Frank Miller’s ‘Push the Wall’: The Romantic Rebel

A review of Push the Wall: My Life, Writing, Drawing, and the Art of Storytelling by Frank Miller; 224 pages; Canongate (July 2026)

Even outside of comic book circles, Frank Miller is known as a gifted artist and writer who made comics grown up and gritty. From his damaged version of Bruce Wayne to Marv in Sin City (whom Miller pithily describes as “Conan the Barbarian in a trenchcoat”), Miller has created stories that resemble a strikingly original blend of film noir and dark Wagnerian opera. But the Miller who emerges from this memoir—part autobiography, part primer for aspiring graphic novelists—is as much a romantic as a gung-ho rebel.

When Miller arrived in New York in 1976, the city was arguably at its most feral and dangerous. A green kid from Montpelier, Vermont, he pitched up with a sketchbook and a sense of iron-clad determination (the motto he wrote by his high-school photo was “Get the Hell out of My Way”) but very little else. He found that he loved things about New York that caused others to recoil:

I arrived wide open to the strange gifts of the city’s seedy decline—the Sodom and Gomorrah of Times Square, the hard-up characters hanging around fleabag hotels by Port Authority, the graffiti and urban dross in the subway, the misfits skulking in the East Village parks after dark, the crumbling, uneasy feeling of it all.

Manhattan at night was a fantasy land for me—the charged atmosphere held the keys to my imagination. Gotham’s wailing sirens, blustery drunks, and street-corner lurkers: the city’s midnight cast of characters in an edgy melodrama I was finally getting to watch in person. It was all a source of romance for me, not terror.

More importantly, New York was the home of his first great love: “Sure the city was violent, but it was also the hub of comic books and had been since the beginning. Marvel and DC were there, and all my real-life heroes were either still there bent over their drawing boards or they had spent formative time in the city, honing their skills and learning the lessons that only New York can teach you.” Miller was a childhood fan of the medium, and developed a particular fondness for EC comics, which were geared towards adults and “explored forbidden themes such as environmentalism, nuclear disarmament, and the miseries of war.” From EC comics, Miller “learned to always push the walls that others constructed, to challenge the strictures others put in place to stifle and smother.”

Part of EC’s appeal no doubt rested on the reproaches it earned from the Comics Code Authority, which Miller describes as “a crusty remnant of ‘Red Scare’ censorship and the prim morality of postwar America.” The attempt to drum up a moral panic about comics will be familiar to those who have followed similar media and public campaigns to ban and censor video games and “video nasties” in the name of child protection: