My planned reading material for summer vacation this year was early Conan the Barbarian stories by Robert E Howard - I like my beach material to be pulpy, sweaty, and uber-testosteroned (Just like I take my coffee). Instead, I found myself sidetracked by an old friend - the comic series 100 BULLETS, which I had started years ago, but never got around to finishing after making it halfway through.
I'm glad that I waited. Running for exactly one hundred issues between 1999 and 2009, the series teases out information in such a slow, deliberate fashion that the suspense would've probably killed me. There are also so many twists, turns, and divergent storylines that it would've been difficult for me to follow had I read it over a long period of time.
It would be giving too much away to go into great detail about the plot of the series. The setup is this: We meet Dizzy Cordova, a Chicago-based ex-gang banger, just as she's being released from prison. She still grieves over the death of husband and little boy, who were killed in a drive-by shooting while she was incarcerated. On the L home to her mother's house, she meets a mysterious man named Agent Graves. Graves informs her that despite her belief that her family was killed in retaliation by a rival gang, they were actually gunned down by two police officers. He gives her an attache case containing irrefutable evidence confirming this fact, and something else; An "untraceable" gun, and a set of one-hundred bullets. Will Dizzy use this information, and "magic" weapon, to extract vengeance? Or has she truly left her violent past behind?
The series expands much farther beyond this, as you might imagine, but continues to revolve around a series of morality tales. Tests of character, for those not so easily classified as "Good" or "Bad". We meet various characters from different cities, different ethnic backgrounds - but all sharing an interlocking culture whose very foundation is formed from theft and violence. Graves is one part Rod Serling, one part Crypt Keeper; setting stories in motion, then cooly watching the fates weave their webs.
Since comic books are a ghettoized medium, I guess it has to be said - No, you don't have to be a "comic book reader" to enjoy this series. While the story is operatically heightened, you won't find anyone flying around in a cape and tights. It's ultimately a mixture of a few different styles of writing that blend well together. You've got the social commentary, and attention to regional dialect, of a Mark Twain or Charles Dickens; the twisted criminal plots, down on their luck characters, and love of pun-filled wordplay similar to authors such as Jim Thompson, Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett; the conspiracy-filled works of authors Robert Shea, Richard Condon and Neal Stephenson; and the spy/action/adventure stories of Ian Fleming and John le Carre. It sounds like something potentially overbearing, but it turns out that there's a little something for everyone in that heady mix.
Essentially, if you like sex, violence, and rock 'n' rock, this is a series for you. Not all of the questions are answered in the end, but unlike with the show Lost, all of the important ones are, and it doesn't end up painting itself into a corner. It's that rare work of art that not only thoroughly entertains, but leaves you with a slightly different perspective on the world around you.
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