530 RONIN
for creators’ rights with his fi rst creator-owned comic, but he also evolved as a comic
artist on a visual level. Each of the six issues spans over 48 pages, a rather uncommon
format for American mainstream comic books at that time.
In Ronin , Miller tells the story of a samurai warrior who, after losing his master,
Lord Ozaki, sets out on a journey to kill his master’s murderer, the demon Agat.
Although the story starts out in 12th-century Japan, the demon and the ronin are
transported into the New York of a post-apocalyptic future, where their battle con-
tinues. Simultaneously Miller depicts a completely diff erent storyline about moral and
human evolution that is altered by biogenetics, presented in the form of the Aquarius
complex, a cooperation that develops new technologies based on bioorganic material.
Both stories intertwine and thus refl ect on each other when the samurai takes over
the body of one of Aquarius’ test subjects, the amputated boy Billy.
Th e story of Ronin is constructed out of a collage of diff erent classical genres. While
the prologue of the comic is situated in feudal 12th-century Japan and clearly resembles
visually and thematically Eastern comic books such as Lone Wolf and Cub , the story
is interrupted by a sudden time-travel into the future where a new protagonist is con-
structed as a symbiosis of two characters that overlap each other. Th e shape-shifting
demon further strengthens this doppelganger motif when he takes over the role of
Aquarius’ director, Mr. Taggart. Although the setting, a dystopian New York City,
resembles that of a science-fi ction movie, the hard-boiled dialogue and the stand-off -like
confrontations between the characters refer back to the classical We s t e r n genre.
In contrast to other comics of the same time, Ronin off ers a positive female fi gure for
identifi cation, Offi cer Casey McKenna. As one of the three founders of the Aquarius
complex and leader of its security force, she reminds the male characters and the readers
of her status as a woman and also invites them to refl ect on their own ways of thinking:
“Gentlemen, it’s the 21st century. You’ve got to have open minds.”
Miller not only confronts his readers with gender issues but also with the society
they are living in. While he is sometimes criticized because of the right-wing political
implications of some of his comics, in Ronin he displays nearly all facets of the political
spectrum, from a right-wing conservative to a leftist libertarian world-view. Although
Ronin includes a wide range of racial slurs (such as “nip” or “chink”), Miller certainly does
not present these stereotypes as acceptable. He rather reconstructs an over-exaggerated
vernacular language in order to question the readers’ perception for such terms and
their implied meanings. After a rather heated debate about racial heritage, an African
American character replies to his interlocutor, clearly recognizable as a Nazi , very ironi-
cally: “Th ere goes the neighborhood.”
What is more striking in Ronin than Miller’s interest in politics is his use of visual
methods (with the help of his color-artist Lynn Varley) to construct a world that chal-
lenges readers’ typical reading habits. His panel designs off er more than a display of
the action taking place; Miller rather structures the readers’ perception of timing and
pace and gives him a sense of direction on the two-dimensional printed page. Only
some pages of the comic book are displayed in a traditional panel structure. From
