Frank Miller on "Wild Work"

More from The Comics Journal #101's 1985 interview with Frank Miller:

"I want to see wild work, even reckless work, cartoonists trying out new approaches that don't even look like they have a chance in hell of being successful. This atmosphere of caution is not only keeping the form stuck 20 years in the past, it's losing us nearly every reader who passes."

I was going to use this in my column this week, but it ended up not fitting in very smoothly. But, man, those words seem to apply to mainstream, direct-market comics today, don't they? Except for the notion that anyone "passes" by the comic rack. Nobody even sees comics anymore unless they go into shop specifically looking for them.

Of course, these days the argument is that the superhero market becomes smaller due to attrition, and "passes" could mean people dying off. But if the comic book market loses "nearly every" reader who "passes," does that mean that there are comics in the afterlife? Is that where "Brother Power" and "The Inferior Five" ended up?

Frank Miller on Superhero Comics and Their Readers

"I feel that pulp super-hero comics depend on a safer, less risky approach to the telling of a story. They're children's books for Christ's sake. Since what I want to do, and what must be done, is to explore the form, to play with different kinds of contents, I work primarily in different formats. What has to develop is a structure to the industry where the avant-garde of the talent is encouraged to do the more ambitious work, where the pulp super-hero comics and the buttheadedness of their readership no longer restrain bolder work, but rather are affected by it, synthesizing techniques that develop, and are steadily pulled forward from the storytelling methods of the '40s."
--Frank Miller

In my research for this week's "When Words Collide" column, I came across that excerpt from a 1985 interview with Miller, published in The Comics Journal #101. (That whole issue of TCJ is a fascinating time capsule of the time right before Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns.)

Here are my questions:

1. Even though we talk about how different the comic book landscape looks now compared to 1985, have Miller's words become true?

2. Have the superhero comics truly synthesized the techniques of the "bolder" work done in the medium?

3. Is it the "buttheadedness" of the readers that continues to restrain the genre?