[This piece originally appeared at comiXology in 2009.]
Like a lot of people who read comic books in my age bracket--the one that no longer attracts the top ad rates on prime-time televison--I took a break for a while. I doubt my reasons were that much different than my fellows--wine, woman and song came a-calling, and money spent on Batman became money better spent on trying to make myself look presentable enough that I might find myself in hay, rolling.
When I returned to comics, bitter and jaded at the realization that love and adulthood were nothing like the film Real Genius, that no one thought it was charming and cute to be a cheeky car thief with a penchant for buggery, I brought my bad attitude with me.
"What's this," I scowled. "Gotham City had an earthquake? Lex Luthor was President? Vibe's still dead? LAME."
At least, that's what I remember it being like. I was also using economy sized bottles of horse shampoo as body wash at the time. (Those early 20's were a dark period!) One thing that had changed, however, was that I really didn't care what I was in the comics shop for anymore. Not that I wasn't there for comics, obviously, I was there for that--I just didn't really care what they were about, or who wrote them, or whether they were about Wolverine eating live babies or some random sketchbooks by Robert Crumb where he depicts every person he sees as if they are about to stab themselves in their eyes. (In a way, those two examples are the exact same thing, but let's stay focused.)
I just felt like reading comics again. I felt it so much that I just went to random stores, none of which were anywhere near where I lived at the time, because I was living in an actual cabin, in the actual woods, just like the Unabomber, except that I spent most of my time watching Michael Mann movies instead of constructing bombs and penning manifestos. One of the comics I randomly picked up at that time, purely on the basis of the cover, was 100 Bullets #8.
The red and white jumped out at me from where it sat on the bottom row with all the other new releases that were no longer technically new but not old enough to be considered back issues. In retrospect, knowing what I know now, and seeing what I've seen, 100 Bullets #8 isn't even in the top twenty of Dave Johnson's excellent covers for the series. (Not that it's a bad cover or anything. I like comics that reference old pulp stuff the way this one does. It's just that Johnson pulled off some really amazing covers later on down the line, and this one lands in the middle.)
By dint of not really caring whether I had a full run of the title, but liking it enough to keep my eyes open, I ended up with a complete "thus far" run of the title after one crazy summer that included an annulment and a drunken adoption that ended up really upsetting the government of Marrakech. I'd been reading the issues I found in fits and starts, not even attempting to figure things out, just enjoying it, the way these two creators just played around with language and violence, the way they toyed with the concept of arcs while stealthily building an epic in the background.
I didn't pay any attention to the comics internet at the time, so I had no idea who writer Brian Azzarello was, I didn't know that Eduardo Risso lived in South America and had scripts mailed to him. I doubt I would have cared much anyway. Now that I have to be on a computer all the time, I have developed a sort of masochistic interest in the backgrounds of the sausage factory, and while it doesn't help me enjoy a bad comic to know that the writer did a lot of research about pointless side nonsense, it does refine my disgust in an entertaining fashion.
It only vaguely helps with a good comic too--artists and writers are usually second only to painters in their inability to discuss their own work without spouting off a bunch of ridiculous garbage, the art crit equivalent of blaming a bad mood at work on a forgotten magnetic bracelet and ley lines. (Which is why I appreciate that interviews with Azzarello occasionally deteriorate into him talking about his favorite sports teams and his most recent grilling experience.) Most of the time, interviews with comics creators end up behaving like the trivia section in wikipedia entries for big budget movies. My feelings for Predator (pure white hot love) don't change in the slightest knowing that some of the Jean Claude Van Damme footage was left in, I just like being able to nod furiously to whomever is in my vicinity whenever those scenes appear. "See! He's the short one!"
100 Bullets shouldn't, in my case, be proclaimed the main reason I started using Google to take a look at comic book websites, but it was a pretty integral part. See, I'd never been much of one for community, but the more I read about Agent Graves and his Minutemen, the more slowly I discovered parcels and pieces of the history of the Trust, the times I stared wide-eyed at the panels of the comic Risso saw fit to brand with his iconographic signature box--I started realizing that this was a comic I really did want to know more about. Not that I wanted to "talk about it"--you can do that on message boards with anything, as long as you don't mind rubbing yourself in the sewer of people who compare Brian Singer's Superman to Nazi war crimes in the cold light of sobriety, without an ounce of self-awareness.
I just wanted to find that somebody I knew was out there, the somebody who was smarter than me, who was opening up all the hidden passages of the narrative that I'd yet to discover. I wanted to find that part of the world where there was a group of people who were just as startled as I was when a character in the series, a character that seemed so important ended up dead. I wanted, honestly, not to do this one on my own anymore.
For better or worse, 100 Bullets was the only comic I felt that way about--in a way, it still kind of is, Grant Morrison be damned. I've read comics during the period I've kept up with Brian Azzarello and Eduardo Risso that certainly stand as "better", if you're determining that word solely on aesthetic constraints and assignments of intent. But I have to say, there hasn't been one that I've looked forward to as consistently as I have this one. I've read 99 issues of this series so far, and I can tell you for sure: I've yet to finish one without hankering for more.
The series ends today. 100 issues, all by the same writer and artist. It's been a hell of a ride. And, like my mother used to say to me every time I left for school, a wee lad in short pants: I hate to see you go.
But I love to watch you leave.
-Tucker Stone, 2009
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