Frank Miller's Ronin

This is a collage tribute to Frank Miller's Ronin (1983-1984). Frank Miller's Ronin inspired Genndy Tartakovsky's Samurai Jack cartoon series (2001-2004). Samurai Jack is basically a very simplified cartoon version of Frank Miller's Ronin. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1984) by Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird, published by Mirage Studios, started as a one-shot parody comic of Frank Miller's Ronin. 

Ronin is a Japanese samurai hero created by Frank Miller. African American woman Casey McKenna was the head of security at the Aquarius Corporation, and she was also defeating the villains, rather than being a helpless damsel in distress. Ronin and Casey McKenna were groundbreaking. As for Japanese influences, Frank Miller was one of the first outspoken manga enthusiasts in the United States and since then, the number of manga and anime influences on America has exploded so much that nearly every American artist knows what manga is and is influenced by it in some way.

Frank Miller explained on the documentary Miller on Miller (2008), "Will Eisner came back with A Contract with God (1978). What he did was he said, 'This is where we can go', as something that is not contemporary, as something that stays on the bookshelf, stays alive for generations to come. Once I really absorbed it, and I gained enough power in the industry, I started working on my series Ronin (1983-1984), as an answer to A Contract with God (1978)."     

Frank Miller said on the documentary Masterpiece: Frank Miller's Batman: The Dark Knight Returns (2013), "It (Will Eisner's A Contract with God (1978)) showed a way for people like me, and Alan Moore, to play to that (adult) audience. To do stories that were beyond the understanding of an 8 year old. To me and to many other artists it gave us a sense that what we could do would be permanent and not a monthly pamphlet that would come and go and be forgotten. And I remember reading that and thinking that 'This is what I want to do. I want to have a bookshelf of work that lives forever.' Jenette (Kahn, DC president and publisher in the '80s) and I had several conversations, but one of the was particularly long, it might have been as long as 3 hours, and she and Joe Orlando, who was one of the editors at the time, had asked me what I wanted most, and I said 'Freedom.' I also made an issue of copyright. Jenette was a captivating conversationalist and they were willing to take a chance on giving me complete freedom, and I used it to my best advantage. I had done a 13 issue run on Daredevil (1981-1982), which really is structurally a novel, it's an unplanned one, but when I did Ronin (1983-1984) I was deliberately after a novel structure." 

Frank Miller explained on the documentary Miller on Miller (2008), "(With Ronin) I took in influences from France and Japan and everywhere else to create a reckless piece of work that I'm still very proud of. You can see the handcuffs come off me. The notion of authorship (in comic books) was really born with A Contract with God (1978), and for me it was with Ronin (1983-1984)."   

Frank Miller explained, "Both Walt Simonson, and particularly Howard Chaykin, introduced me to the European comics. Then, through a girlfriend Laurie Sutton, I discovered the Japanese comics. That all gave birth to Ronin." www.nycgraphicnovelists.com/20…

Frank Miller explained in Comics Interview # 31 (1986), "Ronin (1983) taught me more than anything I've ever done. It showed me that the comic book form can take on the values of a novel, and it showed me a lot of how to do it."

Frank Miller explained in Comics Journal # 101 (1986), "As violent as the story in Ronin was, the real violence was going on behind the scenes in getting the book separated and printed. We were fighting 50 years of history. And with nothing but goodwill from everybody concerned. It was amazing how much goodwill there was for that project. Rozakis and Lynn and I would go three days without sleep while Ronin was getting printed. This opens up a whole new area of difficulty for a artist, that is, protecting the work, particularly the color in printing, which is the most vulnerable. The reaction among the people who didn't normally read comics, seemed to be that they found Ronin much more accessible than they found normal comics. I got a big kick out of that. Told me I was doing some things right. And, well, the format definitely went over well with whoever saw it. Mostly the reaction I got from people outside the industry was they wanted to see the entire thing collected together, because they liked reading it at once. A marketing expert told me he could have sold a million copies of it. The Europeans, in Lucca, were very enthusiastic. It was the first thing of mine to be written up in a book review section of a newspaper. One of the things I'm most happy with is that it demanded that level of attention."