100 Bullets

100 Bullets written by Brian Azzarello and illustrated by Eddie Russo.

I had heard a lot about this series as it was going on but I never got around to reading all 100 issues of it, until now, thank you the public library.  It took about three weeks but I finally got all the issues read and what a great series it turned out to be.  It more than lived up to all hype I'd read about.  I've got admit I'm always skeptical when things get this blown out of proportion, especially when it comes to comics books, because comic readers and die hard comic fans are some of the most gullible and forgiving people on the earth.  But this series was flat out awesome, well worth the read, and more than lived up to the hype I'd read about.

Azzarello essentially dabbled in a level of world building I don't normally see in comics and he more than succeeded.  His world is full of characters of all sorts and gives them a past, a present, and a future that lived up everything he was building on since the start of issue 1.  Comic don't normally have this level of detail or world building, only a few writers have done what Azzarello did with this series.  It's one of the few comics that felt like a TV series as I was reading, such was the pacing, editing, and storytelling ability found within the pages.  Characters felt real and the world Azzarello built around them was gripping, secret, full of double crosses, triple crosses, and quadruple crosses but none of them ever felt gimmicky.  Everything fit together like a well constructed puzzle and by the last issue, even though there were still things left unexplained, I felt satisfied by everything that had at least been explained so far.  There weren't too many strings left dangled.

This is a violent story with a body count in the hundreds and deals with secret societies, criminals, hit men/women, and blood, lots of blood.  The dialogue flowed with an intimacy that completely helped to draw me into the world being built around the characters.  I loved how certain characters would be in the background or seem just part of the story for a section and then later on they would return, which caused me to look back through past issues so I could remember where I'd seen that character before.  Azzarello had the details of this story down pat and built everything subtly until the grand finale that more than lived up to everything he had built before.  This is a series that is dying to be made into a TV series and would look great on HBO.