small amount of ink. I know it's in some cases.

• 1:17:59Speaker 02

  There was a lot of ink.

• 1:18:01Tim Ferriss?

  It's a lot of ink. I know it's, but in terms of line work that is sort of the lattice work of the perception. It's just so incredible.

• 1:18:08Speaker 02

  In the early pages in Sin City, there was a lot of line work underneath all that. George again, it was clicking along, just that was what it was going to be from birth.

• 1:18:20Tim Ferriss?

  Also something that, you know, comes to mind, at least for me, in the, in the Japanese way of doing things, and there's a lot of variability, of course, among Japanese artists and so on, but it's very interesting how they apply detail, right? You might see a ton of detail in a small portion of a panel.

• 1:18:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:18:41Tim Ferriss?

  And then very little on the rest. You might.

• 1:18:43Speaker 02

  I love that.

• 1:18:44Tim Ferriss?

  You write, or you might see a page.

• 1:18:45Speaker 02

  It's like the more Imari approach.

• 1:18:47Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. Exactly. And then you might have a page where it's very fast paced. The line works pretty sparse and then there's one panel that has a lot of detail. And the beauty in this comes also up in Understanding Comics with McLeod is how much work the brain does really effortlessly between the panels.

• 1:19:11Speaker 02

  Well, it's where all this also to where McLeod was applying, applying McLuhan.

• 1:19:18Speaker 02

  Because you know, because there's a lot of my clue in thinking in my cloud.

• 1:19:22Tim Ferriss?

  I've been loving the book, so thank you for sending me an early copy, Selen. And I can't wait until I can actually export all my highlights because there are so many highlights that I put into it. And what I want to also emphasize for folks, I really believe this, is that if you want to be good at anything, study people who are excellent at something. It does not have to be the same thing you are hoping to pursue. Right? Like if you study Jiro Dreams of Sushi or something like that in an effort to become better at X and aim for the top of your field, that seems totally disparate. There's still so many lessons you can take.

• 1:20:05Tim Ferriss?

  And if humans are story making machines and that we often create meaning almost always from stories, then studying your work within the realm of comics and film, even if someone is not involved explicitly in comics or film, the lessons can still be applied. And I'll be very curious and excited to see how people in industries and areas that may not, can't even be guessed at this point, will implement some of the life lessons from the book. I'll be very curious to see. Be very fun.

• 1:20:46Tim Ferriss?

  You know, I have to also mention, and I've wanted you to pronounce this name for me. Well, I never thought I would meet you, but since I was a little kid. The Elektra that you did, that I want to say it was a lot of watercolor artwork. Bill, how do you say his last name?

• 1:21:04Speaker 02

  Sinkovich.

• 1:21:05Tim Ferriss?

  Sinkovich. Sinkovich?

• 1:21:06Speaker 02

  Sinkovich.

• 1:21:08Tim Ferriss?

  Sinkovich?

• 1:21:09Speaker 02

  No. Sinkevich.

• 1:21:12Tim Ferriss?

  Sinkovich. Okay.

• 1:21:14Speaker 02

  Sinkovich.

• 1:21:16Tim Ferriss?

  Exactly.

• 1:21:17Speaker 02

  Think Russian. Pretend you're Russian. Pretend you're Russian.

• 1:21:20Tim Ferriss?

  That is a beautiful, that is a beautiful piece of work.

• 1:21:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's pretty amazing.

• 1:21:25Tim Ferriss?

  It's amazing.

• 1:21:26Speaker 02

  And it was a berserk experience for both of us.

• 1:21:32Tim Ferriss?

  Tell me, because that.

• 1:21:33Speaker 02

  We had such a time.

• 1:21:35Tim Ferriss?

  You had such time, a good time.

• 1:21:36Speaker 02

  We were like two 12 year olds, just making a crazy.

• 1:21:40Tim Ferriss?

  What was the experience like and why did you work well together? Maybe that's worth digging into.

• 1:21:46Speaker 02

  Well, first of all, we liked each other a lot. Okay.

