Frank Miller redefined superheroes. He wants us to push past him.

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The pages of a Frank Miller work are filled with crooked cops, murderers, desperate men and unhinged dark knights. You might expect the creator behind all that darkness to be a bit gloomy himself. Maybe he would be a recluse, like his hero, “Calvin and Hobbes” creator Bill Watterson.

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As it turns out, Miller seems to like people. I watched him sign hundreds of autographs at the Library of Congress’s National Book Festival in D.C. on Saturday. He was gentle, chatty and generous with his time despite the crowd overflowing past its designated space inside the Walter E. Washington Convention Center.

Readers across generations carried books Miller had drawn and written over the decades. Miller, 69, seemed particularly engaged and patient with the youngest readers.

“He’s really cool, he does these awesome comics. He asked me if I liked to draw, and I do, but I’m not very good at it,” said 12-year-old Owen Crable of D.C. Miller signed “Keep drawing” on the boy’s copy of “The Dark Knight Returns,” Miller’s most famous and influential work that redefined Batman.

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Susan McCrackin, 72, of Reston, Virginia, left Miller’s table squealing with glee as she gripped her signed copy of the same book. She’s been reading Miller since the 1980s and singled out “Elektra: Assassin” as a favourite.

“Phenomenal writing,” she said. “He just wakes up your imagination. The way he writes, the drama, the way he crafts the characters.”

Miller remembers what it feels like to be the kid on the other side of the table.

He moved to New York City in 1976 from Vermont as a teenager, determined to meet his “destiny” hunched over a drawing table. He was rejected repeatedly, and one of those rejections came from Neal Adams, the late, great Batman artist who would become Miller’s mentor. Miller remembers Adams’s unvarnished, pointed critiques and rejections in his new memoir, “Push the Wall: My Life, Writing, Drawing and the Art of Storytelling.”

Miller helped redefine the modern superhero with Daredevil and Batman before creating celebrated original works such as “Sin City” and “300.” Pop milestones like “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” or Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies may not exist without Frank Miller.

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His book isn’t a conventional autobiography but a collection of 16 lessons Miller learned while becoming one of the most influential artists of the 20th century. Those lessons include knowing your ending, getting your hero into trouble fast and pushing against whatever it is that’s keeping you from what you want to make.

The lessons also include making mistakes: Miller would sketch out many drawings for months before he finally made something that pleased the old master.

I interviewed Miller on the main stage at the book festival, where an audience member asked Miller why he kept going back to Adams despite the harsh critiques.

“What else was I going to do? I was going to make comic books,” said Miller, adding that he knew he could trust Adams, and there was no better way to learn than to have someone tell him exactly what he was doing wrong.

He learned hard lessons, such as how drawing isn’t just about how things look. Anatomy wasn’t just about the shape of muscle, but also the connection to bone and how it changed with movement. To draw a car door opening, Miller said, you should understand how the door works.

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Eventually, Miller asked Adams what he could ever do to repay him. Nothing, Adams told him, “except the one thing that it’s your duty to do. Do the same thing for the next guy.”

Miller’s memoir is “exactly” his attempt to meet that promise to Adams, he told me.

“It’s created new opportunities for me to speak more freely to new people who are coming up,” Miller said. “One of the real joys is for me to be looking at drawings and hearing story ideas that people are working on themselves, and to give them some advice on where to go with it.”

Miller writes about how his own lessons come from everywhere. He writes lovingly about Adams and his other mentor, Will Eisner, creator of “The Spirit,” but he reaches just as readily toward painters such as Francisco de Goya, Japanese manga writers like Kazuo Koike and music.

Besides Adams and Eisner, two artists seem to inspire special reverence in Miller’s memoir, Watterson and Bob Dylan. I told him Watterson is also formative to my life, and Miller smiled warmly as he called him “a genius and a master.” Dylan is also cited all over this book, much to my excitement as a fellow Dylanologist. (He loves “Blood on the Tracks” and “Desire”.)

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I told Miller that he is the most influential artist of my life alongside Dylan. His staccato-like sentences and simple, emotive imagery taught me to think about writing visually. I was thinking of him in June when writing about my stay at the Hotel Chelsea, where I describe my past struggles with addiction and alcohol. I used to wonder whether Miller’s characters inspired me to keep drinking, but it only felt that way because, like a good writer, he let me see myself in his work.

Miller routinely runs into artists across the creative industries. (In fact, he literally bumped into Martin Scorsese walking up to the main stage. The two shook hands.) In what Miller called his “loosest collaboration,” he drew album art last year for global music star the Weeknd.

Onstage, I relayed a question to Miller from Neil Druckmann, co-creator of “The Last of Us” game series and HBO adaptation, who said his story wouldn’t exist without “Sin City.” He wanted to know how Miller selects collaborators, particularly when someone is adapting his work. How does he make sure they won’t abandon the spirit of his stories?

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“Friendships,” Miller said. “Most of them come from getting to know somebody … and getting a kernel of an idea that I know would be something both of us could feed each other on.”

In the memoir, he describes learning to respect film and its differences from comics. His early comics success led to work as a Hollywood screenwriter. While he appreciated the medium, he would later write his biggest original book, “Sin City,” as a black-and-white novel, in the hope that it was unadaptable to film. He didn’t want it better known as a movie.

Miller spent months saying no to an especially persistent director, Robert Rodriguez (“Desperado,” “Spy Kids”). But Rodriguez finally flew Miller to Austin to shoot a test scene.

“And it ended up being the opening of the first ‘Sin City’ movie, which was used intact,” Miller said.

“It showed me how his studio worked and how his method of filming worked, how different it was from the experiences I’d had on other sets and on other projects that were not of my creation,” he said, adding that he never got a chance to know video games as a medium.

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Before Miller’s memoir, his comics provided the clearest insight into his mind, but his book makes those thoughts explicit, including his regrets. He looks back on “Holy Terror,” a much-criticized story written out of Miller’s anger after the 9/11 attacks. He now describes it as a rant. Would he ever write another such story?

“I hope I’m never inspired to do so again,” he writes.

Miller urges readers to push walls, especially the ones he helped build. He writes that it drives him “crazy” to see that his version of Batman is now enshrined as foundational.

“For one thing, the title ‘Dark Knight’ started appearing in all kinds of comic books,” Miller said in our interview. “Beyond that, he became the unpleasant superhero for a long time. I essentially felt that I was in the business of knocking down walls, and I felt like people had used my work to construct new ones.”

I asked Miller who is pushing him today. He doesn’t name names, but he knows what he wants to read, and he’s seeing a lot of “good work.”

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“I tend not to be looking at the same sources that I used to, and I am certainly not hunting around all the stuff that came from my influence,” he said.

There’s one source of inspiration he always returns to: his experience growing up and working in the city that inspired the contrast of Superman’s Metropolis and Batman’s Gotham. Manhattan is its own character across several chapters in his memoir.

“New York taught me a lot of profound lessons about storytelling because New York has taught me a lot of profound lessons of life, and there is no telling of stories without life itself,” he said.

I wondered who Frank Miller would be without New York, but he just says it’s the destination for superhero artists.

“It didn’t have to be New York, there’s nothing particularly magical about any one place,” said Miller, who also lived in Los Angeles for several years. He calls L.A. “a wonderfully inspiring city full of mysteries and miracles that are endless.”

Miller eventually returned to his drawing board in New York, anyway. Nowadays, you’ll find him at what he calls the beachhead in Hell’s Kitchen, where his drawing board sits. How often does he draw?

“Oh, every day,” said Miller, furrowing his brow as though asked if he still needs air to breathe.

“What else would I be doing?”

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