Return to Sheji
Everything you need to know about the world of Ronin Digital Express, its major players, and where the story is headed.
If you could put George Lucas, Sergio Leone, and Akira Kurosawa into a blender—please don’t!
That would imply you have the power to reanimate a couple of humankind’s greatest filmmakers, so, bring them back instead of chopping them into Director Purée.
But if you could mix their sensibilities, it would look a lot like Ronin Digital Express.
A spaghetti western spanning a futuristic dusty techno-vista, Ronin Digital Express is anchored by its reluctant Motokoin courier, the Green-Eyed Ronin—a man with a moral code as confident as the cut of his blade.
What kind of future? In a post-apocalyptic mess inspired by events we currently doom-scroll, our mysterious ronin wanders the apocalypse’s afterbirth.
Ronin Digital Express breaks several of the supposed limitations of comics.
They say you can’t do things cinema does so well, for example: You know that trick, the one where Clint Eastwood pauses, takes a drag of a cigarette, and exudes pure badassery? Comics doesn’t have the moving image or sound.
But, I’ll be damned if Ronin Digital Express doesn’t only deliver those kind of moments, but takes them in directions only comics can.
I’ve had the privilege of seeing Ronin Digital Express grow from its inception as a one-paragraph pitch, to scripts and eventual full comic episodes. Renton couldn’t get anyone with enough skill to draw it, so he took a few years to transform himself into an artist capable of rendering its incredibly epic world.
The depth of the universe of Ronin Digital Express is such that we can discuss some of the backstory, to tee up this reboot, and not spoil any of the adventure ahead. So, let’s ask Renton to guide us through this relaunch of Ronin Digital Express.
Milton Lawson: Tell me about the world of Ronin Digital Express. Is this our world? When and where?
Renton Hawkey: It is our world. But I’ve put my thumb on the scale in a few places to make it more suitable for the kind of story I want to tell.
Most of the story takes place on the continent of Sheji (that’s mainland China to us).
We’re at an indeterminate point in our future, after a series of World War 3 or 4-like events called “The Cataclysms” which ended the world as we know it. Then, a few hundred years of lawless, Mad Max-style anarchy followed.
Before most of the characters in Ronin Digital Express were born, humanity was on the brink of extinction. But it has begun to rebuild. Still, we’re nowhere near even a billion people left in the world. Maybe not even 100 million. In Sheji, we probably don’t have many more than 5 or 6 million.
We’re entering the story a generation after the turn, at a mid-reconstruction point. Tech is limited, but there’s a functional economy, basic law and order, municipalities, and so forth. Now, Sheji is ostensibly ruled by the Liang-Merabet Empire, but most governance is local and the Emperor won’t be much more than kind of a distant, ineffectual background figure in the plot.
All of this combines to give us the retro-futuristic Old West/Tattooine-ish setting.
It’s important to note, though, that Sheji isn’t China. It’s something brand new. A multi-cultural melting pot of Asian populations and displaced western refugees generations after whatever shakeups put them together.
We won’t go too deep into the history because a lot of the historical record has been destroyed. We’re in this new culture that is a melange of leftovers. Not everyone gets along, but it’s a fun kind of functional chaos.
ML: How much will we learn about the world and how it got to be this way? How much will Ronin Digital Express focus on the politics of this new world?
RH: About as much as I just said.
What is left of our world will be seen here and there. Old megacity ruins. Brutalist architecture suggesting authoritarian regimes. Devastated stretches of desert turned to glass. Craters that are visible from space. Land erosion from climate change.
But the “how we got here” and the politics of this world, it’s mostly in the background. That’s not the kind of story I want to tell. I want to create a rich world, the dynamics of which feel plausible on the ground. So, context is an important part of that. But it’s just flavor in the stew.
This isn’t Game of Thrones. We don’t care about political factions and royal families vying for control of Sheji. We’re following the blue-collar workers, the freelancers, the normies. People just doing their jobs and not thinking much about philosophy, society, or their civil rights. People with a more old-school sense of personal justice — a schoolyard sense of right and wrong. Superstitious people. The ones who get caught in the gears of history.
ML: Tell me about the cast?
RH: The protagonist is Juda, also known as the Green-Eyed Ronin.
He’s a ronin, which in the world of Ronin Digital Express carries a slightly different connotation than what we understand (they’re often thought of as outlaws). He makes money working as a bitcourier, a grunt gig where you explore old world ruins to try and find data caches you then transport to the nearest town where you can sell them.
It can be lucrative; some institutions trying to rebuild society want to acquire as much data as possible and will pay well for it. But it’s extremely dangerous. That’s why it’s mostly ronins or desperados doing it. The types who can’t get a job doing anything else.
