Toddfather Talk

Wayback Wednesday with Frank Miller!

February 17, 2016

Since today is WAYBACK WEDNESDAY, I thought I’d recant a little story from my younger days as a comic book artist….

During the course of my , now lengthy career, some of the highlights during that time have happened by sheer luck and THIS was one of them:

Back in the mid-80’s, I was in New York staying with a friend of mine who happened to also be the inking assistant of Klaus Janson. Klaus, those of you who don’t know, was a long-time inker in the business and had done lots of work at both Marvel and DC Comics. He had done the inking over award winning artist Fran Miller’s reboot of the Daredevil series (which is a huge inspiration for the Netflix Daredevil TV series). But during this time I was in New York, Klaus was just beginning to ink over Frank’s pencils on an upcoming mini-series The Dark Knight Retrurns.

Anyways… Klaus came over to my friend’s apartment and dropped a bunch of pages off to my friend who was helping out on the backgrounds of that mini-series. He told my pal that he needed the pages back in a couple days. When Klaus left my friend turned to me and said, “Hey Todd, can you help me ink these pages while you’re here?” My eyes lit up! I was thinking, “Are you kidding? I get to work on Frank’s new BATMAN book!” So, that evening I sat at a table and tried to do my best impersonation of Klaus Jason inking over Frank Miller.

And to this day I still remember the pages I helped inked: One had Batman dressed as an old, fat lady complaining about the prices of food in the store he was in (because the bad guys were also having a meeting there). And I did some cool explosion lines and a bunch of broken brick flying everywhere. As well as some street scenes and a few cars.

Here’s where my geeky side comes out…

Even though by this time, I’d done two years of Infinity Inc. for DC Comics and had just begun doing Incredible Hulk for Marvel, I was so stoked that I was doing some inking on The Dark Knight Returns (of course… until today, very few people even knew that small detail. I was a full-time monthly artist, but thought that this was the highlight of my career at that point in time. And you know, I don’t think ever knew about it either.

But the nice ending to all this is that years later, after I had helped form IMAGE COMICS, I was able to talk Frank into coming back and write another BATMAN story (since he hadn’t done any after The Dark Knight Returns) in a book that guest-starred my creation SPAWN. We had many great talks during that time as I felt Frank was a kindred spirit. He has always been a favorite of mine.

And always will be.

Enjoy.

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Toddfather Talk

Wayback Wednesday with Frank Miller!

February 17, 2016

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