Frank Miller is back, and his future in comics starts with some unfinished business.

The legendary cartoonist had been largely absent from the comics world over the past decade -- a combination of his fits and starts in Hollywood and reported health issues. But from working on last year's DC Comics-initiated Dark Knight III: The Master Race to his long-awaited return to the world of 300, Miller is ramping up for his most productive period in years. Miller's current series from Dark Horse Comics, Xerxes: The Fall of the House of Darius and the Rise of Alexander, is a prequel to the creator's well-known swords and sandals epic 300 and focuses on the titular Persian king as his empire starts to crumble starting in 490 B.C.

CBR had occasion to speak with Miller during Comic-Con International in San Diego, and the cartoonist opened up about the challenges of telling an epic in Xerxes that is both historically accurate and stylistically interpreted. Below, Miller digs into why the comic represents the future of his work as he preps a new Superman: Year One tale with John Romita, Jr. for DC.

CBR: Xerxes is a book that's been in your brain for a long time and has now gone through your hands and into the readers' hands, what do you think that time gave the story? Were you more ready to tell this story now than when you did 300?

Frank Miller: Yeah. I kind of barreled into it when I started it years ago, and I like the energy that the initial chapter had from that, but I was getting ahead of myself. I needed to do more research and to refocus the series. It became richer the more I studied, and it became more emotional. And now I feel it's in a much better historical context and is much more balanced as a work.

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Speaking to the idea of history, our close historical record from this time is incredibly sparse, and there is a certain amount of artistic license that comes in, particularly with the visuals...

Oh, the visualization is where I felt that I had immense leeway, and I used it wildly.

But did you have a line for yourself where you said "These are the things I have to get correct to history"?

Oh yes. Many things I have to get correct. The most important stuff is the cultural, philosophical and religious underpinnings of all the countries involved. With all the events and the characters, you don't tread lightly on Persian cultures any more than you do on Greek relations. And the lucky thing is that I don't really have to touch on that in any direct way.

But where the leeway really comes in is in the visual portrayal. My visual portrayal of Xerxes does not really bare any resemblance to the written record. I didn't want anything to weigh this down. Had I drawn the Spartans in 300 dressed as the real Spartans did, they would have looked like bugs with gigantic heads who couldn't move very well. Because they couldn't move very quickly... they wore half their weight in body armor! But I wanted them to move fast, and I wanted them to look heroic. So I used the armor as ornament and stripped away the layers of leather they wore.

Do you think the way you drew them is maybe the way they saw themselves as a culture?

Well, I can't get into their minds. It's like asking me to think in Precambrian terms. [Laughs] But as much as I want to inspire people to learn about history and as much as history inspires me, I really don't do historical books. These are evocations. But mostly they're adventure yarns. I'm an entertainer. I'm not a teacher.

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What was it like to get back into this material on the boards after so long away from the material? Do you script as you thumbnail, or do you type anything out in a more formal way in advance?

My script never turns into a typed manuscript. If I'm scripting for myself, I write it all longhand down the rough sides of the page. Then I trace those rough drawings onto boards and pencil them. Before I ink the drawings I letter everything. So I don't type on a script unless I'm working with someone else.

Did you look at 300 while you were doing this?

I looked at 300 to track visuals, like what characters look like. And sometimes I'd go, "Well, I'd like to echo this graphically a little bit." But I have not sat down and reread 300 since the book came out.

Next for Miller is Superman: Year One with John Romita, Jr.

One major difference between that story and this one is that, in a certain sense, we knew what was going to happen there. The idea of the battle was well known and the concept of who were the "heroes" of the story was set in place. With Xerxes, the reader can't assume any of that going in. Do you hope to play with that expectation as you work towards the finale?

Yes. And I also hope to explore what it means, because the way the Xerxes story climaxes and ends is much more complex. And it is much more tied into future events and what's going on with the world. 300 ends with like a flag stuck in a battlefield where everyone is dead. But the flag stands for something. Whereas, Xerxes is more of a rollout. The greatest leader the world has ever seen just said the wrong thing, and we go from an epic, epic figure and all of the sudden there's someone who's bigger than that. There's much more of an expanse to this. Physically, this is a much bigger book, and it involves a much bigger cast. And the collision of cultures is vast. The Persian king who had just conquered the world falls in love with a Jew, and this woman -- you could call her a girl -- changes the course of human history. That's dazzling and romantic and everything someone with my job looks for in a story.

You mentioned the philosophical underpinnings of the cultures you're writing about, and whether we want there to be or not, there are a lot of parallels for our world today. In the telling of this story, do you feel there's any application for us today?

I think there are human lessons to learn because human nature is a constant and an eternal. When people say that "We have evolved," they're wrong. We finished evolving when we started walking upright -- when we went from being hunter/gatherers to what we are today. But after that, it's all been a matter of extrapolation. But we still stick to what we've always done. We eat. We mate. And we rule. But the main thing is that from cave times on, we have drawn pictures. Even before we wrote words we drew pictures. Comic book art goes right back to the cave wall. So we've extrapolated and gotten more complicated, but the only real leap we've made is into outer space. And at this point, we've stopped doing that. [Laughs]

Looking to the future, you seem to really be enjoying your full return to comics.

Absolutely. I'm so full of books I want to do, it's ridiculous. My closest associate, she tells me, "What else are you planning on doing this week?" and I just tell her, "I've got to do this." When I came up with another new Sin City the other day, things were looking a little messy at my place. [Laughs] But Xerxes is up front right now along with Superman: Year One. Those two projects are... well, one is a childhood dream come true in the case of Superman, and Xerxes is an indication of where I'd like a great deal of my work to go in the future.