Review: 100 Bullets Vol. 5 – The Counterfeit Detective

Posted on September 23, 2026 by Arleigh

“You don’t need a face to know who you are.” — Agent Graves

With The Counterfifth Detective, Brian Azzarello and Eduardo Risso pull 100 Bullets back toward the kind of hard-boiled detective story its title and visual style have been flirting with since the beginning. The series has spent four volumes building from Agent Graves’s deceptively simple revenge offer into a much wider conspiracy involving the Trust, the Minutemen, and a long list of people carrying old grudges, hidden loyalties, and enough baggage to sink a city block. This fifth collection does not exactly slow that larger story down, but it does give it a tighter, more focused mystery to work through.

The central character is Milo Garret, a Los Angeles private investigator who wakes up in a hospital after what appears to have been a very bad car accident. His face is wrapped in bandages, his memories are incomplete, and his life has somehow become even more miserable than the average 100 Bullets protagonist’s. Naturally, Agent Graves shows up at exactly the moment when Milo is vulnerable, angry, and looking for somebody to blame. Graves gives him the familiar attaché case containing a gun, proof, and one hundred untraceable bullets, then suggests that Milo’s accident may not have been accidental at all.

That setup brings the series back to its original premise, but there is an important difference this time. Milo is not merely an ordinary person presented with a chance to kill the person who ruined his life. He is a detective, or at least he very badly wants to be the kind of detective he has seen in old movies and read about in pulp novels. He drinks too much, gets knocked around constantly, talks like somebody trying to turn every conversation into a Bogart monologue, and keeps walking into dangerous situations because it is what he thinks a real private eye is supposed to do. It would be easy for that to become irritating, but Azzarello makes Milo’s self-conscious noir act part of what makes him interesting.

Milo is clearly performing an identity, even before the story begins questioning whether he really understands his own past. He treats the hard-drinking, wisecracking private detective routine like armor. With his face literally hidden beneath layers of bandages, he has even more reason to cling to the image of who he believes he is. That gives The Counterfifth Detective a stranger and more personal angle than the earlier revenge stories. Milo is not just trying to find out who hurt him. He is trying to find out what he has forgotten, why so many people seem to know more about him than he does, and whether the version of himself he believes in has ever been real.

The title itself is one of those Azzarello word games that sounds like nonsense until the book starts circling around identity, forgery, and false versions of the truth. Milo gets drawn into the search for a stolen painting, but the painting is not simply a MacGuffin to move the plot along. It becomes tied to memory, deception, and the larger secrets that have been buried around the Trust and the Minutemen. Like much of 100 Bullets, the plot does not always hand the reader clean explanations right away. People speak in half-truths, conversations seem to skip over the most important details, and every time Milo gets what looks like an answer, it creates two more questions.

That can make the volume feel deliberately tangled. Azzarello is not writing a traditional detective mystery where every clue fits neatly into place by the final chapter. This is a conspiracy story told from the point of view of a man who has been dropped into the middle of it with a damaged memory and a gun in his hand. Milo is confused because he should be confused. The reader is meant to feel that same instability as the people around him lie, betray each other, disappear, get beaten up, or turn up dead before they can explain what they know.

At the same time, this is one of the more accessible volumes since the early days of the series because Milo gives the story a strong point of view. A Foregone Tomorrow was important for expanding the scope of the Trust and making the Minutemen feel like a real part of the series rather than vague backstory, but it was also intentionally scattered. The Counterfifth Detective still feeds the larger mythology, yet it is built around one man trying to survive one increasingly ugly case. The result feels more focused, even when the actual plot becomes more complicated.

Agent Graves is especially effective here because his role has changed so much from the early volumes. He still presents himself as a man offering someone the tools to take revenge, but it is impossible to see him as a neutral facilitator anymore. Graves knows far more about Milo than Milo does. He is not just giving the detective a choice; he is guiding him toward a confrontation that has clear value in Graves’s wider war against the Trust. The attaché case remains a powerful symbol because it looks like freedom. It promises immunity, a weapon, and a chance to settle the score. But in this series, the case is never really freedom. It is an invitation into Graves’s game.

The presence of Lono also helps give the story some extra menace. Lono is one of the series’ most unnerving characters because he is not merely violent; he seems to enjoy making everybody else feel smaller, dirtier, and more helpless. Whenever he appears, the atmosphere immediately gets worse. He brings a kind of ugly unpredictability that contrasts nicely with Graves’s calm manipulation. Graves always seems like he has calculated the next ten moves. Lono feels like he might wreck the board just to hear the pieces crack.

