by
Mark Sautter
"To view totality one has to be a total outsider."
-- Bruce Lee
INTRODUCTION
Overcoming great personal loss, world renowned scientist and adventurer Dr. Elliot Marks emerges from seclusion and, adopting the mantle of Doc Ronin, leads the Sekai (World) Foundation in its brave fight to protect the Earth from a mysterious, god-like adversary known only as "The Enemy".
The Doc Ronin Adventures, through a variety of genre archetypes, including super-heroes and their predecessors, the pulp adventurers of the 30s, explores the concept of the "Other" and the many ways in which people alienate one another -- and the consequences in doing so.
Being outside, unbound from conformity, dropouts and outcasts hold an uncommon view of the human condition. They witness humanity in all its "brokenness" and they are uniquely free to react more genuinely and openly to it than those comfortably embraced by accepted society.
The Enemy is right about many things. With people rejecting one another so cruelly and completely, humanity is desperately flawed. And, when you transform individuals into outsiders you run the risk of turning them into outlaws, because, other than force of arms, which no longer applies to The Enemy, why should people keep the laws and ethics of a society that discards them?
Is The Enemy, as he contends, humanity's final reward for all the damage -- physical, emotional, spiritual, environmental, psychological -- it causes? Perhaps, but Doc Ronin and other key members of the Foundation are also outsiders. They, however, choose to be guardians and healers instead of executioners. What philosophies, then, differentiate "heroes" from "villains"?
The Doc Ronin Adventures unfolds through a suite of limited series. Each limited series tells a complete tale while also being part of a larger, ongoing story arc. Character-driven, it embraces a sense of humanity and explores political, sociological, and philosophical ideas of a complex, even disturbing, nature, but it never shies away from being fantasy.
The first limited series, The Doc Ronin Adventures: a Cleansing Fire, establishes Doc's world and chronicles the first clash between Doc and The Enemy.
