Comic book icon Frank Miller on Sin City, and coming to West Cork for the Fastnet Film Festival  

A huge figure on page and screen through the likes of his Batman stories and Daredevil, Frank Miller tells Esther McCarthy about his love for the format he works in, and his plans to trace his O'Neill ancestors when in Ireland 

Frank Miller is coming to Schull for the Fastnet Film Festival at the weekend. Picture: Joel Saget / AFP 

Frank Miller still remembers making one of his first comic books at the age of five, showing it to his mother and telling her: "This is what I’m going to do for the rest of my life." He had folded sheets of paper together and arranged them like real comics before proudly showing his work.

“They had to look like they were really magazines for me to feel like I was really doing something,” he recalls of his early life goal. “I showed it to my mother and said: ‘This is it.' Like many children, I was drawing before I was writing anything down. When you think of it, our languages began as a series of pictographs and the ancient Egyptians, in many ways, got it right, actually writing in pictures.”