The Secret of the Wednesday’s Haul

When the calm before the storm contains a family systematically killed, an unrepentant murderer getting a last minute reprieve from death, a baby cut out of its mothers womb and the recruitment of a trained killer, can you really have any hope of surviving the oncoming storm?

Brian Azzarello and Eduardo Risso have spent the last the last 10 years creating a complex game of cat and mouse in comic form.  The only problem is that at times it’s hard to tell which characters are the cats and which ones are the mice.  Whenever he’s featured, Agent Graves is obviously the cat, playing with all of the other characters but in this latest volume Dirty, Graves is in the background most of the time, rarely seen.  And yet his precense hangs over the entire book as powerful men fear him, strong men want to challenge him and weak men do everything they can to avoid his long reach or being on the receiving end of one of his untraceable bullets.

In fact, Dirty offers a bit of a break in the overall storyarc.  The last couple of volumes have focused on the larger picture, as three factions (the Trust, Graves and Lono’s renegade Minutemen) all worked to strengthen their hold on their power.  100 Bullets is mostly about power and about the people who don’t have it.  Dirty continues that running theme but does it mostly through smaller, more personal tales.

Sometimes you need a roadmap to follow the various allegiances in 100 Bullets but by now all the allegiances are set and this book doesn’t waste too much time questioning anyone’s loyalties.  Everyone’s established and by now we now who’s faithful to who.  The question now has to be who makes the first move and when does it all fall apart for everyone else.  What this book does give us is a view at how these characters influence and destroy the world around them.  There are no innocents in the world of 100 Bullets, just people to be made examples of.

This has been happening since the first issue, when Izzy returned to Chicago from jail.  Her husband and daughter had already been killed and that only helped to drag Izzy into Grave’s circle of influence.  We could already see the game getting set up and the world around the characters being made into sacrifices by people with no morals.  In this volume, we see that no one is safe as Sigmar Rhone a head of one of the families of the Trust, pays the ultimate price for his part in the games and plots of powerful and untouchable men.  In fact, Rhone had to think that he was part of the game and therefore untouchable.  He was rich, powerful and ultimately, as vulnerable as a poor gangster girl’s family once was.  With just four bullets, Rhone is taught just how weak and inconsequential he really is before a fifth bullet just proves it.  The rest of the tales in Dirty continue to show how the Trust and Agent Graves’ war suck relatively innocent people up and spit them out, used and discarded as part of the cost of war.

One thing that’s always struck me about 100 Bullets that no one ever seems to talk about is just how smooth and easy the storytelling is.  Azzarello and Risso long ago settled into a smooth groove on this book, making everything look extremely easy and alluring.  No matter how ugly or brutal the world of 100 Bullets is, there’s a smoothness to the storytelling that sweeps the reader up and helps propel them through the book.  Part of it is Azzarello’s tough yet synchopated dialogue which helps maintain the rhythm of the book.  Another part of it is Risso’s strong and ever-present shadows which reveal just enough of the story, not too much and not too little.  The near-perfect blending of art and dialogue create

100 Bullets: Dirty is a break in the over-arching action of the series but not a break in the action.  In this volume, Azzarello and Risso concentrate on the vanity, the conceit and the confidence of all the characters.  Everyone is convinced that they have the power and that, in the end, they’ll be the ones left standing.  This book shows that even the men who look like the most powerful are only strong until a bullet comes looking for them.  And if you’ve been reading this series for a while, who’s the one handing out the bullets?  I wonder if that’s any kind of indication of who really has the power in this series?

100 Bullets: Dirty
Written by: Brian Azzarello
Drawn by: Eduardo Risso
Colored by: Patricia Mulvihill
Lettered by: Clem Robins