100 Bullets is an Eisner and Harvey Award-winning comic book written by Brian Azzarello and illustrated by Eduardo Risso. It is published by DC Comics under its Vertigo imprint and is slated to run for 100 issues.
Both the writing and artwork in 100 Bullets exemplifies the noir and pulp genres. It presents morally ambiguous stories with dark realism. Consistent with noir convention, most of the characters are deeply flawed.
Influenced stylistically by films such as Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs, Bryan Singer’s The Usual Suspects, Guy Ritchie’s Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Paul Thomas Anderson’s Hard Eight, and by authors like Elmore Leonard, Eddie Bunker, Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler.
The plot of 100 Bullets hinges on the question of whether people would take the chance to get away with revenge. Occasionally in a given story arc, the mysterious Agent Graves approaches someone who has been the victim of a terrible wrong, and gives them the chance to set things right in the form of a nondescript attaché case containing a handgun, 100 bullets, a photograph of a person, and irrefutable evidence that this person is primarily responsible for their woes. He informs the candidate that the bullets are completely untraceable: any police investigation that uncovers one of them will stop.
Though all of the murders enabled by Agent Graves are presented as justifiable, the candidates are neither rewarded nor punished for taking up the offer, and appear to receive nothing other than closure for their actions. Several people have declined the offer.
Agent Graves was the leader of a group known as “The Minutemen”. Although somewhat related to the civilian riflemen who fought in the American Revolution, Graves’ group were also the enforcers and assassins for the shadowy organization known as “The Trust”. The Trust was originally formed by the heads of 13 powerful European aristocratic families who made an offer to the kings of Europe to abandon the “Old World”, where they had considerable influence and holdings, in exchange for complete autonomy in the still unclaimed portion of the “New World”. When England ignored this proposition and colonized Roanoke Island late in the 16th century, the Minutemen were formed. The original Minutemen, seven vicious killers, eradicated the colony and left behind the message “Croatoa” as a warning. Since that time, the Minutemen’s charge has been to protect the 13 Trust families, partly from outside threats, but primarily from each other. They were betrayed by the Trust and disbanded after Agent Graves refused to re-enact “The Greatest Crime in the History of Mankind”. Some of the former Minutemen had their memories wiped for their protection and were living normal, if lackluster, lives at the beginning of the story.
Many of those who are offered the chance for vengeance by Graves are actually former Minutemen, or people who have been wronged by the Trust or its agents. Trusting to luck and the importance of his “experiment”, Agent Graves goes on to reactivate several former Minutemen and recruit potential new members during the course of the series, with the tentative help of the Trust’s warlord, the shady and double-dealing Mr. Shepherd.
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To download issues 84-94
UPDATED 2009-09-25
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