When East met West: Ronin and the emergence of the comic-as-literature

 

If you’re a reader of Neal Stephenson or William Gibson or any of their disciples, you're undoubtedly accustomed to their fusing of Eastern history, philosophy, and martial arts with Western characters in Western settings. If you got in early enough, you were even able to look down your nose at Keanu Reeves’ virtual ninjitsu in The Matrix because you’d already been reading about it, like, a decade ago.  But before Keanu, before Hiro Protagonist, before the heady days of the “street samurai,” East rarely ever met and West in science fiction. This changed in 1983 around the time Frank Miller’s Ronin was published.

1983 was an exciting time to be a young nerd. I was still high as a kite from the conclusion of the Star Wars trilogy, and in the absence of jedi knights, New York movie theaters were chock full of barbarians and ninjas. I’d graduated from Basic Dungeons & Dragons to Advanced D&D, from the “Choose Your Own Adventure” series and Tin Tin books to Edgar Rice Burroughs (Tarzan and John Carter series), Harry Harrison (the Stainless Steel Rat series), and Piers Anthony (anything Xanth), and although still into comic books, I’d deserted costumed super-heroes, looking for something deeper, darker, and more vital.

I didn’t know it, but I wasn’t the only reader bored by the duopoly of DC Comics (publisher of all Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, and Green Lantern titles) and Marvel (Spider Man, Fantastic Four, Hulk).  Frank Miller summed it up best

“…comics have reached the point where there are so many damn superheroes and so damn much superpower flying around that there’s no room left for anything human, and the only way to make the genre seem interesting is to wildly escalate the powers, the numbers, the quantity of planets that can be demolished per panel.”

Writers recognized that something was missing, and like Mao’s hundred flowers, the comic book shops in 1983 quickly blossomed with new writer/artist-owned titles and characters. These stories featured - among other things - elves, sea- andspace-farers, post-apocalyptic encyclopedia salesmen, and Robert Crumb-inspired weirdness.

It was in these conditions that the seeds were planted for comic books to develop into literature. My eyes were opened and I was enthralled. Three things struck me:

1. The absence of capes and tights (and when they did appear, the “heroes” were  usually homicidal or mentally ill).
2. This was adult stuff, and I don't mean nudity and violence (though there was plenty of that).
3. Unburdened by years of convention, formula, and character continuity, these were fresh, original, complex characters.

Most seeds took a long time to germinate. Not far from my family’s apartment, Art Spiegelman was still busy serializing Maus - a decade away from the Pulitzer it would eventually earn. Across the Atlantic, Alan Moore was serializing V for Vendetta; the Watchmen (listed in Time magazine’s “All-TIME 100 Greatest Novels") was still four years off. So while these best known examples of comics-as-literature still incubated, it was DC comics (in response to the upstart competition) publication of Ronin issue #1 that can rightly claim the comic-as-literature "firstie." They are also to blame for pushing me into full-on Nerd-dom - ensuring I would never kiss a girl until I was 16 (okay 17).

So what was it about Ronin that pushed me into teenage celibacy? Initially, I wasn’t floored; the artwork struck me as clumpy and uneven, but the prologue featured samurais versus ninjas, so I pressed on. Then the demon Agat murdered Lord Ozaki for stealing the blood sword, forcing Ozaki’s student - the Ronin - to flee across feudal Japan with the sword in hand. When the story flung me forward 400 years to a post-apocalyptic New York, I was hooked. My hometown was a nightmare, where Virgo, a sentient, self-propagating computer appeared to be the city’s only hope. Miller effectively creates two worlds, and then crashes them violently together when Agat pursues Ronin across time and space, hunting for the blood sword.



So we’ve got samurais, ninjas, demons, sentient super computers, the high-tech weapons of the Aquarius Corporation (who think they own Virgo), all in an Escape from New York setting. And he’s only getting started. New York is revealed to both reader and Ronin as he hunts Agat and is hunted by Virgo. As entertaining as this was on its own, Miller didn’t let it stay a violent but typical “fish out of water” story. There is something ominous about Virgo's matronly omniscience, like a biotech Nurse Ratched. And what exactly is her interest in the Ronin and Agat?



To find these answers, Miller gives us the Aquarius Complex’s Head of Security, Casey McKenna. Casey is a she, and she is bi-racial. I don’t know why that’s important, except I’d rarely (if ever) encountered either before. Casey is strong, capable, kick-ass, and determined to apprehend the Ronin.

As the story evolves seamlessly from one thread to the next, the cast of characters evolves with it. Ronin can bring all kinds of whup-ass, but he’s also sensitive, just, traditional, and even romantic. Casey McKenna is tough as nails, but is burdened managing complicated relationships with her wimpy (at the outset) husband, her staff, and the Ronin. Miller doesn’t even allow his supporting cast (Casey’s husband, the Aquarius CEO, Ronin’s hippie side kick) to stay static. In short, it was literary. The only cipher in all this is Agat himself, and the reasons for this are the greatest trick of all that Miller plays on his reader.

Are the story elements of Ronin original? Well, no. The cannibalistic humanoid underground dwellers in Ronin are the "mashed potato people" (using the parlance from the novelized version) from Escape from New York. Apart from this, there are elements and tropes lifted from a number of films (the art has a cinematic quality to it) and books (including the Bible) that are immediately recognizable. These same influences also touched William Gibson's work, and that of dozens of other writers.

Because of this, it’s not fair or accurate to say Frank Miller’s Ronin was the nexus of Western and Eastern thought in science fiction on top of its comics-as-literature firstie, but it is among the remains among the best. It functions as a lens through which we can view a time and a place where so many great ideas came together so effectively, creating a little bit of literary and pop cultural history in the process. Q.E.D.:

           

Above are the covers of Ronin issue #1 and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles#1, published two years later. The Turtles were originally a send-up/encomium for Ronin and Miller's work on Daredevil and Wolverine. The rest is merchandising history. Ronin also set the stage for Miller's re-imagination of Batman in The Dark Knight Returns, which has been cribbed heavily for the Christian Bale Batman movies. This bridge between East and West traveled two ways, too; pick up any Battle Angel: Alita manga to read about another sensitive, yet highly dangerous, cybernetic fish out of water, and you'll easily spot imagery from Ronin (not to mention a dozen other Western books and movies).

So read it and judge for yourself if this is really the first comic-as-literature. At the very least, when the movie gets made (all indications are it eventually will), you’ll be able to look down your nose at it, because you’d already read it, like, a decade ago.

- Chris