Revenge of the Dark Knight

FRANK MILLER, his pale hands wrapped around a cane and the smoke from his cigarette swirling beneath the brim of his Homburg, sat at the poolside bar at the W Hotel in Westwood and watched the swimsuits saunter by. "I'm married to New York," he said between sips of a fizzy Red Bull cocktail. "But there's something to be said about Los Angeles too."

Miller arrived at the W a month and a half ago with a one-week reservation, but the L.A. fling is still going and he's still living out of a suitcase filled with black clothes. The reason is that Miller, the most important comic book artist of the last 25 years, is enjoying his moment in the Hollywood sun. There was, of course, the record-breaking March box office of "300," a lovingly faithful adaptation of Miller's bloody 1998 graphic novel, but there's also the two sequels to "Sin City" now in the pipeline and the Batman project now being filmed in London that borrows its title from Miller's 1986 masterpiece, "The Dark Knight Returns." "They finally got the title right," Miller said with a pretend sneer. "I was wondering when that would happen."

Miller fancies himself a curmudgeon, and on talk shows he's proven to be a firebrand with his political views challenging modern-day Islam. But it's hard to stay grumpy when everything is going your way. Like most stars of the comic-book community (where he is the rare artist who became equally celebrated as a writer), he had become accustomed to be treated like a valet by Hollywood -- \o7Hey, kid, thanks for the keys and the vehicle, here's a couple of bucks\f7 -- and then forced to watch the studios wreck everything on screen. The 1990s Batman movies, for instance, would not have happened without Miller's work, but they often ignored or trampled his contributions to the character. On two "RoboCop" films, meanwhile, Miller was hired as a screenwriter, but the efforts fell flat. Then Elektra, a beloved character he created, tanked badly on the screen in the hands of others.

Now there's a sweet satisfaction in the fact that the new Hollywood approach is to hire fan-boy directors and show fawning respect for the source material. "Sin City's" Robert Rodriguez even insisted on sharing director credits with Miller on those films (a maverick stand that cost Rodriguez his membership in the Directors Guild), and that led directly to a somewhat shocking development: Miller has now been tapped to write and direct his own film based on Will Eisner's classic noir hero "The Spirit."