When Hollywood makes “Comic-Con: The Movie,” about a meek little convention that morphs into a pop-culture behemoth, we know just the guy for the starring role.

Frank Miller is Comic-Con.

When the 39th annual Con opens this week – preview night is Wednesday, followed by four days of Spandex-and-celluloid madness – Miller will be inescapable. Look for the lanky guy with dark facial hair and a black fedora. He'll be on the exhibition floor, where his comic books and graphic novels, from Batman: The Dark Knight Returns to 300, are hot collectibles.

He'll be at Friday night's Eisner Awards, the comic book industry's Oscars, nominated for an omnibus edition of his Daredevil books.

He'll be on a panel discussion about an upcoming December film starring Eva Mendes, Samuel L. Jackson and Scarlett Johansson. “The Spirit” is based on characters created by one of Miller's friends and inspirations, the late Will Eisner.

Yes, as in the aforementioned Eisner Awards.

“I really was a student of Will Eisner,” said Miller, 51. “He and I would have loud, often quite vulgar arguments. And he usually won.”

But Miller may have the last word. He directed “The Spirit” as a tribute to his mentor, yet it is marked by the pupil's intensely, at times savagely, melodramatic stamp.

CAMEOS TO DIE FOR Even if you aren't a Comic-Con regular, you may have seen Frank Miller. He has a habit of appearing in movies for a scene or two. Just long enough for someone to kill him. His D.O.A. acting career: “RoboCop 2” (1990). As “Frank the Chemist,” killed when drug lab explodes. “Jugular Wine: A Vampire Odyssey” (1994). Playing himself, he's murdered by vampires. Crime witness: Stan Lee, one-time president of Marvel Comics. “Daredevil” (2003). Bullseye, a villain, kills Miller's unnamed character with a pen. Miller's credit line: “Man With Pen in Head.” “Sin City” (2005). Plays a priest, murdered in the confessional.

“I think there are a couple of places where he'd argue with me,” Miller admitted. “And I think there are actually a few scenes where he would turn to me and say, 'Damn, I wish I had thought of that.'”

Like Comic-Con, Miller didn't begin with Hollywood as a goal. Growing up in Maryland, he wanted to write and draw comic books. In 1978, he broke into the trade via a Twilight Zone comic. A year later, he won notice by turning a minor Marvel player into a star: blind attorney Matt Murdock, practicing law by day and justice by night as Daredevil.

“Frank's got this incredible sense of design and movement,” said Diane Schutz, editor-in-chief at Dark Horse. In Daredevil, “he used first-person narration in the panels. That brought us right into Matt Murdock's head.”

It also allowed Miller to flex his noir muscles, as did his re-imagination of the Batman saga The Dark Knight Returns (1986) and Sin City, a series of crime melodramas he launched in 1991. His heroes tend to be ticked-off, burned-out idealists. While his art is smooth, his dialogue can be salty. Some readers abandoned Miller after the exchange he wrote for a 2005 issue of All-Star Batman and Robin, when a frustrated Dark Knight curses at his young sidekick.

In “Eisner/Miller,” a 2005 collection of conversations between the two cartoonists, Eisner argued that real-life concerns of his work – marriage, morality, aging – were absent from his protege's two-fisted sagas.

“The guy who's reading your stuff doesn't give a about man's relationship to God,” Eisner maintained. “He wants to see whether Marvin kills that son of a or doesn't kill that son of a We're talking to different people. You're aware of it.”

Miller replied, “Really, that was an unfair characterization. My stuff deals with that, too. It's more than pandering. My stuff is just more operatic than what you're currently doing.”

In fact mayhem is a comic book staple; it's hardly Milleresque. Miller's work is distinctive thanks to its realistic art and characters who belong in a 1940s Bogie and Bacall flick. He sensed that his work, like those classic films, would appeal to a broad audience.

“Throughout his career, Frank Miller has both anticipated and led the way in the changes in the comics world,” said Charles Brownstein, president of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund and editor of “Eisner/Miller.” Miller sensed “the changes in how comics have become a focal point in the popular culture.”

At pop culture's Technicolor heart are motion pictures. But Miller's introduction to Hollywood, writing screenplays for critical and commercial flops “RoboCop II” (1990) and “RoboCop III” (1993), soured him on that art form.

Unlike comic books, where he can dictate every detail in every panel, Hollywood offered him no control over the final cut. So he returned to writing and drawing Sin City and 1998's 300, a retelling of the Spartans' doomed defense of Thermopylae in 480 B.C.

Then Robert Rodriguez called. The director of “El Mariachi” and “From Dusk To Dawn” wanted to make a Sin City movie. Miller wouldn't listen.

Bob Schreck, an editor at DC Comics and one of Miller's friends, intervened, arranging a meeting in a Hell's Kitchen saloon. Rodriguez did everything possible to close the sale. He knew Sin City's stories and characters. He outlined film techniques that would re-create the books' raw look. He was gracious, intelligent, persuasive.

“I thanked him greatly,” Miller said, “and turned him down.”

Rodriguez requested one last chance, asking Miller to spend a day on location, watching a test scene unfold. He did. When the film came out in 2005, Miller had writer and co-director credits.

That experience paid off when Miller flew solo as director and writer for “The Spirit.” Dark Horse's Schutz visited Miller on the film's set last fall, where he was logging 16-hour days – and loving it: “He was firing on all cylinders.”

But Miller, like Comic-Con, walks a fine line. Is it possible to succeed in Hollywood and remain true to comic books, a trade with infinitesimally smaller budgets, ambitions and egos?

“I don't see why any fantastically talented and intelligent person cannot master two different fields,” Brownstein said. “He's really living the dream that he's set for himself.”

“Can he work in both worlds simultaneously? He kind of, sort of is,” Schutz said. “He's writing All-Star Batman and Robin.”

Miller notes that he's working on a graphic novel about a new character who “really doesn't like terrorists – and does something about it.”

Comics, movies and Comic-Con have all changed since 1979, when the young author of Daredevil first flew to California. “I was brought into a room in an old hotel in downtown San Diego,” Miller recalled, “where people were sitting by boxes of old comic books. It was like being introduced to a strange group of monks in the Dark Ages.”

Now the monks are in retreat, and they are liable to be routed even further this week at a frantic convention dominated by TV shows and movies, including “The Spirit.”

“It's mutated,” Miller said of Comic-Con, “it's never going to be that dusty little thing it was before. It really began when Hollywood decided to make a splash there. It's inevitable that it has lost some of its charm.”