‘Frank Miller’s Ronin: Collector’s Edition’ (review)

Written by Frank Miller
Art by Phillip Tan, Frank Miller,
and Daniel Henriques
Published by Abrams ComicArts

Frank Miller is a legendary creator in the comic book field.

He has had many successes credited to his name. The original Ronin was actually one of my favorite books from the 1980s. I loved it and reread it multiple times growing up.

When I heard that there was going to be a sequel, I got sort of excited. The possibilities were pretty wild as to what might happen. It finally got a release date and I was excited to see what might be coming from this.

Finally, I got a chance to read the book and, well, I was a bit taken aback. Mostly because it doesn’t make much in the way of sense, in any capacity. That is a real shame too because I feel there was a lot that could have been great with this one.

This book followed Casey and her newborn son across the new American landscape that has been torn apart and replaced with a bunch of machinery. There is a devil from the first series who is the villain again in this one. He’s looking pretty much the same that he was in the first one and he’s back to his old bag of tricks.

Basically, he wants to run America and find and destroy the Ronin who cut him down to size so many years earlier. A lot of confusion then ensues from there.

Lone Wolf and CFrom there, we get to see Casey and we get to see her struggle across this landscape. A lot of this feels like a demented version ofub, which makes sense because Miller is a fan of that series.

Unfortunately, it pales in comparison to Lone Wolf and Cub as a lot of the themes Miller may be going for are lost in the muck. We get to see some instances where Casey gets to fight some ninjas and some demons. If only things were executed well it could have been a good time.

Instead, we are left with long passages of Casey not moving forward as a character. Casey is interesting enough at first, but because the whole book is so repetitive and monotonous, there was a certain point in the second chapter that I just stopped caring. And that’s really sad because the set up was intriguing enough. The ghost of the original Ronin is showing his face and he may be coming back (I think). The focus of the series then goes all over the place so much, you are never sure where it is going…but since you don’t care it hardly matters.

A lot of this follows similar story beats as the first Ronin.

Frank Miller does do the layouts for the series as a whole so the pacing seems very familiar. Miller hasn’t lost a beat as far as the layouts go. Yet, the elliptical kind of storytelling feels fragmented and the art and the story and the word balloons don’t always mesh in the best ways. I wish they had used this book to tell a great story. Instead, I feel I would need a grid of sort of key to figure out how to read this thing at all. I eventually understood it but man was it a challenge. It just feels disconnected and disorganized rather than inventive.

Phillip Tan does the artwork for four of the chapters. I rather like Tan’s work here. The script and the word balloon placement do him no favors but it is very strong artwork. The first chapter gave me the most hope because it isn’t at all clogged and Tan’s artwork really does shine. But it becomes less and less so. By chapter four, Miller is back doing the artwork and, well, he doesn’t really tell the story well unfortunately. I would love to see Miller work with another writer and have himself do the artwork, because this is all over the place and comes off as sloppy.

By the end, I could hardly tell you what happened. Most is this book is forgotten as soon as you read it. It does make you long for a time when Miller was on top, and he thrilled you rather than confused you. Maybe that will change with a future book from Miller(I liked Pandora). With this, it is one of the bigger disappointments in modern comics.

RATING: C-