• 1:21:49Tim Ferriss?

  Great starting point.

• 1:21:50Speaker 02

  It was one of those times that happened that, you know, you live for in that, in that comics had been very restrictive for a very long time. Things like Dark Knight had started busting things open. You know, Watchmen was out and so on. Bill had gone from being the guy who draws like Neil Adams to being more and more. This, you know, guy who was pulling in Ralph Stedman and doing all this stuff and really becoming his own man. He had just worked for that one more. He was looking for a much looser kind of arrangement, you know, because Alan's a very dominating writer.

• 1:22:31Tim Ferriss?

  Dominating in the sense that he has an idea of how to.

• 1:22:34Speaker 02

  He writes a very, he writes a very tight. Um, I mean, he's a clockmaker when he writes a story. You know, Watchmen plays off that constantly and the, uh, and Bill is a, is bucking Bronco. So when Bill and I got together, it was, they just opened Epic Comics at Marvel. Back when Marvel was actually trying to loosen up a little bit before it became Marvel again, you know, and, and.

• 1:23:01Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it's easy for people to forget. I mean, Marvel went through some very hard times.

• 1:23:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:23:06Tim Ferriss?

  Before the technology caught up sufficiently to end up with Marvel Studios and so on, but.

• 1:23:12Speaker 02

  No, no, I'm talking about when Marvel was really trying to bring in the European influences and stuff like that. It was, it was quite an exciting time. Archie Goodwin was running a fascinating division there. I came up with a mini series, supposed to be four issues, Electra for Marvel Comics. And Marvel couldn't, when they saw what it was, the script was, they went, this can't be part of Marvel Comics. This is just like too goddamn weird. And so it bumped over to the epic division. Kind of them credit, they didn't just say, we won't do it. And then it went from four issues to eight issues, you know, there were literal wasn't. The top blew off the.

• 1:23:55Speaker 02

  I mean, the lid flew off the pot that was on the stove.

• 1:23:59Tim Ferriss?

  How did you give? Bill enough rain as a bucking bronco?

• 1:24:06Speaker 02

  Didn't.

• 1:24:06Tim Ferriss?

  You didn't?

• 1:24:07Speaker 02

  I wrote full scripts.

• 1:24:09Tim Ferriss?

  Okay.

• 1:24:09Speaker 02

  He just drew over the fucking one and I had to pull the whole thing back.

• 1:24:13Tim Ferriss?

  Can you explain what full script means?

• 1:24:15Speaker 02

  In this? A full script is like a screenplay.

• 1:24:17Tim Ferriss?

  It is, right? Yeah.

• 1:24:19Speaker 02

  It only a little stricter because he tells you what each panel number is and exactly what goes in it and what the captions are.

• 1:24:26Tim Ferriss?

  So you would send that to Bill and you'd be like, thanks, appreciate the effort.

• 1:24:31Speaker 02

  Which is what would come back would be much more abstract and much more daring.

• 1:24:36Tim Ferriss?

  Cool, but it wouldn't break the clock. It would still work.

• 1:24:40Speaker 02

  It did not say I wouldn't like send him an exploding tank and get back a bunch of tomatoes rolling down the street. No. But it required reinterpretation of my script. And I welcomed it though.

• 1:24:52Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, that sounds fun. It sounds.

• 1:24:54Speaker 02

  I saw brilliance was happening. It was fun. And it's just because of that, though, the excitement grew. And I kept expanding the story because all these unexpected elements that he'd throw in. I want to turn them into characters and stuff. And luckily Archie Goodwin was along for the ride and, and you know, it was an absolute gas. I love that book.

• 1:25:15Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, I mean, I still have it. I literally still have it on Long Island. Let me ask you a question. It may go, no, this may be a dead end of a question, but I'm going to ask you anyway. This is a question I often ask. As we start to kind of wind towards landing the plane here.

• 1:25:33Tim Ferriss?

  If you had a billboard on which you could put anything non-commercial, right? Metaphorically, to get a message or something in front of billions of people could be a statement, a quote, a word, an image, combination. What might you put on that billboard? Does anything come to mind?

