Miller's best work stands near the pinnacle of the comic book artform, but when he drops a stinker, it's often so bad that it fouls anything connected to it.
His first run at the helm of Marvel's
Daredevil, from issues 168 through 191 (or so), was among the best stuff that Marvel had produced in nearly 20 years, and it's still superior to much that has come since. His return to
Daredevil with David Mazzuchelli is also very good, if for no other reason than because it revitalized (and gave new focus and direction to) a title that had utterly sucked for about three years.
His
Batman: Year One is excellent for much the same reason (Mazzuchelli included!). It revitalized a decades-old character that had degraded into self-caricature. It also served as a thematic book-end to complement
Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, even if that latter title was later relegated to an "Elseworlds" storyline.
But his
Elektra: Assassin stuff from around the same time is self-absorbed and faux-artsy crap that the reader can just as well do without.
His first
Sin City series was excellent because it was visually groundbreaking and uncompromising, in a way that its contemporary titles seldom were. It stands alongside Gaiman's
Sandman as some of the best work of the 90's. But the later
Sin City titles lacked the same power and seemed to obsess too much with breasts, penises, and guns, often in the same frame. Hey, not that there's anything wrong with that, but such imagery should (IMO) enhance the story rather than drive it.
I didn't care for
Bad Boy, and
Hard Boiled was visually very cool but generally uninteresting to me as a story. And the interminable
Martha Washington stuff was just awful, due in no small part to Dave Gibbon's
hugely over-rated artwork. I couldn't care less for Miller's
Robocop vs. Terminator stuff, and his
Batman vs. Spawn oneshot is an entirely forgettable foray into market exploitation.
Dark Knight II is inexcusable drek, and a clear effort to pad Frank's pockets at the expense of artistic expression. Its very publication undercut Alan Moore's forward to the bound edition of the
Dark Knight Returns, wherein Moore notes that a mythic character's strength is often derived from an awareness of his own death. In publishing
Dark Knight II, Miller takes away this awareness and throws Batman back onto the pile of generically immortal costumed heroes.
And then I stumble upon
this tidbit, and I think that Frank's finally lost whatever scrap of artistic integrity he once had. I've known for years that his professed political views are common among angry (and angrily ineffectual) Libertarians, but it's a real disappointment to see him aiming for a political zinger. Sure, Superman fought the Nazi's in WWII-era comics, but one would hope that we'd advanced beyond this simplistic, four-color chest-thumping.
Miller apparently has not.
Still, it was cool to see him dead with a ball-point pen in his forehead in the otherwise not great
Daredevil film, and as a priest shot in the confessional booth in
Sin City.
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