100 Bullets
Azzarello and Risso
Reviewed by Kent Worchester

According to Neil, who works at my local comic bookstore, 100 Bullets is a rare example of a Vertigo title that appeals to the hardcore Marvel and costumed super-hero audience. From his standpoint this is a good thing, since many of these fans are feeling pissed off at the standard fare and it relieves him to see customers walking out the door with a purchase they feel good about. Whether 100 Bullets helps pay the rent is not exactly part of The Comics Journal reviewing paradigm, however. Undoubtedly, the buzz is there. But does Vertigo's most popular crime genre title merit a positive thumbs-up in a take-no-prisoners journal of criticism? It's a good question, one I've been wrestling with as I've put off this long-delayed review.

Maybe it's the problem of genre. Reviewing comics like this one, which are obviously a cut above the norm but hew closely to familiar, pulp-derived conventions, begins to seem like a waste of time. This is not to say that 100 Bullets isn't better than most of what's out there in genre comics land. Brian Azzarello's writing has a chewed-over, tough-guy cinematic quality, and Eduardo Ricco's pencils and inks are capable of conveying subtle nuances of character and setting. While I wouldn't go quite as far as Greg Rucka, who says "I feel like I've died and gone to Chandler-Heaven. It honestly does not get much better than this," I will concede that the plot has more twists and turns than a hard-scrabble coal mine. And surely that's a good thing.

But the fact that genre can stay fresh has by now been established beyond any reasonable doubt. Improbably enough, even Batman, at the age of 60-plus, can sometimes inspire reasonably decent comics. The real question is whether 100 Bullets offers anything more than an unusually intricate riff on the familiar guns, broads and vengeance motif; and the answer, I fear, is no. Lurking behind the creators' undeniable talents is yet another comic whose horizons are defined by the introspect's holy trinity of comics, porn, and noir. The idea that the world presented in this comic has anything to do with urban America circa 1990-2000 is laughable. Its "realism" is as phony as a two-dollar steak sandwich. This is why Rucka's comparison with Chandler strikes me as off-kilter. At the risk of sounding like a hopeless scold, Chandler's crime fiction was about something more than crime fiction. It represented a conscious effort to make sense of mores and institutions at a time when individuals were expected to "choose sides." By way of contrast, we seem to be living in an age of the asocial comic, in which choosing sides is reduced to the question of good guys versus bad guys. This just happens to be one of those comics in which the good guys are a tad more interesting than usual (the bad guys are almost always interesting, of course).

The basic story-line is simple, but as I've indicated not without its complications. A highly secretive group of vengeance-seekers, the Minutemen, are locked in battle with the Trust, the obligatory nasties. The Minutemen operate outside the law, specializing in setting up victims of criminal wrongdoing with hard evidence of who did them wrong, along with a tasty firearm and one hundred untraceable bullets. The victims get to decide whether and how they are going to use the information and weaponry the Minutemen have dropped in their laps. Those who succeed in blowing the bad guy(s) away might then be approached to see if they have what it takes to join the ranks of the secret revenge society.

This basic framework allows for plenty of physically fraught confrontations and other crime genre high-jinks. As with many crime stories 100 Bullets immerses the reader in society's tawdry underbelly without actually revealing much of importance about its inner workings. Thus, we meet gamblers, strippers, drug dealers, bartenders, hitmen and barrio gang members, each of whom are intent on taking back what belongs to them. Lots of dreams go unfulfilled, and lots of people die. It took eleven issues before readers were introduced to an "ordinary" lead character, a married waitress. But this is also the issue most reminiscent of the high water mark of vengeance comics, Mike Baron's Punisher run of the late 1980s. Take aim and fire.

The glue binding these lowlifes together are Minutemen Shepherd and Graves, who are blessed with the kind of inside knowledge that suggests friends in high places. Armed with an Augustinian sense of the frailty of human nature, they troll the toughest city streets like they own the place, or want it back. Given their names you might think Shepherd ministers to the victims and Graves shoots the bad guys in the back, but in fact their roles overlap to a considerable degree. They both "clearly believe in payback," and they are eager to "settle the goddamn bill." They also seem to know how "everyone is connected." Ms. Dietrich, the comely blonde with a penchant for low-cut designer suits and gaping exit wounds, also knows something important about how this "real world" operates, but since she works for the Trust she isn't telling. Where things go from here is anyone's guess. Azzarello has obviously mapped out the larger story, but there are still plenty of secrets to be spilled along the way. How did a group like the Minutemen come into being, for example? How do Graves and Shepherd know so much? What really went down in Atlantic City? What's up with the helicopter fights over city streets? And how many issues will it take before Ms. Dietrich and her buddies get what they so richly deserve?

I will admit to actually enjoying 100 Bullets, and I will uncomplainingly keep buying issues along with the disaffected Spidey crowd. So sue me: comics that deliver that comic book fix don't grow on trees, you know. But just because I am prepared to read it on a monthly basis does not mean that I would canonize this title, or spend much time analyzing its idiographic entrails.