It has of recent days fallen in my way to revisit the pages of Frank Miller’s Ronin, both the influential original and the freshly minted sequel. The former was printed over the course of a year, bridging the spring of 1983 and 1984, with the latter from November of 2022 through to late winter 2024, both six issues long.
After acquiring a current printing of the trade paperback of the original Ronin I set about over the course of a number of evenings to take the story in many stages, allowing myself the significant luxury of digesting an object of no small portent at personal leisure. It must be stated that the book remains imperfect. To put the matter directly: it’s not very good. It hasn’t somehow gotten any better in the intervening decades since you last gave it a look.
My first destination following this intervention was an old friend to these pages, Mr. Kim Thompson. His contemporary review of the opening salvo of the endeavor is available online for you to read, right this moment. No one would think any less of you if you clicked on that link and read that piece first. It’s history, after all; one of the most famous pieces of writing ever to see print in the pages of the Comics Journal, issue #82, July 1983. An absolute model of the vituperative mood in criticism. Thompson is simply incensed at Frank Miller, and he goes down the list of reasons why in apple pie order.
Inasmuch as I think both Thompson and I stand in general agreement here, the story remains more or less twaddle. As Thompson states, “My reaction to the storyline is ultimately this: It’s a clever, if derivative conceit, and it kept me turning the pages.” I’d go one step further, having read the rest of the story: that it’s more than a derivative conceit, it’s many derivative conceits sewn together in the manner of the proverbial human centipede. It’s a samurai fantasy with a magic sword; it’s an early cyberpunk cautionary tale; it’s a story about the world falling apart. It’s got a race war and slurs—so, so many slurs, I mean, really a lot of slurs—and sex scenes and nudity and my god does it have a lot of plot. You don’t necessarily think of Miller as a big plot guy, but this is a book with a lot of plot. Seems like he spent a solid part of the next decade learning how to plot less, and good for him.
It also suffers from a constitution to which Miller has been all too amenable across his career: two-thirds of a good book accompanied by a stack of fabulous digressions wearing a trench coat and trying to sneak into an R-rated movie. Sometimes those digressions are among the most interesting parts, even if they also detract from the finished work. That’s not to say Miller can’t do a perfect landing, but he’s been known not to leave well enough alone.
Is that where we are today? No, I don’t think so. Although certainly a surprising advent in the 21st century, to find a new volume of such an unlikely beast as Ronin from such an uncertain corner as Miller seems a moment of some passing note. Frank Miller doesn’t have to do anything, I don’t believe. And yet has had quite a busy few years. I’m sure returning once again the Dark Knight universe, and expanding the franchise significantly in so doing, did not come without financial inducements. But I don’t think he’d be drawing covers for Marvel again if he didn’t want to, for what it’s worth.
The trick is, of course, that Ronin is not unworthy of sequel. As a matter of quality, Mr. Thompson and myself are correct in principle, but in the fullness of history our opinions are absolutely, thoroughly, devastatingly moot as a matter of empirical observation. Two things can be true at once: Ronin was both not very good, and also the most influential comic book printed in the 1980s. Nothing else comes close. Multiple empires rose and fell on the fortunes of men who learned to draw from tracing those panels, and still more empires again from the men who learned at their feet.
Return, then, to Kim Thompson’s fateful words against Miller’s first solo opus, and admire with me this pellucid description of Miller’s storytelling at its most abstract:
Miller’s much-vaunted story-telling skills have also collapsed into a set of annoying mannerisms. Why must nearly every panel be either the length or the width of the page? It’s as if he had set himself the task of drawing his story on the wood of a picket fence, alternating between horizontal and vertical sections. One result is that the reader is pulled along at terrifying speed. The narrow slivers of art leave no room for the eye to wander, and it is unceremoniously shoved from one panel into the next; whenever I hit the occasional “normal” panel, I felt like stopping to catch my breath.
