Brian Azzarello and Eduardo Risso's '100 Bullets' embodies the true sense of Noir and Pulp Fiction

An old man walks up to you - it doesn’t matter where, possibly on the train, a dive bar, a basketball court, maybe even your home - and offers you a chance to set things right, to get payback for the one thing that went wrong in your life, to punish the person responsible. Your tools for your mission, should you choose to accept it: an attache case, with a gun and 100 Bullets, conclusive, irrefutable proof of what happened, and total immunity against any criminal prosecution. And then, the 100-projectile question: what would you do?

Hard-boiled noir was not a genre explored with any seriousness in the 90's. Even the earlier ventures, until Frank Miller’s unapologetically hard-boiled Sin City, tended to the caricature rather than the grim realism that spilled from Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler’s fiction. Even as publishers such as Vertigo, Wildstorm and Image Comics explored the darker alleyways of the medium, it wasn’t until 1998’s 4-part mini-series Jonny Double that the stage was set for a definitive comic noir series. This mini-series took a little-known DC Universe character and tossed him into a dark and bloody caper involving Al Capone’s money. More importantly, it brought together a little-known American writer called Brian Azzarello and an equally little-known Argentinian artist called Eduardo Risso.

100 Bullets begins in deceptively episodic fashion, each issue following a recipient of a briefcase from the ominously-named Agent Graves. Dizzy Cordova, the first "beneficiary" (that we see - the series implies that there have been several in the past), is in a bad place, coming to terms with life after the murders of her baby son and gang-leader husband. Lee Dolan, a bartender and a drunk, is shown the person who falsely framed him as a child pornographer. A police officer on Christmas duty and a meta-narrative about Graves and his briefcase. All through these opening stories, Azzarello and Risso plant a series of "Chekhov’s gun" elements that tie into the larger narrative of power, corruption and retribution, one that takes readers all the way back to the foundation of America, a legend of a lost British colony, and a mysterious word.

Azzarello’s characters are a quintessential modern upstairs-downstairs combo, drawn from the dirty, drug- and death-ridden streets of inner city America and from large gated estates of the extraordinarily wealthy and privileged. The latter group is the Trust, a centuries-old consortium formed of thirteen families that established and rules the country from the shadows, with the help of seven Minutemen, brutal, clinical and merciless enforcers of the Trust’s rules and charter. As the Trust’s allegiances toward each other shifts, events are set into motion which place the Minutemen at odds with the Trust, leading to a mysterious assassination in Atlantic City, after which the team is deactivated until just before the series begins.

Azzarello and Risso do an exquisite tango with the words and images, all the more stunningbecause they never met in person until late into the series’ run. Risso’s art hides an immense amount of detail in flat, deceptively simple panels, using chiaroscuro and exaggerated detailing to chilling effect, like disembodied eyes and grinning chipped-toothed mouths in black fields, to amplify impending brutality. The use of bigfoot art and hard, angular lines, reminiscent of Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns, puts the violence front and centre, never backing away from making the reader hurt from what physical damage is being caused on the page. In one devastating panel, Risso frames Megan Dietrich in the hole she has just blown in Lee Dolan’s head, the bloody bits of brain radiating outward adding a gory, yet compelling detail.

The bulk of the characters who inhabit 100 Bullets are unsavoury, drawn from the parts of society which most people who don’t inhabit them pretend don’t exist. And they speak in a juicy, rude patois that borders on self-caricature and revels in its profanity. They are crude, scatological, misogynistic, and still manage to find pockets of sensitivity and tenderness hidden away. The women of 100 Bullets are hyper-sexualized, very much in line with the "traditional" portrayal of women in comics, and are often at the receiving end of highly sexist language, a burden the series will never truly set down. Two women, however, are as critical to the series and its events as any of the men - Dizzy Cordova, with whom the series begins and ends, and Megan Dietrich, heiress to one of the Trust’s families.

In many ways, these women represent the two extremes from which the two dominant narratives of 100 Bullets converge. From an ex-con in mourning to freshly-minted Minuteman and beyond, Dizzy is the character who leaves behind her origins and looks to reinvent herself, with the help of Graves and the enigmatic Mr. Shepherd. Megan Dietrich, on the other hand, is the new head of the Dietrich family, using all her considerable resources to hold on to her position and interests while the Trust heads into turmoil. Her allegiances are those of convenience and necessity, as much as Dizzy’s come from a fierce loyalty to Shepherd.

Right through 100 Bullets, characters both minor and major are placed in situations that challenge their strength of body and or character. They are rarely moral, and will readily shoot their way out of a sticky situation, but they display, on the rare occasion, a capacity to care and to love, a dichotomy that the series creators play up with pitch-perfect timing right through the series. While Cole Burns has to assassinate his girlfriend because she, a Trust family heiress, broke the rules, Wylie Times must euthanise a gifted trumpet player whose jaw was snapped off by a bear trap. The latter arc, titled Wylie Runs the Voodoo Down (Issues 51-54), is probably the most heartbreaking story in a series full of betrayal, despair and tragedy.

Between 1999 and 2009, 100 Bullets stood out as a highlight in the comic book universe, a body of work that was completely unique in its subject, tone and presentation that it launched its creators into the upper echelons of the industry. A clutch of Eisner and Harvey awards later, Azzarello was given "the keys to both cars in the garage, the Maserati and the Ferrari", when he took over writing duties for a run on both Superman and Batman (look up his Batman collab with Risso, Joker), and then, more recently, Before Watchmen, featuring the Comedian and Rorschach.

One of the aforementioned clutch of awards belongs to Dave Johnson, who drew the covers to all 100 issues, 13 trade paperbacks, 5 deluxe edition omnibus collections, and the 8 issues of the sequel miniseries, Brother Lono. Johnson’s cover art morphs itself to match the story within, adapting through style and composition to match Azzarello’s verbal gymnastics with his own. It probably seems fitting, then, that Johnson should have the final word (at least for now) on the series, through this montage composed of the five covers to the 100 Bullets Deluxe Edition.