“He told me recently that he (still) wakes up everyday with a story in his head,” she said. “He was always lost in another world.”

The Miller family moved to Vermont in 1960, when Frank was age 3. His parents came to Vermont for work.

Miller’s father has held many jobs over the years, including fabricating steel for bridges, operating a farm and starting up a bus company. Marjorie Miller spent years working as a nurse, including a long stint at Fletcher Allen Medical Center in Burlington.

“I liked Vermont right away,” she said. “It reminded me of (rural) Maryland, but I’ve also always thought on myself as half-Yankee.”

Miller’s fantasies almost became deadly once when he was a child, his mother said. She said he once dressed up in a homemade Superman costume and jumped off a large rock into the driveway of the family’s home along Route 12.

He landed right in front of a car pulling into the family driveway. Superman could have survived a crash, but a young Miller probably would not have. Luckily, the driver swerved to avoid the child.

“He had a gas leak,” she said. “I don’t know what made me call him that day, but I probably saved his life.”

Miller’s first breakthrough work was with Marvel Comics in 1979, when he came on as the new artist on the Daredevil comic. The little-known comic, first launched in 1964, only had a few fans. But Miller’s gritty art and cinematic flair soon had fans flocking to the story about a blind lawyer and his superhero alter-ego.

The book became a hit and Marvel asked Miller to write the Daredevil stories every month. For practice, he began sketching the rooftops of New York City, to give the book, which had the superhero bouncing from building to building with athletic ease, a more realistic tone.

Stephen R. Bissette, a native Vermonter who now teaches at the Center for Cartoon Studies in White River Junction, remembers picking up Miller’s Daredevil run in the early 1980s and being amazed by Miller’s dark and gritty city stories and his cinematic approach to art.

While Miller was drawing Daredevil at Marvel, Bissette had just begun drawing the DC Comic Swamp Thing, a comic about a man trapped in the body of a swamp monster. Like Daredevil before Miller’s tenure, Swamp Thing had few fans in the early 1980s.

But joining Bissette on Swamp Thing was British writer Alan Moore, who may be one of Miller’s few rivals for most popular living comics legend. Moore’s scripts called for wild experimentations in comics storytelling, and Bissette said Moore found his inspiration with Miller’s Daredevil comics.

“Frank took a B-list Marvel character and essentially reinvented him,” Bissette said. “And here we were coming in to write a B-list DC character and hoping to do the same.”

Bissette and Miller realized their shared Vermont roots after meeting at an Ohio comics convention in the mid-1980s. The new Swamp Thing was a success, and Miller by then had begun writing and drawing a new comic for DC – a science fiction story samurai story called “Ronin.”

Over the next few years, comics shed their juvenile image and were developing a literary edge and were being taken more seriously as books. Graphic novels suddenly began winning book awards. Everything seemed to be changing in the industry.

“I remember Frank leaning over to me and saying, ‘The inmates have taken over the asylum,’” Bissette recalled. “And he meant that as a compliment!”

One of Miller’s big fans is U.S. Sen. Patrick Leahy.

Leahy was born in 1940, one year after the Batman character was created by artist Bob Kane and writer Bill Finger, two pillars in the comic book world. Leahy said he bought his first comics at Vermont news stand when he was five years old.

Leahy’s favorite superhero is Batman. And his favorite Batman comic is Miller’s iconic, “The Dark Knight Returns” graphic novel.

“I think Frank really saved the (Batman) franchise with ‘Dark Knight Returns,’” Leahy said in an interview.

Miller’s story centers on an aging and retired, Bruce Wayne, who dons the Batman costume once more to take back Gotham City, this time from a gang of Nazi-like mutants. “Dark Knight” may be the darkest Batman story ever created as the character is portrayed as moody and psychologically damaged.

Along with Moore’s Watchmen graphic novel and Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning holocaust comics memoir “Maus,” “Dark Knight Returns” is credited as being one of the books that helped comics grow up into a new art form.

“I think Frank really saved the franchise with the ‘Dark Knight Returns,’” Leahy said. “It sounds cliché to say now, but his Batman was dark and gritty and real, something that character wasn’t for a long time.”

Leahy appeared in two of the Batman films in the late 1990s and recently was filmed for a small role for next year’s “The Dark Knight” film, a sequel to 2005’s “Batman Begins,” which borrowed some plot elements from Frank Miller’s 1987 series, “Batman: Year One.”

The senator remembered meeting Kane, Batman’s creator, on the set of one of the earlier films. Leahy said he mentioned to the legendary creator that he really enjoyed reading Miller’s Batman stories.

“I got the impression that he wasn’t too happy with Frank Miller’s rendition,” Leahy said, with a slight laugh. “So I pointed out to him that I also really enjoyed his work on the character.”

Miller has never strayed far from Batman. He is now writing a new series for DC about Batman recruiting the orphan who would become his teenage sidekick, Robin. But his next comic project could be his most controversial: A black-and-white graphic novel called, “Holy Terror, Batman!” The superhero apparently battles al-Qaida after terrorists attack Gotham City.

