Stray Bullets

Before there was 100 BULLETS, there was STRAY BULLETS.

I know, that sounds a little off grammatically, doesn’t it? But it makes sense if you know that I’m talking about two different comic book series. I just read the trade paperback reprinting the first four issues of STRAY BULLETS, written and illustrated by David Lapham, who also self-published them under the El Capitan imprint. These stories of low-level crime, graphic violence, loneliness, and loss were first published several years before Brian Azzarello’s epic underworld series 100 BULLETS made its debut. STRAY BULLETS doesn’t have the scope of Azzarello’s work, at least not in these issues, but it has its own mythic qualities. The stories, mostly set in Baltimore, jump back and forth in time and revolve around a group of unlucky losers whose lives are touched in one way or another by a mysterious, unseen criminal known as Harry. The dialogue has a lot of street-level realism, and the black-and-white art, reminiscent of Frank Miller’s work on SIN CITY but not nearly as stark and stylized, is very effective. This is fine stuff. Now I have to go out and find the rest of the books in the series.