​Ian Miller had a whiff of the exotic for me when I first came across the lavishly produced trade paperback of his work titled “Green Dog Trumpet and Other Stories” in 1979.  The brief introduction gave a hint of the themes that seemed to grip Miller.  And there was a perfunctory bio as well;  but just what was this thing I had found in the back of Walden’s Books at Colonie Center?



OK, he was British.  I thought I recognized his work from my one viewing of the widely distributed animated fantasy film from two years prior, Ralph Bakshi’s “Wizards.”  This was before the internet and helpful widgets like IMDB, so one had to rely more on one’s own experience to confirm authorship of one’s favorites.  “Wizards”  (see Youtube link to watch the entire film in 8 installments) was full of Tolkienesque cliches, post apocalypse boiler plate, big boobed, sexualized “faeries,” and elves running about with spears and magic helmets.  But it also had these incredible backgrounds of intensely intricate dystopian architectural detail.  There was a Bosch like menace to them that really captured my 14 year old attention.  These, it turned out, had been drawn by Miller.



What I thought I had found in “Green Dog Trumpet” was a complete break from mass market comic book conventions.  The “stories” were between 5 and 15 pages.  The individual frames were intricately produced. The hours necessary to produce them seemed nearly palpable; but there were no cluttering dialogue, no captions, and no Wally Wood-Harvey Kurtzman like descriptive sound effects.  These purely visual stories seemed completely non-verbal.  I was also struck by the way each page seemed to present the artwork on it almost as though it were on some kind of gallery wall.  The frames and clusters of frames were of vastly different sizes.  Sometimes a two page layout would even be presented asymmetrically.  In short, the “story” was dictating format - not the other way around.  It may seem like a little thing, but this was entirely unique in my experience.  This seemed more a merger of comics with fine art.



But, what to make of the subject matter?  I am still wondering even now.  My friend Heidi Holder, who had been forever going on about a new cultural hero she had imported from her semesters at Mount Holyoke, Erwin Panofsky, helped give me a name for how one might go about figuring this stuff out: Iconography.  Everything in these stories seemed like a medieval allegorical representation, a series of symbols denoting a war of concepts.  But it also functioned as a highly atmospheric version of contemporary fantasy genres.  There were workers in furry bunny suits.  There were black faced golly-wog dolls, court jesters, sword scabbards that looked like penises, demonically possessed Victorian nursery toys come to life - and so much more.  Characters were laden down with suits of fur, armor, and badges hinting at cryptic significances.  They wore back packs full of living toys and sub-characters; and finally many seemed to be carrying highly eccentric versions of a Roman Legion’s Eagle Standard.  Characters seemed to be walking embodiments of some kind of morality play - but certainly not one ever envisioned by the Catholic Church of the middle ages.



What I took away from this was an understanding that use of symbols need not necessarily be clear; sometimes being deliberately oblique could be more powerful.  When one looks at the engravings of someone like Albrecht Durer (an artist Miller himself claimed as an influence), Professor Panofsky and his knowledge of what certain objects and characters signify can be powerfully helpful.  It hints that the intended meanings can be knowable; and an especially busy picture (like the 3 Durers shown here - or a Miller drawing) signals a promise of an especially great bounty of such “knowing.”  I say knowing because I mean it to signify the process of revealing rather than the actual attainment of knowledge, the solving of a riddle, the working out of a puzzle.



Whether someone sufficiently insightful could unravel all that is meant in Miller’s work is something I don’t know.  That part was not as important to me at the time. What mattered to me was the notion that vast, intricate mysteries could be hinted at and, nevertheless, kept deliberately out of reach of a viewer’s ability to know.  In the spring of 1982, as I was starting my project, my college course work had set me on the task of understanding late 18th century notions of the Sublime.  I had chosen to puff up my pretentious understanding with excerpts from Kant’s “The Critique of Judgement.”  I, in turn, projected this onto Wordsworth - or whatever else seemed to be on hand.  It all seemed to revolve around the notion that infinite knowledge, infinite beauty, or infinite goodness overwhelmed or completely suffused a person’s understanding - not by intrinsic beauty or knowledge but rather by the inability of a person’s minds to grasp the infinite - infinite anything.

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And perhaps this is what I saw in the intricately detailed architectural work in Miller’s stories.  They seemed like overwhelming, “wrap-around” environments - brick and mortar versions of “The Matrix’s” Machine City.  If the iconography of Miller’s pictures made me think of nightmare versions of Durer, then the massive buildings of his work reminded me of Piranesi’s Prisons prints.  Spaces hinted at, but not fully seen, making the imagination run wild with the notion of scale.

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So far I have only touched on the subject matter; but I was in the midst of devoting myself to using technical pens when I discovered Miller.  The intense textures of his ink work also dramatically impressed me.  The dense thickets of rigid parallel lines were amazing!  Yes, traditional crosshatching and shading could be impressive too; but this was spectacularly unsubtle.  It practically screamed, “Look how detailed I am!”  I had been exposed to Durer and, to a lesser extent, Piranesi prior to stumbling on Miller; but I think it took my exposure to this highly idiosyncratic work to make me have a greater appreciation of the fabulous black and white textures of their work.

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Below I have included one of the longer stories from “Green Dog Trumpet” titled “The Pequod Saga.”