Even if one makes a forcible effort to stay with one panel for more than the two seconds it takes to actually scan the elements in it, one is hardly rewarded. None of the panels are composed in any way that is aesthetically pleasing. How could it be? You can’t draw anything in a space that’s 10 times taller than it is wide. When Berni Krigstein subdivided a page into slivers of time, he had the sense to establish, in a normal image, the location and characters, before using his exquisite sense of timing and design to zoom in on a particularly important detail or moment of the action. Miller will render whole sequences, from establishing shot to climax, in these oppressively designed panels, and the effect is alienating.
Thompson was, please remember, writing in 1983. He sees the future coming right at him like the proverbial speeding freight train and turns away in principled disgust. Can we ask anything more of our great critics?
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Because, do not doubt, the men who learned to draw from Miller’s wake—and I fear it was men almost exclusively, at least until recent days—did very well for themselves. A generation drilled down to those precise techniques Thompson describes in forensic detail, and a few of them made quite a bit of money from so doing.
Frank Miller drew a lot of comics, in his early days especially. But he had never drawn a comic like Ronin before. No one had; at least not in America. To be completely fair, no one has ever really drawn a comic quite like Ronin again, including Miller. Like everyone else, he chipped his own future incarnations from its leavings - here there’s bits of Sin City hidden in patches of chiaroscuro, there the overweening machismo of 300. And yes, the paranoid racial provocateur of too many corners of the bibliography is present as well, for far too many pages. Those elements are so broad as to seem like burlesque, repulsive on their face while also, tragically, in no way an extrinsic element to Miller’s compositions. As I had cause to discuss recently, there is an inherent paranoia latent in every fiber of Miller, visible in every incarnation to a greater or lesser degree.
Unexpectedly, I found significant insight into Miller’s understanding of space and movement in the pages of 2019’s Superman: Year One, which he wrote for John Romita Jr. and Danny Miki. Interesting to find Miller so assiduously recovering territory laid down by John Byrne before him, alongside many other worthies in subsequent years. It’s not a great Superman story, but it’s an interesting Superman story - more thoughtful than I perhaps expected. Miller puts a fair amount of thought to a detail Byrne, and most other Superman writers as well, have accepted in passing: the lived experience of Superman as someone perpetually restrained, unable to move naturally save in the most highly specific circumstances. He has to be aware of absolutely everything going on around him at all times and completely passive in every movement and mannerism. Total situational paranoia at the apex of morality. Hypervigilance as the ultimate expression of morality.
When Superman moves, it’s to stop violence, one way or another. Consequently, Miller’s Superman rarely moves - out of his fervent desire not to inadvertently harm. He is even moved against his own well-being out of an abundance of caution, a weakness fully in character. That strikes me as an interesting and crucial insight for such an old cog. It makes for a slightly cold and dour Man of Steel, but it drills down to Miller at his most basic dynamic: his Superman lives with abstemious and ascetic devotion to stopping fights. I can respect it. I like it at least much as I liked the New 52 Superman, who also had some quite nice John Romita, Jr. art along the way.
But, if Miller had long telegraphed his intention of a pilgrimage to Superman—a question in the air at least as far back as the fourth issue of The Dark Knight Returns—there wasn’t quite the groundswell of attention awaiting a return to the universe of Ronin. As IP, to use the degraded term, it seems rather uninspired, for reasons both already elaborated and unenumerated but implied. It’s a grab bag of this and that, and the significance of the book lies in just what "this and that" entails. Ronin is a book that has been picked down to the bones by scavengers, and the bones have themselves been ground into fine powder and snorted by the scavengers' descendants. It’s probably impossible to create a true sequel to Ronin for the simple fact that there’s no way another single book could have the impact of this one; no way it could even measure on the same scale.
So, brass tacks, just what kind of impact are we talking about? It’s not like Miller was the first American cartoonist to read Moebius. Lots of people were reading Heavy Metal in the late '70s - my mother was reading Heavy Metal in the late '70s. Even Marvel was reading Heavy Metal, and launched a noble copycat in form of the late, lamented Epic Illustrated. And, certainly, Miller was soaking up any number of other influences, or bathing in copacetic cross streams. There’s José Muñoz, yes, and also Richard Corben; possibly early 2000 AD, and definitely his studiomate, Howard Chaykin. American Flagg! was state of the art, and the first issues of that were roughly contemporaneous with the beginning of Ronin. The early Flagg! was also colored by Lynn Varley, so the organic connections are plain to see - especially in the later part of the book, where long passages of plot-heavy dialogue overwhelm the forward momentum of the narrative for extended periods of time.
