Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #567923 in Books
• Published on: 2009-07-08
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 304 pages

Customer Reviews

Graves never lies.
At volume 9 I realised 100 Bullets was no longer satisfying me as an episodic read, so I sat it out until the series concluded. I got volume 13 last week and started re-reading the whole run in one go.

There are some problems. I still don't think Azzarello and Risso realised at the beginning that this whole thing was going to run to an epic 100 book arc. So, we've got 13 families, 7 Minutemen, agents, warlords, wildcards, bit players... I'm sure Azzarello initially thought these would be interesting background colour, or a potential pool of characters to dip into if things were lagging, not that he'd have to introduce, realise and pursue stories for all of them. So, there are dips, there is 'off-screen' downtime, the tone is occasionally uneven. The much-lauded dialogue does sometimes clang. There is some misogyny. There's the late introduction of characters D'Arcy, Slaughter and Rothstein which seems a bit contrived and rushed. There's Echo and the painting that seems tacked on. But, my overriding impression, having completed the whole thing, is of admiration and satisfaction. The comic looks great, Risso is superb, and it's a real bonus having a single knockout artist for such a long series, it really helps the feel and the flow and the cohesion of the whole thing.

Some of the segues and narrative tangents are obviously there to illuminate or colour pre-existing themes or motifs or to provide foreshadowing for forthcoming threads. By about volume 10 I realised that there was no point in trying to second-guess motives or even attempting to keep any sort of track of where allegiances lay or who was on whose side. This was double-, triple-, quadruple-... whatever-cross. Trust no one. Except Graves. Graves never lies. Some big players go down at unexpected times and the whole thing barrels along to a frenetic, bloody conclusion. There are a handful of unexpected survivors.

I'd say read it. Definitely. It's like The Wire but for comics.

[Incidentally, the Amazon Product Description contains a review from the New York Times Style Magazine, which reads "An ink-dark crime series about consequence-free revenge." They're right about the inky darkness, but 'consequence-free revenge'? Hardly. Quite the opposite, in fact. One of the central themes of 100 Bullets is that we can't escape from the consequences of our moral choices.]