A “hard-edged” new superhero, The Fixer, is set to take on al-Qaida in acclaimed comic book author Frank Miller’s latest outing, the “gut-wrenching” graphic novel Holy Terror.
Set for release around the tenth anniversary of 9/11, the long-awaited comic – “a dark, uncompromising superhero tale for the modern era”, according to its publisher – was originally intended to feature Batman taking on the terrorist group, and was called Holy Terror, Batman! “Superman punched out Hitler. So did Captain America. That’s one of the things they’re there for … It is, not to put too fine a point on it, a piece of propaganda,” Miller said in 2006 at a comic convention where he described the book as “a reminder to people who seem to have forgotten who we’re up against”.
But the author of The Dark Knight Returns and 300 told the LA Times’s Hero Complex blog last year that he had “decided partway through” that the graphic novel was not a Batman story. “The hero is much closer to ‘Dirty Harry’ than Batman. It’s a new hero that I’ve made up that fights al-Qaida,” he said. Told in the author’s iconic black-and-white style made famous by his Sin City series, Holy Terror “seizes the political zeitgeist by the throat and doesn’t let go until the last page”, according to its publisher Legendary Comics , a subsidiary of Legendary Films.
The 120-page Holy Terror is due out on 14 September.