But if Miller were a better draftsman, more committed to the intricacies of physiology or the nuance of the sable brush, he wouldn’t be Miller. He’d be Dave Stevens or Jaime Hernandez. He draws just well enough to be a magpie, and it is in that mode that the first Ronin stands as perhaps his finest achievement.
What sticks out most at this remove is, of course, the prescient and precocious use of Japanese influences. I’m sure he also wasn’t the first American cartoonist to really dig into manga, but Miller was the first to make a big deal of it in a venue where other people could see. It was a entirely new world, but don’t take my word for it, here’s Kim Thompson once again:
In interviews, Miller has explained that he has borrowed much of his technique on Ronin from Japanese comics, with which I am not familiar. I can only conclude either that the Japanese comics that inspired him are bad, or that something got lost in the translation. Considering Miller’s track record with Kane, Krigstein, and his other misappropriated influences, I incline toward the latter.
Ronin is now 41 years old. We’ve been living with the reality of manga as a cultural juggernaut for so long that the very idea that it was once the extreme tip of the cutting edge seems as distant as the pharaohs. Of course Thompson is completely correct. None of the many myriad borrowings of which Ronin is composed, Gōseki Kojima or otherwise, are fully digested. It’s all a jumble because it’s all fresh: steaming entrails strewn across the counter.
That novelty is crucial to recover the meaning of the text. Frank Miller was in many respects a wholly imperfect ambassador for the world of comics beyond the boundaries of the American mainstream circa 1983. And yet, that was what he wanted to do, what he chose to do with his first-ever solo move - no one in comics had ever had a solo move quite like this. He wanted to do it, so he did it, and that was that.
Think about Miller at that moment. By all accounts he could have done anything with the blank check proffered by DC in 1983. The safe thing to do, and what most would have done in his position, would have been to do what he had already done, only better. This would have almost certainly entailed a deeper application of American noir, further burrowing the path begun in his Daredevil. An early attempt at a book like Year One, or even a prototype Sin City, seems the more logical choice in hindsight for the Miller of 1983. But as we know that’s not what he did in any way shape or form. The Eisner, Ditko and Kane of his earliest movements would be subsumed as fully as he knew how, and although those formative influences never dissipated entirely, he would remain devoted through his career to finding new and different ways to draw comics.
That's the great tragedy of Miller's later career - that a man who dedicated so many years of his creative output to serving as a most generous ambassador of the medium to American audiences would descend so readily and repeatedly into revanchist reverie. But the tendency was there from the beginning. Despite himself, Miller contains multitudes.
So did Ronin. A pair of kids in New England figured out how to do that hatching from the first couple issues and popped out Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles before Ronin was even finished as a serial. Miller and Ronin weren’t the only influences on the Turtles, naturally; Claremont’s in there too, don’t forget, and so’s Kirby. But Ronin was the match that lit the pilot for Eastman & Laird. Rob Liefeld stole the most distinctive spread from the first issue for his final issue of New Mutants, I mean outright bald-faced theft - you know, just like Miller himself was prone to do. Was Alan Moore paying attention to the way Miller blocks out the claustrophobically dense nesting interior narratives in the later part of the story? I’m sure he’s familiar.
And it must be noted, animator Genndy Tartakovsky took the bones of Ronin, stripped the skeleton of every scrap of Miller’s indulgences, and rebuilt the bare premise into one of the most consistently gorgeous and delightful animated programs of the century, Samurai Jack.
