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Guns and Ammo
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100
Bullets: A Foregone Tomorrow
Brian Azzarello, Eduardo Risso
Vertigo/DC, 2002
Rating: 3.7
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Posted:
December
30, 2002
By
Kevin Forest Moreau
Out of a fairly boilerplate noir premise -- one that echoes the
vintage television drama The Millionaire -- Brian Azzarello has crafted
an intriguing epic. A man known only as Agent Graves approaches people who've
been wronged in some way and offers them the ultimate revenge: a gun, a suitcase
full of 100 untraceable bullets, and the implied assurance that the recipient
will get away with his or her revenge scot-free. This set-up would make for a
fairly solid crime-story anthology, a look at broken lives and the ultimately
empty thrill of vengeance, and indeed 100 Bullets does work on that
level. But beneath the hardcase-learns-a-lesson-of-the-week veneer lurks a
murky, compelling tale of espionage, conspiracy and territorial pissings to
rival The X-Files, The Godfather and The Tailor of Panama.
A Foregone Tomorrow, the fourth volume to collect the ongoing 100
Bullets series, delves deeper than previous volumes into the nuts and bolts
of the tangled intrigue of its players: Graves; his opposite number, Shepherd;
the Trust, a secretive conclave of families who wield great behind-the-scenes
power; the Minutemen, a now-defunct enforcement arm for the Trust, once headed
by Graves; and of course the pawns, recipients of Graves' generous offer, caught
up in a world of shadowy associations and hidden motivations.
To his credit, Azzarello doesn't fall into the trap of fleshing out his
byzantine world -- what writers of The X-Files called the "mythology" of
the series -- at the expense of the everyday characters tangled in the great
game between Graves and the Trust. In "Red Prince Blues," a hard-luck gambler
named Hank is driven by desperation, and his gravely ill wife, to take up arms
against pretty-boy Benito Medici, a scion of one of the 13 families of the
Trust, which has convened for a summit in Atlantic City, where the Minutemen
apparently met their end at the hands of the Trust. Azzarello nicely balances
the escalating intrigue surrounding the Trust -- including the murder of a
prominent seatholder, and the push-and-pull flirtation between a wary Benito and
statuesque bombshell Megan -- with Hank's plight.
The rest of A Foregone Tomorrow doesn't fare quite so well as "Red Prince
Blues": "Contrabandolero," the collection's other significant multi-issue tale,
is a serviceable if overlong introduction to Wylie, a small-town gas station
clerk who crosses paths with Shepherd and his right hand girl, Dizzy (introduced
in the series' first story arc), and who apparently has his own connection to
the Trust and whatever befell the Minutemen in Atlantic City. And a handful of
single-issue or two-part tales varies widely in quality: "Idol Chatter"
stretches credulity with a trite look at a ballplayer's involvement in the
Kennedy assassination, ostensibly as payback for the grim fate of the slugger's
movie starlet wife (any correlation to Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe is,
presumably, intentional). And "Mr. Branch and the Family Tree" commits the
grievous sin of feeding the reader lengthy, expositional backstory through
dialogue, in this instance between a talkative bit player in the unfolding saga
and a coarse Parisian prostitute.
But if A Foregone Tomorrow lacks the taut storytelling punch and
indelible character sketching that made its predecessor, Hang Up on The Hang
Low, the series' high-water mark to date, it still proves a satisfying,
multi-layered onion of a tale with considerably more depth than most comics
genre tales. And the evocative artwork of Eduardo Risso, perfectly complemented
by Patricia Mulvihill's shadowy palette, continues to shine, making 100
Bullets perhaps Vertigo's most visually distinctive offering, as well as,
arguably, the line's flagship title. Tomorrow's slight dip in
high-quality consistency doesn't seriously mar 100 Bullets' status as one
of the most engrossing, well-executed and enjoyable mainstream comics being
published today.
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