Risso’s artwork continues to carry an enormous amount of the book’s personality. The bandaged Milo is a great visual creation because he looks both mysterious and ridiculous, like a cheap horror-movie monster trying to pass himself off as a tough guy. Risso finds the humor in that image without undercutting the danger around it. He is also excellent at making Los Angeles feel appropriately worn down and hostile. The city is not glamorous here. It is a place of cheap offices, dim bars, empty roads, battered cars, suspicious hotel rooms, and people who look like they have been awake for three days making terrible decisions.

His use of shadow remains one of the series’ biggest strengths. A room can be almost empty and still feel tense because of the angle of a lamp, the silhouette of somebody standing in a doorway, or the way a character’s face is half-covered by darkness. That visual approach suits a story about missing memories and hidden identities perfectly. Risso rarely needs to make a big flashy gesture to sell danger. Sometimes all it takes is someone sitting too calmly in the wrong place.

Azzarello’s dialogue is still sharp, vulgar, and often very funny in a nasty way. Not every line lands, and the characters can sometimes sound like they are competing to be the most quotable person in the room, but that heightened style has become part of the book’s identity. These are people who use tough talk as a weapon. They insult, threaten, flirt, and lie in the same breath because direct honesty would make them too vulnerable.

100 Bullets Vol. 5: The Counterfifth Detective is a strong installment because it combines the series’ expanding conspiracy with a satisfying noir setup. Milo Garret is not as immediately sympathetic as Dizzy Cordova or as tragically lost as Loop Hughes, but he is a memorable lead precisely because he is such an imperfect version of a classic private eye. He wants answers, revenge, and a sense of control, but the deeper he goes, the clearer it becomes that he may be chasing a life that was invented for him by somebody else.

This is not the cleanest or easiest 100 Bullets volume, and readers looking for every mystery to be fully explained may come away frustrated. But it is stylish, mean, funny, and packed with the kind of uneasy connections that make the larger series addictive. Azzarello keeps tightening the web around Agent Graves, the Trust, and the surviving Minutemen, while Risso makes every page look like it was pulled from the darkest corner of a crime film. By the end, Milo may have found some answers, but like everybody who accepts Graves’s offer, he has paid far more for them than he ever expected.

100 Bullets Volume Reviews

Hellboy: Seed of Destruction (by Mike Mignola) Review

Posted on September 17, 2026 by Arleigh

“Imagine the good this boy could do. I know what he is, what he might grow into, maybe even what he’s meant to be. But I also see what he can be. He just needs a little guidance and someone to set a proper example.” — Trevor Bruttenholm

Mike Mignola’s Hellboy: Seed of Destruction is more than the opening chapter of a popular comic-book universe. It is a foundational work of supernatural adventure, combining pulpy monster fiction, wartime conspiracy, Gothic imagery, Lovecraftian apocalypse, and a surprisingly human story about identity and free will. First published as a four-issue miniseries in 1994 and co-plotted with John Byrne, the graphic novel introduces Hellboy with striking confidence. The mythology already feels vast, the visual identity is fully recognizable, and the title character arrives as one of the most distinctive heroes in modern comics: a cigar-smoking red demon with a stone right hand, a sarcastic sense of humor, and a stubborn refusal to become the monster everyone expects him to be.

The premise is immediately compelling. In the final days of World War II, Nazi occultists conduct an elaborate ritual intended to summon a weapon powerful enough to alter the war’s outcome. The ceremony is overseen by Grigori Rasputin, who is reimagined here not simply as the notorious Russian mystic but as a servant of ancient, world-ending forces. Allied soldiers disrupt the ritual, but instead of the apocalypse the Nazis hoped to unleash, they discover a small red-skinned demon child transported to Earth. That child becomes Hellboy. He is taken in by Professor Trevor Bruttenholm, founder of the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense, and raised not as a weapon or scientific specimen, but as a son.

That decision gives Hellboy: Seed of Destruction its emotional center. Hellboy looks like the obvious villain of his own story. He has red skin, filed-down horns, a tail, cloven feet, and the massive stone right hand known as the Right Hand of Doom. He appears as though he should stand alongside Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster, or Satan himself. Yet Mignola’s central idea is that origin does not have to determine destiny. Hellboy may have entered the world through an act of evil, and powerful supernatural forces may expect him to fulfill an apocalyptic role, but he chooses another path. As an adult, he works for the B.P.R.D., investigating paranormal threats and protecting humanity from the very kinds of monsters he might be expected to join.

The main story takes place decades after Hellboy’s arrival and begins when a death close to him forces the past back into the present. The loss gives the investigation a personal urgency and propels Hellboy toward the hidden truth behind his own origins. As he follows the trail, he becomes entangled in a conspiracy involving Rasputin’s return, surviving Nazi occultists, forgotten rituals, buried secrets, and the terrifying possibility that Hellboy himself may have a role in an event far greater than any single monster attack. The plot steadily expands from a personal mystery into a threat with apocalyptic implications, but it never completely loses sight of Hellboy as a character caught between the person he has chosen to be and the fate others want to impose upon him.

