EXTRA // 7.18.02

UPON FURTHER REVIEW: 100 BULLETS
By Jeff Chon

When I first read 100 BULLETS, I hated it. Now I like it-Simple as that. This is my story….

I love dialogue, particularly the fast-talking David Mamet fun-lovin' criminal kind. Everybody said the dialogue in 100 BULLETS was like that, some real tough guy badness that made you want to put on a black suit and commit heinous crimes, which is why I picked it up. After reading it, all I could think was no-no-no-no-NO! Despite everyone's assertion that the street slang contained within was "da real shiznit," the dialogue just didn't seem right to me. Some of the things Dizzy and company were saying just seemed dated, and I'm not the greatest authority on inner-city hip-hop lexicon, but I was fairly certain that SOME people in the hood had the ability to speak without resorting to paragraphs upon paragraphs of G-Funk argot. Not everybody refers to money as "Chedda." Actually, nobody refers to money as "Chedda," not even Ghostface Killah. Needless to say, I stopped after the first story arc.

I was so wrong to do so. So very wrong….

We all reserve the right to change our minds, and I did so after receiving the first three 100 BULLETS trade paperbacks as a birthday gift. Yes, I get comics for my birthday. It helps my friends to not actually think about what to get me, but that's neither here nor there. What's important is that I was wrong to dismiss this comic, because, as most of you smarter than me already know, it's a damn fine piece of work.

100 BULLETS is a story of crime, punishment, and redemption. A mysterious man named Agent Graves approaches one loser after another with a seemingly simple proposition: Make things right and turn your life around. What complicates things is he gives each of the disaffected an attaché with file upon file of irrefutable proof that it was one person and one person only who sent their lives spiraling downward. Also in the attaché are a gun and 100 untraceable bullets. Kill this one person, avenge yourself, and get away with it. Hell, I dream about opportunities like this.

But these revenge missions are also a test, to see how far people are willing to go and where they draw the line. Agent Graves was once a member of a secret group known as the Minutemen, who've had their ranks mowed down in recent years by the Trust, a Bilderburger-like organization that once employed them. By handing out these bullets, Graves isn't just giving people a chance at revenge; he's slowly planting the seeds for his own revenge against the Trust, by recruiting the cream of the attaché-recipient crop.

By stopping after issue 3, I missed out on the deepening mystery of the Trust and the Minutemen, who've been pulling the strings in this country for years, and how the mysterious mishaps at Atlantic City landed Graves at square one with the Trust's crosshairs pointed at his head. I missed out on Dizzy Cordova's maturation from troubled gang-banger to introspective Minuteman. I missed out on Hang Up On the Hang Low, which reaches Lapham-esque levels in its touching portrayal of shady underworld figures.

All that good stuff missed, just because I couldn't buy the dialogue.

But it wasn't just the dialogue. The first story arc itself threw me for a loop, and not in a good way. I felt Azzarello was trying too hard to get the authentic "street" feel, to the point it came off as some kind of hip-hop opera. Every character sounded like they were at a tea party Ol' Dirty Bastard was taping for MTV CRIBS. Also, he misspelled Esse, which really bothered the Hell out of me. It may sound like a silly thing to be bothered by, but if you're going to walk the walk, then you should at least spell the spell.

As you can see, there were a few prejudicial things in my initial reading of the first story arc, but not necessarily in the way people have criticized Azzarello for CAGE. I don't mind hip-hop influenced fare, it's just that I want a little more balance. At the time, I felt that not everybody needed to talk in the "What up, G-Money-Frankenstein-Money-Grip" patois of Str8-up gangstadom. For that reason, Azzarello's portrayal of Chicago Latinos seemed a bit artificial to me, but I'll get to how I got past that later.

What I didn't realize was that Azzarello was planting the seeds for something huge, that I didn't really give him a chance to let his vision completely unfold. The story wasn't horrible; I was just being narrow-minded because he was white. Yes, I admit it. A lot of what bothered me was that Brian Azzarello was a white guy writing a story inner city life.