• 1:25:54Speaker 02

  Whoa.

• 1:25:54Tim Ferriss?

  A motto, a mantra, anything?

• 1:25:58Speaker 02

  I'm gonna get very broad on this.

• 1:26:00Tim Ferriss?

  Okay.

• 1:26:00Speaker 02

  It's just they ask every question.

• 1:26:02Tim Ferriss?

  Ask every question. What does that mean to you?

• 1:26:06Speaker 02

  This means that we live in a time of silence. People are leaving things unquestioned, unspoken. And, and, and the good bit, uh. It's not a good, it's not a good line. I can't come up with a good one, it seems.

• 1:26:22Tim Ferriss?

  I think ask every question is pretty good. But we can take a couple of bites at the apple if you like.

• 1:26:28Speaker 02

  Yeah. That would just challenge.

• 1:26:31Tim Ferriss?

  Challenge?

• 1:26:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:26:32Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, what does that mean to you?

• 1:26:34Speaker 02

  And that, that, when you are confronted with things that everybody says, be ready to challenge.

• 1:26:47Tim Ferriss?

  Challenge, push the wall, defy the code. If everybody says do X, everybody says you must do Y.

• 1:26:55Speaker 02

  At least if they say.

• 1:26:58Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, why?

• 1:26:59Speaker 02

  Why is a pretty good one. You wanna go with that?

• 1:27:01Tim Ferriss?

  Why is a good one?

• 1:27:02Speaker 02

  Just one.

• 1:27:03Tim Ferriss?

  I guess they go together. Both of them go together.

• 1:27:05Speaker 02

  Why don't you go why?

• 1:27:06Tim Ferriss?

  Okay.

• 1:27:07Speaker 02

  With the question mark.

• 1:27:08Tim Ferriss?

  Why, question mark, ask, where's the camera? There it is.

• 1:27:12Speaker 02

  Or why's it gotta be that way? Why it gotta be that way?

• 1:27:15Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, why is it gotta be that way? They all converge sort of in the same theme.

• 1:27:19Speaker 02

  Just trying, just trying to go against an age of pathological conformity.

• 1:27:25Tim Ferriss?

  Yes. Yes, often subconscious to pathological conformity.

• 1:27:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:27:31Tim Ferriss?

  Ask the why. Why does it have to be this way? Also with your own thinking, it applies everywhere.

• 1:27:36Speaker 02

  Everywhere.

• 1:27:37Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, everywhere. Frank, thank you so much. It's great to see you again.

• 1:27:41Speaker 02

  Real pleasure, man.

• 1:27:42Tim Ferriss?

  And everybody, you can find Frank on Instagram at Frank Miller Official. The website is Frank Miller, Inc., I N K, dot com. And you can now, where's the camera? You can now preorder. So absolutely check out Push the Wall, My Life, Writing, Drawing, and the Art of Storytelling. I've been reading it. I'm going to finish it over the next couple of days. I've really been taking a lot of notes. I also took a bunch of notes from this conversation and we will have links to everything that we talked about in the show notes, as per usual, at tim.blog/podcast. Frank Miller will be the only Frank Miller. If you search by name for guest,

• 1:28:27Tim Ferriss?

  you will find this episode. And until next time, be just a bit kinder than is necessary to others, but also to yourself and ask why, why, why. Thanks for tuning in, everybody.

• 1:28:43Tim Ferriss?

  Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off and that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests.

• 1:29:26Tim Ferriss?

  And these strange esoteric things end up in my field and then I test them and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to tim.blog/friday, type that into your browser, tim.blog/friday, drop in your email and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening. Sleep is the key to it all. It is the foundation. Many of you heard me talk about how today's sponsor, Eight Sleep, has improved my sleep with its Pod cover. The Pod5 introduces Eight Sleep's latest product, the blanket, which uses the same technology as the Pod's cover to extend temperature regulation across the entire body.

• 1:30:10Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:30:54Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:31:34Tim Ferriss?

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