Hellboy is joined by fellow B.P.R.D. agents Abe Sapien and Liz Sherman. Abe, an amphibious investigator with a calm, analytical nature, provides an effective contrast to Hellboy’s bluntness and impatience. Liz, a pyrokinetic woman whose connection to fire comes with emotional burdens of its own, brings a more vulnerable and tragic element to the team. In this first volume, they are not yet as richly developed as they would become in later stories, but their presence establishes the B.P.R.D. as something more interesting than an ordinary superhero team. These are not polished celebrity heroes in colorful costumes. They are unusual, damaged, and often isolated people employed to confront dangers that the public cannot know exist.

Mignola’s art is the graphic novel’s defining achievement. Even among the strongest comics of the 1990s, Hellboy: Seed of Destruction feels visually singular. At a time when much of mainstream superhero art emphasized intricate rendering, oversized muscles, and hyperactive action, Mignola worked through silhouette, shadow, stark design, and carefully controlled negative space. His figures are often blocky and stylized, but they are never lifeless. A few lines can convey fear, exhaustion, anger, or resignation. A large black shape can become a doorway, a corridor, an abyss, or a threat the reader cannot fully see.

Mignola does not use darkness merely to make the comic look moody. His shadows are active storytelling tools. Characters disappear into them, monsters emerge from them, and entire environments seem to exist only partially in the light. A seemingly empty room can become frightening because its far wall is swallowed by blackness. A frozen landscape can feel ominous because it leaves its characters exposed beneath an enormous blank sky. His layouts often evoke old pulp-horror illustrations, German Expressionist cinema, Gothic architecture, folklore engravings, and vintage monster movies. Rather than presenting a sleek modern superhero world, Mignola creates a universe that feels ancient, secretive, and half-buried under centuries of superstition.

The color work deepens that atmosphere. The pages use earthy browns, faded blues, icy whites, sickly greens, and vivid flashes of red to create a world that feels both dreamlike and decayed. Hellboy’s red skin makes him instantly recognizable within Mignola’s compositions, especially when he stands against a field of black shadow. He often resembles a burning ember in a world of darkness: visually connected to the supernatural realm around him, yet refusing to be extinguished by it. That visual contrast captures the character’s place in the story. Hellboy belongs to the darkness in a literal sense, but he continually chooses to stand against it.

The writing is more exposition-heavy than some later Hellboy stories, but it serves an understandable purpose. Hellboy: Seed of Destruction has to introduce Hellboy, the B.P.R.D., Rasputin, the Nazi occultist threat, the supernatural cosmology, and the significance of the Right Hand of Doom in a relatively short space. John Byrne’s scripting helps organize the material and gives the narrative forward momentum. Certain explanations have the recognizable rhythm of early-1990s genre comics, but the story’s atmosphere remains strong enough that the mythology rarely feels like a dry information dump. Mignola and Byrne create the impression that readers are seeing only a small piece of an immense occult history, one filled with ancient gods, forgotten disasters, and forces that have been waiting in darkness for centuries.

The pacing is deliberate rather than relentlessly action-driven. Mignola allows scenes to breathe, lingering over ruined architecture, old artifacts, empty corridors, haunted chambers, and moments of tense silence. The dread accumulates gradually. When action erupts, it tends to be sudden, heavy, and physical. Hellboy is not an acrobatic hero who glides through combat with effortless grace. He breaks through doors, trades blows with monsters, absorbs punishment, and keeps moving forward. His heroism has a blue-collar quality. He treats fighting the impossible as difficult, unpleasant work that nevertheless needs to be done.

That quality makes him especially effective within the story’s Lovecraftian framework. Traditional cosmic horror often centers on human helplessness in the face of forces too vast, ancient, and indifferent to comprehend. Hellboy: Seed of Destruction preserves that feeling, particularly in its suggestions of ancient beings and apocalyptic forces beyond normal understanding. However, it gives readers a protagonist willing to confront that terror rather than collapse before it. Hellboy cannot necessarily understand every supernatural threat, and he cannot erase the ominous circumstances of his birth, but he can refuse to cooperate with the fate laid out for him. His defiance is not naïve optimism. It is a hard-earned, practical moral stance: he will not let anyone turn him into a weapon, and he will not stand aside while innocent people are endangered.

