What Frank Miller Can’t Live Without

I drink green tea all day long. The first time I took yoga — back then, I was a coffee drinker and an unrepentant smoker. My yoga teacher was very, very beautiful. When she told me her age, I couldn’t quite believe it because she looked like she was about 15 years younger than she was. I said, “Is it yoga that keeps you so young?” She said, “No. The yoga keeps me healthy. The green tea keeps me young.” So as part of my general move toward getting healthier, I switched from my suicidal coffee habit to green tea and never looked back. I’m having it right now. I tend to do anything I do obsessively, so I tend to have it running all day long. I switch to the decaf around midday or a little later.

Where do I start? That is so much a treasure of my home that I bought it twice. It’s a magnificent hardcover collection that collects what I regard as perhaps the crowning masterpiece of comic-strip art. I believe that comic-strip art all led up to “Calvin and Hobbes,” and while there’s many other great works in comic-strip art before it and since, I regard it as the real pinnacle to my taste. It’s a masterpiece on every level. It’s a perfect study of the inner life of a young boy. The young boy’s inner life greatly resembles mine when I was a little kid, full of dinosaurs, monsters, and aliens. His friendship also includes his relationship with a stuffed tiger, who is his sarcastic friend. Beyond that, it’s just a virtuoso performance by as fine a cartoonist as the world has ever seen. Bill Watterson’s work set a standard that we’ll all be working on matching for a long time.

I was lucky enough to be invited to write introductions to this Japanese manga when it was introduced to the United States. I wrote introductions, and Lynn Varley and I produced covers for it. It was part of my overall push to introduce the whole of Japanese comic books to the United States. I introduced manga to the United States back in the 1980s.Lone Wolf & Cubwas like the freight train that charged in to introduce it. Since then, it’s become a separate section in most comic-book shops, and it’s become a larger and larger part of the reading of younger readers. It’s some of the purest visual storytelling you’ll see anywhere. It’s been adapted into all kinds of cartoons, feature films, and so on. It’s amazing stuff.

I’ve always been a movie nut and always been a Hitchcock fan, so picking a favorite movie is not easy, but I settled onRebeccamainly because I found that it’s the perfect piece of storytelling. It took a book and used it as a vehicle to, I think, use cinema to its best advantage. What other medium could have you completely and absolutely captivated by a character who never shows up? Rebecca dominates every scene of the story to the point where the lead character is so dwarfed by her that we don’t even notice that Joan Fontaine is playing a character who is never given a name. And the suspense of the movie, the mystery of it, and the astonishing revelation far into the movie that this goddess of a figure was, in fact, a villain. It’s classic Hitchcock, but not as a twist but as a pivotal, shocking revelation. When it first came out, I believe it was considered almost a poor man’sWuthering Heights, but I thinkRebeccaactually was the more truly gothic one. It’s a masterpiece.

I’m wearing them right now. It started out with me realizing that I found a shoe that was actually long enough and thin enough for my weird feet. But then they went from being an absolute habit to being a trademark. And, goodness gracious, they became popular with the basketball players and then they became designer shoes. Now I can get them with every possible design there is, so they’re just wonderful shoes. I mostly wear black ones, but if you saw my cabinets, you’d see I’ve got dozens of the damn things. And people give me them, so it’s just wonderful.

Well, I’ve always been a real big fan of old crime movies. When I started doing mySin Cityseries, I wanted to have a character to wear one, so I naturally got one my own size. I just fell into the habit of wearing them myself, and it became a trademark of mine. Now I’ve got a pile of them. They do wear out, by the way. I can testify. I’d say my favorite is gray — it’s a coolish gray, but I’m also very fond of the black and brown ones.

The Da Vinci brushes were a real discovery that I made on my first trip to Lucca, Italy, where there is an international congregation of cartoonists that happens once a year. I discovered this particular brush that has a wonderful point. No other brush I’ve gotten is quite as perfect as that one. Normally, the British are known for their brushes, like the Windsor & Newton brushes, and I’ll use those quite a bit, but for really intense work, I always go for the Da Vinci. I like to have a whole different group of sizes to work with. The Da Vinci brushes run a bit smaller than the standard Windsor & Newton brushes, but they’re finer in their point — their point is like a laser beam. In my line of work, you learn to compensate and learn which works better for what.

The pencil comes in first. Think of a pencil drawing as being almost like an architectural schematic and the real action takes place in the ink, but the actual hard work of the construction of the drawing and the arrangement of everything takes place with the pencil. I like Blackwings because they’re very, very smooth, and they don’t catch on the paper at all. They’re very much designed for drawing. A lot of these tools are things that were created for something else and then have been adapted into drawing tools. The pencils I had been using for many years before I was introduced to the Blackwing pencils were ones used by stenographers and such.

This is something that I don’t often put on because I do have my Vermont blood. But if I want to be impervious to anything, that works for me like one of those absolute thermal coats that everybody wears, you know, one of those where it’s like astronauts walking around in them. This little vest makes me feel like I’m in one of those. If I have a shirt and one of those on, I’m good. The other thing that’s really useful for this little vest guy is that it can function as an artist’s smock when the heat isn’t really kicking in. An artist’s smock is a very valuable thing because it not only keeps you comfortable while you’re working — your arms are free to work because it doesn’t have any sleeves — but the smock itself can take punishment and not complain. So if you walk out with splashes of ink or paint on your smock, it makes you look like an artist, not just a slob.

[Editor’s note: Miller’s vest, the Besne style, is sold out, but this one is similar.]

Well, again, it’s my constant companion. I’m prone to allergies and I’m an ex-smoker, so I tend to sneeze a lot and that sort of thing. It’s good to have around. They’re just all white. I will tell you that they’re as raw cotton as I can get because I don’t like them to have a shiny surface or anything else. I don’t like the aesthetics and I don’t like the function.

[Editor’s note: Miller’s handkerchiefs are white, but this check pattern is similar.]

It’s a store in Florence that I was introduced to during our business travels. I walked into this place, and it was just a magical place where you could see these people live for these things. I got to drift among them and feel this magnificent fabric. It was just delicious. As someone who grew up in cold weather — I come from upper Vermont — I know what it’s like to be comfortable from the cold. This definitely did it. I like all kinds of different colors, really. I’m an artist, so I probably go by moods and such. But I do say I lean toward blue. I’ve been using them for I’d say at least ten years. But I’ve been using scarves ever since I got out of the crib.

[Editor’s note: Principe di Firenze’s scarves are only sold in Italy, but you can find secondhand ones on eBay.]