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What’s left? What could possibly be left for the sequel? Well, in the first place, let’s look at the circumstances of the launch. Although the original Ronin remains safely at DC, this installment was published through a new outfit, Frank Miller Presents: one with Miller as titular figurehead, president and editor-in-chief, but for which Dan Didio serves as publisher. To be frank (if you’ll pardon the pun), I don’t see a lot of upside in the deal for Miller. Didio’s outfit has significantly underpromoted Ronin Book II, at least to judge from the fact that the series’ lack of promotion has undergirded almost every conversation I’ve had on the subject. Perhaps there’s a novelty to that, given the ubiquity with which Miller’s movements in the industry have traditionally been tracked and reported. From a purely commercial perspective it seems less than ideal for a Frank Miller book to fly under the radar.
Maybe the most interesting aspect of Ronin II, for me at least, represents another possible demerit: Miller’s not actually drawing it. Or, at least, he wasn’t supposed to. Of the six issues, Miller draws the #4 and #6 for Daniel Henriques' inks and tones, providing detailed layouts on the other four issues for Philip Tan and Henriques. If Didio has any positive effect on the finished product, perhaps it is here. I doubt Philip Tan was on most peoples’ short lists to work with Miller. Much of his career to date has been spent at DC during the period of the aforementioned New 52, doing dogsbody work in desperate times across books as disparate as Outsiders and The Phantom Stranger. He also drew a fair amount of Green Lantern, but I see no reason to hold that against him.
If Didio was indeed, as I strongly suspect, the man to put Tan in Miller’s path, well, good for him. I walk away from this series convinced, if nothing else, that Philip Tan has matured into a strong and confident talent, fully capable of handling Miller’s idiosyncratic designs. This reads nothing like the original Ronin. It reads like nothing so much as the most contemporary iteration of that very same Image school of comics-making, spawned directly from Miller’s early '80s movements, with Tan and Henriques marked heirs to Lee and Liefeld as directly as Miller’s descent from Eisner.
Because, it should go without saying, there’s no way to introduce Lone Wolf & Cub to American audiences once again. Kojima and Kazuo Koike are about as well ensconced in the pantheon as you can imagine. Everyone’s a weeb now. Hell, I’m a weeb now. Marvel and DC are filled with artists who grew up watching Dragonball Z and might even have passing familiarity with the world of Sailor Moon - cultural artifacts that followed the advent of Ronin in English-speaking terrains, along with Akira, Ghost in the Shell and, for what it’s worth, the near-contemporary Neuromancer and the movie Pulp Fiction.
To accompany that last point a brief digression. There’s a scene in the first Ronin where the titular hero wakes up captive in a pawn shop, picks up a samurai sword off the shelf and murders a man in a gimp mask. Did Tarantino or Roger Avary take the idea from Miller, or did everyone steal the idea from an Elmore Leonard story I haven’t read? The mind boggles. There’s a lot going on here, is my point.
What’s the plot in our sequel? Well, it’s a much simpler huff than the first book: the evil artificial intelligence from the first series, Virgo, is trying to kill and/or copulate with the nameless samurai from the first series, while his fellow travelers, the former Aquarius Corporation security officer Casey McKenna and their offspring Billy, rush to the rescue. Virgo is allied still with a demon from medieval Japan named Agat, and is trying to conquer the world by digging deep into the bowels of the Earth with her biocircuitry, in so doing extinguishing the human race and etc. You get the idea. An evil AI wants to conquer the world, must be Tuesday.
(The reason we know this is fiction, is that the AI actually works.)
If too much happens in the first Ronin—ten pounds of happening in a five pound sack—then know that very little appears to happen in the sequel. Each extra-length issue, ranging from 48 to 56 pages, appears to take place across no more than 10 or 15 minutes of time, split between extended action set pieces and hysteric episodes wherein characters are literally surrounded by intrusive thoughts and personal monologue, at times reaching vatic intensity. An example from #5, Casey describing her son’s power: “And now this creature - this angel - this savior - this destroyer - it lashes out - it cries out - with a voice that cracks into falsetto fury.” If you like the emphatic mode, there’s more where that came from.