Juda will be a one-man show for a little while, but he’ll slowly pick up a supporting cast. Like The Outlaw Josey Wales, where Clint Eastwood plays his typical tough guy lone gunman, but, he slowly picks up a found family of a kind over time. That’s the approach here as well.
One of his first allies is Mercury Soto, a data miner (basically the person who parses the data that someone like Juda finds; the low-level tech nerd). She’s very bright and enthusiastic, and absolutely enamored with ronins and ronin culture. She sees the echo of old samurai nobility in them, and is basically Juda’s biggest fan. But he’s trying to travel light, so, he’ll be pretty resistant to her tagging along.
He’ll come into a lot of conflict with various factions, but, the main villains he’s worried about are The Tengu. If you think of Kill Bill, these are the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad of Ronin Digital Express — the seven best ronins in Sheji; the top 1% most dangerous people in this world.
Juda used to be a Tengu, until he abruptly left several years before the beginning of the story. Leaving the Tengu is like leaving the mob. As a custom, they hunt you down and kill you. It’s the rules. So Juda will have to stay ahead of the Tengu and over time, face them one by one.
Remember that these are people who were, for all intents and purposes, his family. So, some of these fights are going to be emotionally tough. And others, he’s gonna be thrilled at the chance to put an elbow in their eye socket. Seeing these characters show up and learning about his specific relationship with each of them will be a big throughline for the plot.
ML: Let’s talk about the plot. What’s Juda trying to accomplish? Who is trying to stop him?
RH: Juda carries a katana sword that is well over 1,000 years old. You’ll find out why pretty soon — basically, it’s a sword that belonged to his original master, and Juda has sworn an oath to return it to him.
This is Juda’s first oath ever taken, and he loved his master, so this supersedes whatever pledges he took as a Tengu, and he’s honor-bound to see this quest through, even if it costs him his life.
Like I mentioned before, the Tengu are also honor-bound to pursue Juda and bring him back “body, beads, and sword” (i.e., kill him). But the guy in charge of the Tengu, Bigman Massimoto, has split loyalties that muddle the motives here.
Imagine Massimoto as the Kingpin of Ronin Digital Express. Cunning, ambitious, ruthless. Crazy smart. Charming. Evil. Before him, the Tengu were a kind of rural legend. A pretty traditional honor culture-type group. Massimoto is responsible for modernizing them and making them a real force of terror.
He wants it all. And so, he’s thrown in with a benefactor called Futurus, which is this shadowy organization that uses technology way beyond anything else in Sheji.
Futurus are sort of the “White Walkers” of Ronin Digital Express. We won’t get to know much about them for a while — they’re an enigmatic and faraway threat looming over the story. Their motives are unknown.
But they’ve invested in the Tengu, and Massimoto is beholden to them in ways that will complicate the plot.
ML: So Juda has to watch out for the Tengu, this shadowy organization Futurus, and what else?
RH: He’s always crossing someone. There are local gangsters called Chao Phos, some of whom he’s on friendly-ish terms with. Others, not so much (he ran into a couple in older entries of Ronin Digital Express).
There’s also SINC, which is more or less “the cops” of Ronin Digital Express. They’re a paramilitary organization hired by the Liang-Merabet empire to keep the peace in Sheji. They’re neither good guys nor bad guys, they’re just there doing their jobs and will occasionally bump up against Juda.
There’s the 108 Kobun, a Yakuza-like organization that Juda was recruited into the Tengu from as a teenager. There’s a huge desert area (basically the Gobi, but way bigger) called “the 404” where there are all sorts of raider and marauder types who haven’t rejoined society yet. They’re still walking the Fury Road, so to speak.
It’s gonna be a good time with plenty of wild characters to introduce and explore.
ML: For longtime readers, what’s different about this new incarnation of Ronin Digital Express? What can we expect?
RH: The 100+ pages I’ve already done of Ronin Digital Express and the one-shot Tower of Death have a very loose continuity; a Kung Fu-type serialized story.
While nothing we’re doing moving forward necessarily contradicts whatever “canon” is there, I consider this iteration of Ronin Digital Express to be a reboot. A fresh start. This won’t be episodic. It will be an epic that tells one long story, like Lone Wolf and Cub, Vagabond, or Berserk.
So this is a great place for new readers to start. This is the main course. Long-time readers or anyone curious enough to go check out those older episodes will see little easter eggs here and there, but none of that is needed moving forward.
Ronin Digital Express publishes intermittently as Renton Hawkey’s schedule allows.
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