I've read Frank Miller before, most obviously 'The Dark Knight Returns', which, along with Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons's 'Watchmen', made me aware that comics books weren't just for kids any more. However, I haven't reviewed anything of his for the Nameless Zine, so another book from his bibliography seemed like an excellent choice for my graphic novel project and, as if by magic, my friend Edward included 'Ronin' in a stack that he lent me for review. So here goes!

'Ronin' came before 'The Dark Knight Returns' and was originally published as a six-issue series for DC, where he'd made a serious impact working on superhero titles like 'Daredevil', running over a year from 1983 to 1984. He wrote it and drew it, while his future wife Lynn Varley painted the colours, and John Costanza lettered it. All three of them are American but this doesn't feel like an American comic at all and certainly not a superhero comic.

I've read that Miller saw Alberto Breccia, a Uruguayan-born Argentinean artist and cartoonist, as his greatest influence, but I can't say whether he shows up here or not because I haven't read any of his work. However, I do see other influences, most obviously Japanese samurai movies of the sixties and the Spanish artist behind 'Strontium Dog', Carlos Esquerra. Apparently, Miller's reading of the Kazuo Koike manga that would later be translated as 'Lone Wolf and Cub' was his primary influence on the Japanese side but I struggle to believe that he didn't find movies from Akira Kurosawa, Kiyachi Okamoto and especially Masaki Kobayashi during his research.

It's the samurai side that kicks the book off, with a young and nameless samurai dedicated to a life protecting his master, Lord Ozaki. Initially he does a good job but the demon Agat disguises himself as a geisha and assassinates him in his bedroom, while our young samurai waits outside, having been persuaded to leave the lovers to their privacy. Therefore disgraced, he prepares to commit seppuku and join his lord in the afterlife but Ozaki's ghost appears to send him on a new mission.

The reason Agat wanted him is because he stole the demon's sword, which is powered by blood. Now, that sword is the only way that Agat can be destroyed and Ozaki avenged, though it has to taste the blood of an innocent first. Our samurai must wander the land as a ronin or masterless samurai in order to perfect his skills, then return to finish the demon off once and for all. What he figures out is that he's the innocent who must die and so thrusts the bloodsword through his own body to impale Agat, thus killing them both. As they die, however, the demon issues a curse and traps both their souls inside the sword.

While that might sound like the entire script for a graphic novel, that arc unfolds in only twenty-four pages within the first issue of 'Ronin', which is only half of it. The rest of it shows us that it's a daydream in the mind of a young man named Billy Challas, who was born without limbs but has the power of telekinesis as if to compensate. He lives in the Aquarius Complex, a biomechanical cyberpunk city located in the midst of a post-apocalyptic future New York. It's the vision of Peter McKenna, who invented biomechanics, whose wife Casey heads up security, and it's funded by a rich man known as Mr. Taggart. The other key character at Aquarius is Virgo, who's the AI heart of the complex. She runs everything and is expanding what she can do, by learning from Billy.

All that we learn from the first of the six issue run, but what remains can be read in a swathe of different ways. The most obvious one is that the samurai story is real and both the demon Agat and the ronin pledged to destroy him reappear in New York, prompting a huge explosion as the demon takes over Taggart and Casey chases after the ronin. However, that take gradually falls apart as the story runs on and we realise that they exist because Billy dreams them, probably a riff on the television shows that he watches. The question becomes whether we're spending an awful lot of time inside his head or whether his paranormal abilities brought them to life.

There has to be a lot of the former, because it's even commented on within the comic itself, the ronin pointing out to Casey that she'd never picked up a sword until now yet she quickly finds a mastery that rivals the ronin's. It doesn't make sense, except from the context that Billy wants Casey, with whom he's fallen in love, to be part of his fantasy and what better way than to make her a samurai? However, I believe there's at least some of the latter, because of how it all ends, which is astoundingly devastating.

Of course, there are other ways to read this, not least by looking at Peter and Casey's surname, McKenna. Especially in the last third, much of this reads like a fever dream or a psychedelic trip and that name quickly brings Terence McKenna to mind, the ethnobotanist who advocated for the responsible use of natural psychedelics such as DMT, ayahuasca and psilocybin mushrooms. Anyone who reads 'Neuromancer' and binges the 'Zatoichi' television show while high on any of those could easily conjure up something like this.

However trippy and however real, what Miller conjures up here is deep worldbuilding. Much of his efforts went into this futuristic New York, both the rundown old city that's full of extremists, cannibals and urban decay, and the biomechanical new city that expands across the landscape like a cyberpunk virus. If social and economic collapse aren't dystopian enough, how about the sentient city built in the middle of the old one tapping into the strata below it to fuel a gradual growth in every direction like a fungal infection? And we're back to mushrooms again, though a further influence here could be the manga 'Akira', which I really ought to read now that my son bought me a deluxe box set of its complete run. Thus far I only know the movie.

I mentioned that Miller didn't just write 'Ronin', he also drew it. I don't know what his work was like for earlier comics like 'Daredevil', though I do know that he started as an artist but worked his way into the writer's chair and eventually had to pass the art onto others. It's raw, visceral art, an approach aided by a lot of cross-hatching before the colourist got to play with it, and an impressively quiet approach in which many pages get by entirely without words. There's even a powerful use of negative space, some panels being entirely black. It all feels very personal, as if we're not reading what's going on in Billy's brain but Miller's. The word that springs to my mind from film is "auteur", though I guess that just translates in comics to "writer/artist".

Bottom line, I thoroughly enjoyed the experience that is 'Ronin' and ought to treat it as a point of reference to dive into other graphic novels from a few different directions. It certainly feels like a pioneer and I wonder how many people took it as a primary influence. ~~ Hal C F Astell