Was he wrong to do so? Absolutely not. The earnestness was there from the start and I just refused to see it. He was working his way through various crime archetypes, such as "hard-boiled crime reporter who gets too close to the truth" or "amnesiac assassin slowly regaining memory," and urban revenge just happened to be the first one out of the gate. Would I have acted this way if something like SHORT CON, LONG ODDS was the first arc and then followed by the arc I refused to accept? Sadly, I don't think I would have. I was somewhat relieved when I read Howard Chaykin's forward to the second trade, where he admits he initially didn't care for it either; but that doesn't change the fact that I didn't really give it much of a chance. It was the first time I felt like writing a letter of apology to a writer.

I've come to realize that first issues/first story arcs should be treated more like television pilots. They're there for the creators to work out their kinks. Test-runs, if you will. That's not a bad thing. Most television pilots, even for great shows, are crap compared to the rest of their run. The first story arcs for SANDMAN and TRANSMETROPOLITAN weren't the strongest their respective series had to offer, either in retrospect. But there was something there that kept me coming back on both of those titles. It was there for 100 BULLETS, too. I don't even remember why I stopped reading it, just that I'd convinced myself that it wasn't good in order to waste money on stuff that I'd end up throwing away, or trading in for store credit.

This comic is very remiscent of SANDMAN to me. They're constructed very similarly, anyway, if not in subject-matter. I seriously doubt we'll see Mister Shepherd making his raspberry-filled chocolate men "squidge," or anything like that; it's just everything in this series is meant to drive the series along, while making sure to not lose readers with overly convoluted subplots. As a matter of fact, I'd say this is the closest Vertigo has come to matching SANDMAN in terms of scope, structure and soul.

Azzarello gives us tales of various protagonists being guided through their journeys by a mysterious self-serving man in black, who is neither friend nor foe, but a seemingly omniscient being who brings up more questions than answers. Hmmm… Now why would I compare this book to SANDMAN?

This book is all about mystery and romance and one of the more accessible books out there. The storytelling is very easy to follow, the action, riveting, and the art is breath-takingly cool. I'd actually lent the trades to a few friends and all of them raved about it. The best response being, "Wow. I didn't know comics were like this." Even better is that one of them went out and bought the fourth volume, A FOREGONE TOMORROW, because she had to know what happened next.

I can't help but feeling that if we pushed books like 100 BULLETS on to younger readers, comics may have a wider following they're always pining for. There's a real "I just discovered THE KILLER" kind of joy to reading it, and the youngsters love that feeling. I'm not saying Azzarello's a John Woo newbie; I'm saying there's a real kinetic thrill to the Eduardo Risso's art and Azzarello's soulful morality plays stick in your guts, kind of like when I first saw THE KILLER. This comic is cool, smart, and fun, just what we need more of in this stupid business.

As good as Azzarello is, artist Risso matches him word for word with stunning visuals that are brutal, eloquent, and sexy all at once. The graphic intensity of his images is the anabolic juice that pumps through the script's filthy veins. He understands the rhythm of violence and the nature of shadows, and that can only embolden Azzarello to tell the kind of stories he wants to tell. There are no throwaway transitional panels in his work. Everything leads to the next panel in a way that legitimizes the notion of comics being "paper movies." If Azzarello's the writer-director of this piece, Risso's his cinematographer, giving the author's vision crisp coherence and unmistakable beauty.

And I've now come to appreciate the dialogue. The dialogue is stylized, just like everything else in 100 BULLETS. It's Azzarello dreamspeak, the way people talk in his idealized reality. It doesn't have to be real. That's why they call it fiction. Sometimes, dialogue isn't about how we really talk, but how we wish we could talk. Nobody really talks like Kevin Smith or Whit Stillman characters, either.

I remember an old teacher once telling me that a novel doesn't really get going until about 100 pages in, so I should give the author at least 100 pages to win me over. Having finally given Azzarello his 100 pages, I have to say 100 BULLETS is a great example of comics' boundless potential as a story-telling medium.

The Hell with pushing MAUS or AMERICAN SPLENDOR or ACME NOVELTY LIBRARY; those don't have the wide-ranging appeal of a book like 100 BULLETS. Not to say those books are bad representatives of what comics can do, but if you want to ease someone into becoming an avid reader of literature, you're going to push something like LORD OF THE FLIES or THE GREAT GATSBY rather than giving them FINNEGAN'S WAKE right off the bat. If we really want comics to gain mainstream acceptance, or actually believe that they can for that matter, then it would make more sense to push something with a little more mainstream appeal like 100 BULLETS onto prospective converts.

After all, it converted me, didn't it?