Tucker spoke highly of 100 Bullets in this interview, and I’ve heard good things about it in other places, so I thought I’d give it a, er, shot.

I was pretty disappointed, though. In the first place, Eduardo Risso’s art is lousy. The figures are stiff, the anatomy is shaky, the layouts are cluttered and confusing, and the coloring (by Grant Goleash) is more muddy than moody. If you’re going for stylish noir, it’s really important that the art be…well, stylish. You want Alex Toth or Howard Chaykin; bold blacks and whites, dramatic page design — the art should scream sex and danger and class. Risso just doesn’t have the chops. I mean, look at that page below. [Update: Johnny B in comments notes that the cover below is not by Risso (who I still don’t like), but rather by Dave Johnson (who,apparently, I like even less.)]

What is wrong with that woman’s neck? Is this supposed to be a Parmigianino tribute or something? And the proportions are all completely off; her legs are lengthened to make her look sexier, I guess, but it ends up looking like she’s been assembled from mis-matched doll parts. And the ugly red insets segmented up almost at random…what the hell? That’s not dramatic: it just looks dumb. (I’d apologize for the book code stuck in there by my bookseller, but it actually seems like a reasonable aesthetic choice, given the context. Certainly it doesn’t drag the image down in any way.)

I wish I could say I liked Brian Azzarello’s writing better. Some of the dialogue is okay (the yuppie bar-crawler who smugly boasts about his trust-fund-greased-life is pretty funny.) But the plot is lame. For those not in the know, each story is sparked by a guy named Graves, who gives some lucky hard-luck case a gun and 100 untraceable bullets with which he/she can get revenge on some evildoer in his/her past. So Graves is like Michael Landon’s cranky cousin, basically. The whole thing seems like some gimmicky sit-com, and the episodic nature makes it hard to create the slow build of inevitable doom and corruption which haunts the best noir.

I don’t know…maybe things improve later in the series, but after one volume this really seems sub-Sin City as far as comic pulp goes. And that’s not a good thing.

Update: I force Newsarama [Update: not newsarama; but Heidi at the Beat; see comments for suitable snark from Heidi) to eat their words re:not whining about criticism. They’re especially dismissive because I didn’t instantly see the difference between Risso and Johnson. Fair enough, I guess…though the funny thing is that I did see the difference — I knew the cover was an especially poor effort, even though I didn’t instantly identify it as by a different artist. So is it really a failure of connoisseurship? Or is it a failure of geek knowledge? You make the call….

Incidentally, the page of Risso art Newsarama the Beat uses seems definitely better than the stuff in the first 100 bullets trade.

Using a simple grid is a big help — not that I”m a huge fan of grids, but when you can’t lay out a page to save your life, simple is often better. Black and white helps too, given the indifferent coloring in 100 bullets. The page doesn’t make my heart sing, exactly — I’ve been looking at Arthur Rackham silhouette work recently, which has maybe spoiled me for Risso’s take on black outlines. But, in any case, if 100 bullets looked like this page, I’d be much more inclined to buy the next couple of trades.

Update: A follow up post is here.

Update: And Chris Mautner weighs in at Newsarama; and I post about my related flame-war with Mark Waid here.

I talked about David Heatley’s “My Sexual History” in my Comixology column posted last week. The strip was reprinted in David’s new book, My Brain is Hanging Upside Down. However, David has placed little pink boxes over all the naughty bits. He explains that:

“I was getting fan mail from a couple twentysomething boys, saying, ‘Oh, your strip gave me a boner,’ and I thought, This isn’t what I had in mind. It’s really about longing and bad sex and lack of connection.” The bleep-outs “almost draw attention to it, but it’s like another layer of the narrative—me kind of covering up a little bit before publication.”

I was reading a thread on the TCJ message board where folks were discussing the pros and cons of this; the consensus seemed to be by censoring himself David was betraying his art, or at least undermining it (the word “douchebag” occurs with some frequency.)

To me, though, it seems like the self-censorship is of a piece with the tenor of the strip in general. As I said in my column, to me “My Sexual History” is distinguished by its solipsism; it’s resolute refusal to acknowledge the existence of other people as something other than bodies which exist for the pleasure of the narrator. Though it purports to be about confession and revelation, the comic seems much more about concealment — swallowing others in the shadow of one’s own ego, and thereby, in fact, hiding oneself, since most of what is important about our inner lives, after all, involves relationships to other people.

Given that, it makes sense that David would be made uncomfortable by the discovery that his readers had an emotional investment in the work, of any kind. The strip’s prurient interest seems fairly obvious — unless, of course, the whole point of the exercise was to avoid having to think about other people at all. David’s not defacing his own work so much as he’s trying to erase his readers, much as the comic itself erases, for all practical purposes, his sexual partners. Slapping pink blotches all over your drawing isn’t pretty, but if you’re goal is to create art without faith or love, a little ugliness here and there isn’t going to stop you.

************

And extra bonus link: some images from David’s little-known anthology, The New Graphics Revival, which I also discuss in that Comixology column.

TCJ #293 is (more or less) out. I’ve got a couple of long reviews (of Alan Moore’s Wildstorm comics and Hideo Azuma’s Disappearance Diary) and a couple of short reviews (of the shojo title Nightmares for Sale and Kyle Baker’s Nat Turner. I believe that’s a four-for-four negative review ration there, so check it out if snark is what you want.

Also, and more productively, HU’s own Tom Crippen has a lengthy interview with Alex Robinson. So go forth and purchase, or at least browse in a store near you. (And TCJ is now available in at least some bookstores, for those of you who don’t want to darken the Direct Market’s door….)

Just so regular hooded fans don’t get worried, Tom’s got some real life stuff to take care of, and won’t be around for a month or so. So you’re stuck with just me again for a while.

I’ve got a new column up at Comixology about David Heatley. One of the books I talk about is a little known anthology he edited (and which I participated in.) Comixology has a couple images from that book, but I thought I’d add a few more here for those who are interested:

by and ©Patrick Dunne

by and ©Michael Heatley

by and ©Juan Eclarinal

by and ©Donei Ebenezer