Even the “reality” outside the psyches has blustering caricatures of a Nixon president shouting homophobic slurs and stroking the nuclear button, while Garrett and his teammates are equally hyperviolent and constantly resurrected via outlandish cybernetic implants.Įlektra: Assassin is a difficult read whose absurdity reaches self-parody (which may be the point), but its disorienting presentation only demonstrates what an experimental time the mid-80s were for comics. This is only one reading of Elektra: Assassin, which overloads the senses with information, becoming destabilised in time and plot to operate like a stream-of-consciousness story (especially in the opening issue). Sienkiewicz’s unhinged and often lysergic artwork only emphasizes the disorienting psychological emphasis Miller foregrounds in these books. Realistic textures would press against hyper-exaggerated figures, like the enormous Kingpin within Daredevil: Love and War. Sienkiewicz strayed from traditional “representative” comic art into stylised watercolors that bordered on expressionism and abstraction. It’s appropriate that Sienkiewicz worked on both these books, as his distinctive art-style exemplifies the disruptive innovation occurring in ‘80s mainstream comics. And both were illustrated by Bill Sienkiewicz. So, in addition to Born Again, Frank Miller wrote two more ground-breaking, experimental, standalone Daredevil (adjacent) stories in 1986. Frank Miller was commissioned to help boost sales of the imprint, resulting in the explicit and psychedelic limited-series Elektra: Assassin. Epic would publish high-quality, creator-owned series which would be distributed to the direct market, and therefore avoid Comics Code Authority censorship over vulgarity and nudity. The Marvel Graphic Novel was one commercial exercise of the 1980s, but editor-in-chief Jim Shooter also experimented with the Epic Comics imprint.

Frank miller daredevil elektra