In 1986 a young comic books writer called Frank Miller practically reinvented the form with a violent, uncompromising Batman story called The Dark Knight Returns. Twenty years on his (comparatively) realistic portrayal of costumed crimefighters is the established voice of comics. Every hero needs a dark compulsion to motivate him and a viscerally brutal approach to law enforcement.

In his new career as a film director though, Frank Miller seems to be undoing the orthodoxy he created. Although The Spirit occupies the same film noir inspired world evoked in Miller’s earlier Sin City the eponymous hero spend much of his time embroiled in cartoonish fistfights that hark back to the golden age of Looney Tunes and the rest of it romancing a series of voluptuously daffy dames in revealing, not to say eye-popping costumes. It’s a movie that is steeped in reverence for the Spirit’s original creator, Will Eisner,

We caught up with the pulp polymath for a brief interview. There may not quite have been time to ask him about his long-delayed Batman versus Bin Laden epic ‘Holy Terror’ but in our video he discusses the look of The Spirit, his views on a movie version of Dark Knight Returns and his attitude to the recent ballyhoo about The Death of Batman.

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