Miller was a resident of New York City during the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, and he warned in an interview with National Public Radio this year that we are “up against an existential foe.”

“Nobody questions why after Pearl Harbor we attacked Nazi Germany,” he said. “It was because we were taking on a form of global fascism; we’re doing the same thing now.”

While Miller for the most part has severed ties with his home state, he several years ago began name-dropping James Kochalka, a Burlington cartoonist who does a daily autobiographical comic strip. In interviews Miller described Kochalka as one of the most exciting creators working. Kochalka was flattered, and the two struck up a friendship.

Kochalka’s favorite Miller graphic novel is his Batman sequel, “The Dark Knight Strikes Again.” The 2002 series was a comedic take on the character, and Miller employed a bright, bold and cartoony style for his tale of Batman fighting a police-state government.

“It showed that he was an artist that was still willing to take risks,” Kochalka said.

Kochalka thinks he can trace Miller’s obsession with cities back to his days growing up in Vermont.

“His art really comes from the perspective of a person who grew up in the country,” Kochalka said. “And as a result, he has a love and romance for the city, including its violence, which can only come from someone who spent their youth outside of the city.”

Kochalka said Miller told him that he now draws his comics standing up in front of a large canvas, instead of the traditional method of being seated over a drawing table.

“He told me he wants to feel his whole arm move as he draws,” Kochalka said. “And I think that really accounts for the rougher and bolder turn his art has taken.”

Miller first began working in Hollywood after his success with DC Comics in the late 1980s. He wrote the screenplays for the two sequels to the successful 1987 film, “Robocop,” a science fiction story about a crime-ridden Detroit in the future.

But little of his scripts made it to the final film versions, and Miller vowed never to work with Hollywood again. Meanwhile, he broke away from DC Comics after the company started putting warning labels on its comics with more adult themes, which he viewed as creeping censorship.

He instead brought his new creations to Dark Horse Comics, a smaller company that offered him ownership and more control over his work. His black-and-white “Sin City” stories published over the next several years would earn Miller more praise among the industry and – more than a decade later – would reunite him with Hollywood.

The first “Sin City” story, serialized over 13 months in a Dark Horse anthology comic, saw Miller dive even further into film noir influences and produce intense, stylized depictions of Basin City, a sprawling crime center full of hard-boiled men and two-timing women.

Diana Schutz is a senior editor at Dark Horse Comics, the Oregon comic company that publishes Miller’s “Sin City” graphic novels. Since 1997 she has been Miller’s editor, but she first got to know the man as a fan in the early 1980s. “You’ll find one of my fan girl letters to him in the back pages of his Daredevil comics,” she said.

Miller works with little editorial oversight, Schutz said, and that’s because he often doesn’t need any.

“I don’t know any other cartoonist that gets so deeply involved in their work,” Schutz said. “When Frank is working on a comic, he immerses himself. … He lives and breathes the comic until he is done.”

In the early 1970s, a teenage Frank Miller made his stage debut as the lead role in a U-32 high school theater production. But on the day of the show, a snowstorm hit the region, turning the evening roads into a white mess.

“I think only about 25 people showed up,” remembered Ken Page, a teacher at the time, who is now principal at Crossett Brook Middle School in Duxbury.

According to his mother, Miller is now in Texas filming a movie based on the little-known comic strip superhero, “The Spirit.”

Page, too, remembers the young Miller making money on his creations – although by the time Frank was in high school he was making a nickel, not a penny, a strip.

Miller was always drawing comics in high school, Page said. He would make copies of his short strips on the mimeograph machine. To encourage the student’s creativity, Page got Miller the job of drawing several report covers for the Vermont Council on Reading. He still has the original art for those covers somewhere in storage, Page said.

Miller even drew a crime comic strip, “The Fixer” for the U-32 newspaper. A clear precursor to Sin City, the strip featured a tough-talking private investigator. One strip’s plot has the hero’s secretary kidnapped and a deadly gun fight down by the docks.

“The Fixer falls into the bay, as darkness sets in … !,” a caption reads. Next, the shadowy villain gloats, “Now to make sure … ha ha ha! I’ve killed the Fixer!”

Miller told the UK Telegraph last year that his early comics were “awful,” but that it was important for him that he both wrote and drew them.

“I’ve done my best to keep it that way, because I believe that drawing and writing have been unnaturally separated,” he said.

Miller stood out among his peers during high school, according to students and teachers. He wore a dark trench coat at a time when his fellow students embraced the scruffy, sometimes colorful fashions of the 1970s anti-war movement.

Even then Miller seemed to be pulling away from Vermont. His visits to New York City grew more frequent. It was clear he saw his future surrounded by a big city, not cow pastures.

“He was brilliant, but not in the conventional ways,” Page said. “It was very clear that he was on a different level than everyone else.”

Contact Daniel Barlow at Daniel.Barlow@rutlandherald.com