Ronin

AUTHOR: Miller, Frank

ARTIST: Frank Miller (illustrator); Lynn Varley (inker, colorist, and cover artist); John Costanza (letterer)

PUBLISHER: DC Comics

FIRST SERIAL PUBLICATION: 1983-1984

FIRST BOOK PUBLICATION: 1987

Publication History

By the mid-1980’s, Frank Miller’s work (especially his run on Daredevil) had marked him as a serious figure in the comic book industry. Wanting to write comics that went beyond the typically adolescent treatment of heroism and violence depicted in comic books, Miller chose to explore more complex perspectives. Although he was mostly working for Marvel at the time, it was DC Comics that offered Miller the freedom to produce Ronin the way he wanted. First, Miller opted out of the one-month-per-issue publication schedule in order to give himself time to do quality rewrites. At the same time, both Miller and Lynn Varley opted for more expensive, coated papers and took active roles in every aspect of the print process to guarantee the level of quality they wanted.

Always planned as a limited-run comic book for adult readers, Ronin ran from July, 1983, to August, 1984, and was an immediate success with critics. The visual sophistication the new printing techniques allowed, along with the absence of ads, helped readers recognize Ronin as a more aesthetic offering. The six issues were collected into a single volume in 1987 and then again as a deluxe edition entitled Absolute Ronin in 2008.

Plot

Although actually set around the Aquarius complex, a high-tech startup in the middle of a vaguely futuristic, postapocalyptic New York, Ronin opens with a vignette about a young, unnamed samurai in Tokugawa-period Japan (1600-1868). The unnamed samurai is unable to protect his master from the demon Agat, but he is denied seppuku (ceremonial suicide) and forced to live as a ronin (a masterless samurai) before exacting his bloody revenge on the demon.

Jumping back to New York, the story reveals that what the reader sees are actually the dreams of Billy Challas, a limbless telekinetic and the test subject for all Aquarius cybernetic projects. In a panic, Billy declares that his dreams are real and that the Ronin needs his body to continue the fight. Seemingly no longer in control of himself, Billy uses his telekinetic powers to fashion cybernetic limbs out of Aquarius technology while he transforms into the Ronin.

Escaping into the twenty-first-century ruins of New York City, the Ronin struggles first to reconstruct his identity and then to find his place in this wreck of a world. Navigating tribal boundaries by which bizarre factions of missionaries, Aryans, Black Panthers, cannibals, and neocavemen divide the city—and dodging attempts by Aquarius’s head-of-security, Casey McKenna, to capture him—the Ronin inexorably moves toward a final showdown with Agat. In the meantime, Agat, who has killed and taken the place of Mr. Taggart, head president and owner of Aquarius, has ordered the formerly strictly nonmilitary complex to begin building war machines, which he uses to attack the Ronin.

McKenna joins forces with the Ronin after he saves her from sewer-dwelling cannibals and realizes in the process that Virgo has constructed the elaborate samurai fantasy in order to unlock and then appropriate Billy’s considerable powers for herself. After defeating wave after wave of robot soldiers, the Ronin and McKenna finally fall. Virgo brings the Ronin back to Aquarius so she can try to absorb his abilities, but McKenna takes the fight to Virgo, battling her way through layers of automated defenses, including her husband’s cybernetically reanimated corpse, which manages to reveal the Ronin fantasy that is essential to Virgo’s plans. Finally reaching Virgo and Billy at the heart of the complex, McKenna turns the fantasy upside down by destroying the Agat robot and shaming the Ronin as a failure who needs a woman to fight his enemies for him.

The story comes full circle when McKenna offers seppuku as the only honorable option left for the Ronin. Virgo’s attempts to stop them go unheeded, and when McKenna, acting as second, delivers the killing blow, one final blast of Billy’s telekinetic power destroys the entire complex and, presumably, Virgo with it. The story ends on a more complex note, however, hinting in the last frame that the essence of Billy’s power, in the form of the Ronin, has somehow survived the blast.

Characters

•Billy Challas/Ronin, the protagonist, is a limbless, telekinetic test subject. Virgo fools him into using his powers to fashion cybernetic limbs and become the Ronin, whom he believes is a samurai from the past.

•Agat, a shape-shifting demon, hounds the Ronin throughout the story until it is revealed that he is only a construct that Virgo used to further push Billy Challas into the Ronin fantasy.

•Virgo is the artificial intelligence that runs Aquarius. Universally treated as female, she presents herself as a white-haired woman with reading glasses. As the reader learns the truth, however, the reader sees that Virgo is anything but the gentle figure her facade suggests.

•Mr. Taggart, the founder and owner of the Aquarius complex, is an idealist who hopes to save the world. He is killed and supplanted by Agat (actually Virgo’s robot), who then cultivates much more imperial costumes and attitudes and uses Aquarius technology to hunt the Ronin.

•Casey McKenna, head of Aquarius security and wife of Dr. Peter McKenna, is a capable and attractive African American woman. Billy Challas’s infatuation with her thrusts her into a crucial role within the Ronin fantasy.

•Dr. Peter McKenna, inventor of the biotechnology that built Aquarius and husband of Casey McKenna, is high-strung and idealistic. He discovers Virgo’s plot, but she discredits and kills him to hide her secret.

•Jagger, a corpulent figure in Nazi garb, is the leader of the White Power Party. He hires the Ronin to kill his rival and, by doing so, becomes one of the players in a Yojimbo (“bodyguard”) subplot.

•Silk, African American and inexplicably dressed in a Superman costume, is the head of the Panthers and is struggling with Jagger for control of the same territory. Silk hires the Ronin to kill Jagger, but ends up dying with him.

