Ronin

In class the other day as we were talking about the comics in McSweeney’s 13, as I tried to draw a kind of connection between those comics and superhero comics, what came to mind was how whether you are considering a muscle-bound hero in tights flying over a lake of fire or a degraded, humiliated sensitive artist guy whose comics are ignored until he dies, you are inside of a portrait of anxiety. Our anxieties inform both the fantasy–impregnable! unstoppable! unkillable!–as well as the disaster, which is its own kind of fantasy–pregnable! stoppable! killable! These images are both ways the mind is trying to protect itself, through the idea that there’s a hero who can defeat what would defeat us, and through the idea that we can’t escape certain disaster. The message of either fantasy, ironically, is that there’s no use in trying.

Ronin, by Frank Miller, for example, illustrates this perfectly. A paraplegic telekinetic in the future is being used to create “tools”, which is to say, weapons, by an AI that has been installed as the worldmind of a city of biorganic plastics that lives in the middle of a ruined Manhattan, destroyed by wars and pollution. The story is always right on the line of madness, the idea that it could all be the hallucination of the paraplegic, as a battle between a masterless samurai and a demon, whose souls take root in this time, upend the power balance of the city and the paraplegic finds he has become the ronin. This first image is of the paraplegic as he dreams himself into the ronin (or is ostensibly possessed by his ghost) and with a body reshaped by the plastics he has been working with at the laboratory.

At the same time he is the dreamer of it all, and he is also under the spell of the AI, who ostensibly controls the demon. In these scenes on the right, the demon kills the AI’s maker. Which is either patricide or fratricide, depending on which version of the story, or which level, you occupy.

There was a genre of French literature in the 19th century that played this way, telling stories at the edge of madness, where the character either could or could not be mad. The enchantment could or could not be real. Miller’s story has a relationship to that, even as it is also a creature of anxiety, about pollution, sex, power, violence, racial struggle and technology. He published it early in his career, but it remains like a kind of DNA to everything he’s done since.