In the introduction to Absolute: Ronin, Jeanette Kahn talks about three things (which I paraphrase here) that would help to shape the look of mainstream comics in America in the late 1970's and early 1980's:
a) The visual and storytelling impact of Metal Hurlant, which would be translated in the United States as Heavy Metal.
b) The need for the expansion of the actual format of the comics (e.g. page, color palate, and content quality).
c) The need for support at a mainstream flagship like DC to offer creators the ability to own the work they produce.
Now, there is nothing necessarily wrong with the way American hero comics were being produced during that time in history (this is always a sticky argument), but it is worth noting how they were constructed to truly appreciate the impact of what a book like Miller's Ronin was able to accomplish.
The superheroes, or even superhero teams, of the early 1980's were still, to a large degree, fairly pedestrian in regards to the types of stories that were told. Comic book narratives were comprised of masses of internalized dialogue (I must save the day!), inexplicably overly- explained internalized action dialogues ( I'll just take this gun out of his hand, turn it on himself, and then let it blow up in his face, haha!), and fairly tame (by modern standards) good versus evil parables laid out in panel sequences that did little (sometimes) to challenge the status quo of how comics had been read (although I believe there is a solid counter-argument to that in the likes of work by George Perez and Steven Bissette when he begins his Swamp Thing work).
While the look of the characters were also changing to be more "contemporary" ( we laugh about mullets and high hair, but art does reflect the times!), the construction and substance were a bit stagnant. While it is easy to say that the appeal of comics is that you should be able to drop right into them, and to a degree I agree with that, it is too easy sometimes to use that as an excuse for not taking chances with how stories are told. If we did not take chances with how we tell stories in our cultures there would perhaps be no, for example, James Joyce's Ulysses or Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow in literature. Challenging the dominant modes of any constructed norm is a vital part of keeping dialogues and avenues of ideas alive in the arts.
If nothing was to be done the medium of comics in the mainstream was in danger of being stuck in permanent static adolescents in providing books that were simply bloated comfort food. However, a whole new adult group of 18-35 year olds, who had survived arguably the most tumultuous time in American history (e.g. assassinations, space races, civil rights unrest, Vietnam, presidential impeachment, etc.), had indicated a need for a change in taste for the hero stories they grew up loving and had wanted to stay with. And many of those fans, luckily for the readers, were the creators and editors themselves who were ready to try something different in the mainstream.
Ronin would challenge the way mainstream comic books could be seen and read. Miller goes to great lengths to combine, unabashedly, a cinematic influence through wide-screen panels, two-page transitional/establishing layouts, a deconstructionist approach to color and inks, and a story that let the reader actually read the story rather than have the story merely laid out for them. In the next post, I will dig deeper into Ronin and why it deserves to be recognized more often as a book that helped to change the way mainstream comics were going to be done, for better or worse.
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