•Head, a caricature of a 1960’s-style hippie complete with long hair and flower, appoints himself the Ronin’s guide and promoter. Head’s amorality and selfishness often clashes with the Ronin’s strict sense of honor.

Artistic Style

One of the most striking stylistic innovations in Ronin is Miller’s introduction of aspects of manga drawing styles. The distinctively blunt features of the characters allow for an interesting range of expressions while simultaneously letting them uncoil and spring across often frameless pages. Varley’s earthy greens dominate the Aquarius scenes; they, like Miller’s soft, rounded lines, suggest the organic nature of the complex’s biotechnology. There are more than a few moments, however, when the greens sour and the rounded lines become crowded and carbuncular, hinting at the corruption that lies beneath the hopeful veneer of the Aquarius project. Outside Aquarius, the colors fade to sterile browns and grays. The harsh lines of rubble and ruined structures fill the landscape with sharp edges that point to the feral nature of the landscape and the communities that inhabit it. The Ronin’s cloak and hakama offer the only splashes of brightness, but by the end of the story, they only serve to remind the reader that the vibrant shogunate that they recall is but the fiction in which Virgo has trapped Billy Challas.

Similarly, John Costanza’s lettering is alternately spare and crowded, suggesting both the vast silence that spreads across the wasteland of twenty-first-century New York and the confusion of voices that cloud its moral landscape. In the superior action sequences, Miller’s lines extend across whole pages, giving those scenes remarkable vitality. This final aspect of the comic reaches its zenith in the last sequence—a massive, four-page fold-out illustration of the exploding Aquarius complex that literally bursts out of the book.

Themes

Opening in Tokugawa-period Japan, a time strictly defined by the rules of Bushido (a Japanese code of conduct associated with the samurai), Ronin hints at its concern over the hypocrisy and capacity for corruption inherent in societies—one of the story’s most pervasive themes. For all the shining hope that Aquarius seems to promise, the fundamentally human flaws of its inhabitants make it difficult to see the complex as a constructive good, even in blighted New York City. Likewise, the story is ambivalent about its own characters, who, although certainly capable of heroic and unselfish acts, are just as often pawns in Virgo’s ploy to gain further autonomy or, even more interestingly, are vulnerable to their own flaws and insecurities. The strict code of honor that the Ronin follows, for example, is constantly undermined, first by Ozaki’s complacency and later by Head and Virgo, each of whom uses the Ronin’s sense of duty and honor to pursue their own selfish ends.

Within the framework of his fantasy, the protagonist seems to be the one good man in a world otherwise given over to horror; however, once that plot is revealed to be a fiction serving Virgo’s evil scheme, readers must rethink the scale by which they judge the Ronin. At the same time, Casey McKenna’s marital problems and obsessive tendencies give her a real touch of human frailty, but they also make her conscious decision to act out her part in the Ronin fantasy even more problematic.

Finally, that the entire Ronin fantasy turns on a plot hatched by a thinking computer built by people who do not fully understand their own technology speaks to a kind of not-so-benevolent hubris and reframes the architects of Aquarius less as the sort of idealists the complex’s name evokes and more as members of a pampered elite class unable to fully consider the implications of their actions. Inviting readers to wrestle with questions about the value of intention versus concrete outcome, Ronin plumbs the depths of some of the fundamental issues surrounding social and individual ethics, something that even a little reading reveals to be at the forefront of much of Miller’s work.

Impact

Situated on the cusp of the Bronze Age and the Modern Age of comics, Ronin has had a major impact on the work that followed it. The elements that Varley and Miller pioneered—more realistic dialogue and nuanced storytelling than previously seen; the complex silhouettes formed with collections of simple pencil strokes that define manga-inflected drawing styles; and, especially, their complex approach to the moral universe their characters inhabit—changed the fundamental approach that artists and publishers alike brought to comics. Indeed, Ronin casts such a long shadow that its influence can be seen in television and cinema.

As much as Ronin is an important step in the evolution of the comic book aesthetic, Miller and Varley’s commitment to quality material, high-end printing techniques, and the exclusion of ads probably represent Ronin’s most important and enduring influence on the comic book industry. When Miller pitched the project to DC, the most essential aspect of the project for him was that it would begin with production standards that allowed him and his collaborators to tell a genuinely mature story that would resonate with the increasingly sophisticated audience that the shoddy materials and overly simplistic plots common to comics at the time were threatening to completely alienate. Opening the door to a comic book that adult readers could take seriously, it is not hyperbole to suggest that Ronin is not so much an early example of the graphic novel but actually one of the seminal efforts in creating the genre in the first place.

Further Reading

Koike, Kazuo, and Goseki Kojima. Lone Wolf and Cub (2000-2002).

Miller, Frank, Klaus Janson, and Lynn Varley. Batman: The Dark Knight Returns (1986).

Miller, Frank, et al. Daredevil: Volume 1 (2008).

Moore, Alan, Dave Gibbons, and John Higgins. Watchmen (1986-1987).

Bibliography

Bongco, Mila. Reading Comics: Language, Culture, and the Concept of the Superhero in Comic Books. New York: Garland, 2000.

Harris-Fain, Darren. “Revisionist Superhero Graphic Novels: Teaching Alan Moore’s Watchmen and Frank Miller’s Dark Knight Books.” In Teaching the Graphic Novel, edited by Stephen E. Tabachnick. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2009.

Wolk, Douglas. Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean. Cambridge, Mass.: Da Capo Press, 2007.