I’m of two minds about the DC/Vertigo title 100 BULLETS, written by Brian Azzarello, and illustrated by Eduardo Risso. On a panel by panel, page by page basis, I find this comic pretty compelling. But conceptually, I have my doubts…
The premise, at first, seems simple. People who have been screwed over in life, in one way or another, are offered a second chance. Each of them is given a briefcase with a gun and 100 bullets, “irrefutable evidence” as to the person responsible for their misfortunes, and a free pass to accomplish revenge: the bullets cannot be traced, they will not be touched by the law for killing their tormentors.
But there’s a second, and much more complicated, plot level, involving mysterious conspiracies at the highest levels of power in the USA. It’s all focused on the murky figure of Agent Graves, the man who, for unclear motives, gives people the 100 bullets and second chance. At least from reading the first and second volumes of the trade paperback collection of 100 Bullets, I have little idea where this is heading.
As I said, the comic makes for compelling reading. The illustration is state-of-the-art, with lots of jump cuts and lurid angles and play with foreground and background. The dialogue is sharp, and the stories are exciting even when they are somewhat predictable.
But I am made uneasy by the whole pretense of 100 Bullets to be gritty and naturalistic. There is something a bit canned about its tough, unsentimental portrayal of life in the ghetto, and the travails of poor and oppressed people of various colors. It seems too easy–gritty urban realism is itself a genre formula by this point, with its own cliches and conventions. I love pulp writing as much as anybody, but this seems to be a case of the authors trying to pretend that what they are doing is more (and better) than pulp–instead of acknowledging and playing with the very quality of pulpness. There’s the same implicit claim here as in much mainstream rap music as to “realness” and “authenticity”; but as with Eminem or 50 Cent, so here: there is nothing more constructed and calculated, than that which makes a claim to being truly authentic.
I also wonder about the comic’s underlying premise: its unproblematic reveling in revenge as the truest and most indubitable motive: I’ve long preferred pulp, noir, etc that has ambivalent sympathy for the bad guys, than the current sort that makes out the evildoers as being so depraved, and so devoid of any sympathetic qualities, that we just cheer self-righteously when they are blown away.
Finally, for all its self-congratulatory “realism,” 100 Bullets has much less to do with life as it is actually lived today than do overtly surreal and psychedelic comics like Alan Moore’s Promethea (which I commented on in an earlier post) or Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles and The Filth.