Emma Peel Sessions 30 – IF YOU INTEND TO DIE, YOU CAN DO ANYTHING.

or: “SHUT UP, MOMMA.”

part of David Brothers’ Booze, Broads, and Bullets Week. Hopefully not the only entry I’ll have in it, but hey, it’s been a hectic week. Check the rest out on David’s index @ 4thletter

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The interesting thing about Frank Miller is that his creative timeline is rare one. Instead of working throughout his career towards a fertile period, he’s been constantly alternating between minor works and collaborations, masterpieces and flawed attempts, utter failures and journeyman work. Miller hasn’t had a direct career trajectory, and the Dark Knight Strikes Again reads like the work of a young man. Ronin on the other hand reads like an older man taking apart his own obsessions and exposing them for what they are. Ronin is a fucked-up piece of auto-analysis, as much about Frank Miller creating it as samurai swordfights, cannibals, and robots. That aspect is missing from a lot of Millers work, sometimes to his benefit (DKSA, Batman/Spawn) and sometimes to his detriment (300, most of the Sin City shorts). Ronin is Miller doing scifi too – establishing himself in the realm of bleak dystopian sf. Miller would back to sf several times, while not as honed and satirical as Give Me Liberty, or as gonzo as Hard Boiled, Ronin is fully realized in its decimated portrayal of future New York City.

Ronin is interesting because for all it’s complexity, it’s still Miller finding his footing. The drawing style is a cross-pollination of Miller’s two biggest influences at the time – Moebius and Goseki Kojima – but the story itself pits Metal Hurlant neon tech nihilism and sex against the classicism and pacing of Lone Wolf and Cub’s ninjas. The hero of the modern euro storyline is a black woman completely in charge of every situation, has a problematic marriage, who’s antagonist is a computer that is based on a construct of her personality. The nameless Ronin’s is simpler, and more basic heroes journey. He is a disgraced young samurai, who’s been cursed for letting his master be killed by a demon, forced to walk forever until he kills the demon Agat, and eventually thrown into the future by the demon’s magical treachery. The two stories and styles are forced to intermingle, and in doing so Miller sneaks his own stylistic flourishes in until by issue six we are looking at pretty much complete Frank Miller pages.

Those are not the only elements of Ronin that owe something to other works – quadriplegic telepath Billy Challas is straight out of Phillip K Dick’s Dr. Bloodmoney; the gang-heavy with an underground full of cannibals owes something to The Warriors and Escape From New York; the crazy guy building a rocket out of vacuum cleaners could come from any of the major scifi writers of the time (my guess is Disch); Agat is visually reminiscent of Kirby’s Etrigan. Ronin issue three even has a miniature reenactment of Yojimbo. Removed of its moral context, the story is exactly what it sounds like – a guy comes into town, hires himself to two crime bosses, gets beat up, kills two crime bosses, leaves. Kurosawa was heavily invested in morality, and what it means to be a moral figure in a world caught not between good and bad but bad and worse. Miller plays that as flat as he possibly can, prefiguring the emptiness of the moral question we are presented with at the beginning of the story – will the Ronin have his revenge? It turns out it doesn’t matter, and that angle is meaningless. The samurai ethos and modernity aren’t at odds, and this is not the story of a man trapped in a world he never made. Millers trick is placing the stylistic extremes of comics against each other exposes that each are still coming from the same place emotionally and developmentally – which is entertainment for teenage boys (interestingly enough Ronin will probably go down in history as the inspiration for Samurai Jack and nothing less, because Samurai Jack introduced kids to the epic action sequence and played the samurai-vs-robots thing for the age group its designed for).

The story that the evil computer feeds everyone is exactly that, a story. It’s heroes journey bullshit. There are no demons or samurai, no curses. The sword doesn’t drink blood. It turns out most of the samurai scenes in the first issue are scenes from japanese television. The Ronin is actually a manifestation of Billy Challas, who is mercilessly taken down in the books own dialog. He’s a horny helpless manchild who wants to sleep with the other lead character, Casey. Because she’s everything a kid like that desires, she’s strong she’s exotic and she’s not his mommy. The Ronin is magic, and can do anything, he always wins. He wants to cut everyones arms and legs off, he wants to have sex. He magically learns english because he already knew english. The flaws in the story, the leaps are the kind you’d have to jump when reading foreign boys adventure fiction, partially because of the language barrier but partially because you didn’t grow up with it and learn to make those jumps intuitively like you did when you were a kid. “Whats it like to be a freak’s wet dream?” Virgo asks Casey, which is really Casey asking herself the same question.

Another aside, Ronin is the clearest starting point for Miller’s idiosyncratic editing style. His Daredevil pages are, while consistently inventive and sometimes astounding in their layouts, not the same thing thats being done here. Ronin sees Miller dicing time up by fragments of a second, using grids as rhythmic devices as often as it is a storytelling tool. While he would take this to more extreme points in Dark Knight Returns – specifically editing in a harsher, more on-the-page fashion – its easy to see how Miller uses repeating layouts to not only enforce repetition (which has been less commented on than Gibbon’s use of the technique in Watchmen), but to show chaos and intensity when he breaks it. A full page splash means something in Ronin, as does a pencil-thin vertical panel of someone moving their hand away from their face. Ronin’s framing and pacing are entirely its own, in an editing style not built out of film-editing but one designed to work on the page. It’s intuitive. Miller abandoned this technique with Sin City, but it’s still my favorite aspect of his work – and while every element of his career has been stripmined, almost no one has been able to understand how to pace a page quite the same way. The closest anyone has ever come is Darren Aronofsky’s “hiphop montage” style in his first three films.

Ronin’s narrative is snapped in half long before the final climax. Casey is shown that the world around her of demons and katana battles is simply a projection of either Virgo or Billy, and she realizes the only way out of the narrative is to subsume her own into its. So instead of being the scifi heroine, she saves the Ronin on his own terms. She kills Agat quickly, then forces the Ronin to commit seppukku, with her as his second. Virgo, it seems, has manufactured all this nonsense to kill Billy Challas. And to seed chaos while she moves towards creeping takeover of NYC and merging with a japanese military company. But most specifically to kill Billy Challas, and to keep him and his power quiet because he is too dangerous. While Casey enacts the samurai narrative, we are shown Billy and Virgo arguing until Billy explodes. As Casey goes to behead the Ronin, Billy wakes up and destroys everything. The ultimate line is cut out of the copy of the trade I have, of the Ronin turning to camera and saying “Shut up, momma” before killing Virgo and everyone near her in a massive explosion.