Inspiration: Film noir and Frank Miller

This post was solely inspired by “The Spirit” movie that I watched today with my fiancee. I think it’s absolutely brilliant piece of cinematic art and Frank Miller’s style is so inspiring that it’s worth putting some examples on the blog.

Frank Miller?

In case you spent last few years under the rock, I’ll drop a short biographic note of Frank Miller. What you need to know is that Frank is the original author of such masterpiece comics like “300″, “Sin City” and “The Spirit” which have been adapted by Hollywood to grow into billion-making movies. His weapon of choice is film noir style, which means it’s mostly about good cops, bad cops, sex, drugs and so on. So, who is Frank Miller (I’ll quote Wikipedia on that):

Frank Miller (born January 27, 1957) is an American writer, artist and film director best known for his dark, film noir-style comic book stories and graphic novels for Dark Horse Comics, DC Comics, and Marvel Comics. He recently directed The Spirit. Miller shared directing duties with Robert Rodriguez on the film Sin City and produced 300.

Behind the style

The style that Frank Miller uses in his comics relates to the late 40s and 50s American crime scene dramas that had one in common – operators used strong light and shadow contrast to increase dramaturgy of the scene. Also, most of those movies were – as I said before – about sex, drugs, crime and some really classic badassery (is that even a word..?). In noir movies people were corrupted to the bone, cops were useless, no one was safe and only some lone vigilantes tried to regain peace and quiet. Sounds cool, huh? Now some classic scenes follow to increase your appetite…

The works of Frank Miller

So, now that you know the deal behind, here’s the juice – the drawings of Frank Miller, including comic scenes, posters etc. (click for bigger version if available).

Feel free to drop me a line in comments or via Twitter if you’d like something to be added to the post. Hope you feel inspired now!