If you were to ask any Frank Miller fan what Miller’s best work is, there are a number of highly plausible answers. Batman: Year One and The Dark Knight Returns are excellent takes on the World’s Greatest Detective. Daredevil: Born Again is a masterfully gritty journey for the Man Without Fear. Sin City is a fantastic blood-drenched noir series. While these are all masterful works in the comic medium, his best, most original, and most unique work is the six-issue Ronin, an era-spanning text so mind-bending that several attempts to adapt it have fizzled out or become stuck in development hell. We’ve probably already received as close to an adaptation as we’ll ever get, and it’s all thanks to animation legend Genndy Tartakovsky’s excellent Samurai Jack.
Miller’s Ronin ran from July 1983 to August 1984. It’s set in a dystopian New York, where a telekinetic named Billy finds himself plagued by dreams of a ronin at war with the shapeshifting demon Agat in feudal Japan. When Agat seems to emerge in this post-apocalyptic future, the samurai’s cursed spirit possesses Billy in order to finish the demon with its own magical sword (complete with sci-fi elements that make the tale more complicated in ways I can’t note without spoilers). Following his debut film Pi, Darren Aronofsky was slated to direct an adaptation of the series for New Line Cinema back in July 1998. It was never made, and Aronofsky left the project to make Requiem for a Dream.