The first issue features a chase, with Agat the size of a building and stalking the ruins of the city to kill Casey and her child, son of the amalgamated composite of the samurai and quadriplegic psychic Billy Challas. It’s remarkable just how little there is in the issue besides the figures of the primaries. Little in the way of 'establishing shots' throughout the whole book - if the first Ronin was overly enamored with Moebius-influenced scene-setting, the sequel has almost no patience for anything except tight full-body images of figures in extremis. This is a constrained universe populated by only a handful of creatures, and they’re all trying to kill each other.
More than once, reading Ronin Book II, I was reminded of the most ancient vintage of Image titles: the earliest Extreme releases, or even the first years of Savage Dragon. There is a vivid immediacy here, chopping down the extraneous parts of comic books to tell a very brief story about fighters establishing physical relationships with one another across the page. Miller's all-encompassing paranoia finds its full flower in endless sequences of muscular figures writhing in space, in extremis at the whims of great machinations beyond our ken. For better and for worse Miller will never outgrow the primal yawp signified by the immortal couplet, “fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me.”
The key and crucial decision here has been to eschew color. That was the final ingredient of the original Ronin, and the portion of the finished product even Thompson admired: Lynn Varley’s groundbreaking color work. Certainly Miller is known for black & white - Sin City has proved in time almost as influential as Ronin, on the strength of its colorlessness. But this is different than that; for the most part we’re not looking at pages of high-contrast black & white, we’re looking at carefully prepared grayscale designed by Henriques to aide in drawing the eye across the page. It looks and scans like the pages of a manga tankōbon, a crucial and telling effect for a book designed to be read quickly.
The bulk of the series involves the first steps of Casey’s son, a pre-verbal infant in the opening pages who comes into his own as an extraordinary telepath over the course of the story’s running fight. Eventually he sprouts an anime haircut and begins floating around of his own volition, a nimbus of great power in a pint-sized package. Super-powerful children have appeared throughout Miller’s later work, particularly recent Dark Knight episodes, but the operative movement here would appear to be a more specific influence. Look to issue #5, after baby Billy has come into his own and begun ripping apart Virgo with his mind. An extended spread of Billy from behind, flexing his tiny muscles, with tiny torn sleeves, is indistinguishable from Goku.
Miller did all this just to have his own Goku? His own Tetsuo? Honestly, makes about as much sense as anything else.
In any event, I dearly love Tan and Henriques here, and urge every reader to approach their work with an open mind. Theirs are simply gorgeous pages. Tan is a far better artist than we have ever suspected. Miller’s constant stream of cinematically framed close-ups are technically challenging, with Tan and Henriques bringing necessary sinew and nuance to his detailed layouts.
If the book staggers, it’s down to Miller’s decision to draw the fourth and sixth chapters. It would have been a better book, straight-up, had Tan and Henriques finished the piece together. It would also have been a better book had Miller drawn the whole thing himself. Just please, pick a lane. As it is, it’s two-thirds a gorgeous interpolation by Philip Tan with the remaining one-third an intriguing but doggedly spartan work with Henriques following Miller’s own hand.
Now, of course, there is much of interest to be said about that last third. Miller’s layouts as reprinted in the various issues' extensive backmatters are tight and detailed, enough so to make you wonder why he didn’t just draw the whole thing himself. He breaks down somewhere in the home stretch, the middle of issue #6 falling into what can only be called a Mahfood-esque stupor, which charitably might be read as an attempt to shift the story’s subjectivity in its final moments. Much like the original Ronin, the story does not end so much as stop, with the conclusion of the primary conflict dropping after many pages in which the innards of the plot are unspooled like so much violent spaghetti.
So, yes, it’s a bit of a mess. What else would you expect, would you even want? It’s a different work and a different kind of work. Miller is no longer trying to impress anyone, I don’t think, save for himself.
But what do I know? I’m just the schmuck who’d swear up and down on a stack of Bibles that Miller’s finest work remains Marvel Team-Up #100, drawing Spider-Man vs. the Fantastic Four with the aforementioned Chris Claremont, and Bob Wiacek to boot. That’s my Frank Miller, right there. You could teach a class from that comic. Dude contains multitudes.