The relationship between Hellboy and Bruttenholm gives that moral stance its weight. Bruttenholm represents the compassion that allowed Hellboy to become something other than an instrument of destruction. He does not deny Hellboy’s demonic origins, but he refuses to treat those origins as a permanent verdict. Their bond lends real emotion to the graphic novel without overwhelming it with melodrama. Mignola’s best moments of feeling are often restrained, expressed through silence, body language, or a brief line rather than a lengthy speech. This restraint suits Hellboy himself. He is not a character who easily verbalizes grief, fear, or tenderness, but those feelings are present beneath his rough exterior.

The graphic novel also has an important place in Hellboy’s larger cultural legacy because it served as the basis for Guillermo del Toro’s live-action film Hellboy. The adaptation draws from the comic’s wartime origin, B.P.R.D. framework, Rasputin-centered occult threat, and larger supernatural mythology, helping bring Mignola’s character and visual world to a wider audience. Even so, Hellboy: Seed of Destruction stands firmly on its own as the original expression of that world: darker, quieter, and more reliant on the power of shadow, silence, and graphic design than any adaptation could fully reproduce.

Hellboy: Seed of Destruction is not entirely flawless. The exposition can occasionally be dense, and Abe and Liz are not yet given the emotional complexity they receive in later Hellboy stories. The book also has the understandable burden of establishing a great deal of lore in a short opening arc. Yet those limitations are minor beside its achievements. Mignola creates a complete aesthetic universe from the beginning, one populated by ancient horrors, occult conspiracies, cryptic prophecies, and damaged people trying to do the right thing in a world that often seems hostile to human life.

Ultimately, Hellboy: Seed of Destruction remains a landmark graphic novel because it places mood, design, and character above conventional superhero spectacle. It is not simply about a demon punching monsters, even though it delivers that pleasure exceptionally well. It is about a creature born under the shadow of evil who insists on defining himself through his choices. Hellboy’s greatest strength is not his stone fist, supernatural durability, or ability to survive encounters with horrors beyond human comprehension. It is his refusal to become what he was made to be.

Review: Transmetropolitan Vol. 3 – Year of the Bastard

Posted on September 2, 2026 by Arleigh

“Journalism is just a gun. It’s only got one bullet in it, but if you aim right, that’s all you need. Aim it right, and you can blow a kneecap off the world.” — Spider Jerusalem

Transmetropolitan Vol. 3: Year of the Bastard is where Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson’s series fully locks into its political purpose. The earlier volumes establish the wild, filthy, hilarious, and relentlessly overstimulating future world of the City, while also introducing Spider Jerusalem as one of comics’ most aggressive and unconventional protagonists. This third collection gives that chaos a more direct target. Spider’s reporting increasingly centers on President Gary Callahan, known as “the Beast,” and the book becomes a sharper examination of political corruption, media manipulation, public apathy, and the ugly necessity of speaking truth to power.

Spider remains the main reason Transmetropolitan works as well as it does. He is not a conventionally likable hero, and the series has no interest in sanding down his worst edges. Spider is arrogant, filthy, confrontational, casually cruel, and frequently unbearable to everyone around him. He insults his assistants, attacks people with little warning, abuses his position as an employer, and seems to approach most conversations as though they are a competition he needs to win. His anger is not performative, though. Spider is furious because he sees how the City works, how easily people are exploited, and how often institutions that are meant to serve the public instead exist to preserve wealth, influence, and power.

That is what separates Spider from a standard rebellious antihero. He does not simply dislike authority because it tells him what to do. He hates authority when it becomes insulated from consequence. His journalism is not neutral in the shallow sense of pretending that every side of an issue deserves equal moral consideration. Spider believes that facts matter, that evidence matters, and that powerful people deserve aggressive scrutiny. He wants documents, interviews, proof, and a story solid enough to survive legal threats and political spin. But he also wants that story to make its target feel exposed. For Spider, journalism is both a public service and an act of combat.

Year of the Bastard makes that approach feel especially urgent through the arrival of Gary Callahan. The Beast is an amalgamation of all the worst traits associated with the fictional politician: narcissistic, shameless, opportunistic, cruel, dishonest, charismatic when it suits him, and utterly willing to use ordinary people as tools in his pursuit of power. He is the kind of leader who can speak in a language of public service while treating the public as disposable, who can turn fear into political currency, and who can rely on supporters to dismiss his most obvious sins as either necessary strength or a conspiracy against him.

Callahan is exaggerated in the way that much of Transmetropolitan is exaggerated, but that does not make him feel safely distant from reality. The series filters him through dystopian satire, giving him the monstrous nickname, the heightened rhetoric, and the almost grotesque confidence of a villain who believes consequences are for other people. Yet the deeper qualities behind him are painfully familiar. He thrives on division, contempt for truth, resentment, spectacle, and the belief that accountability is something to be attacked rather than accepted. In recent memory, that has only made the Beast feel more unsettling. Political figures with traits that once seemed too bluntly villainous for anything but fiction have repeatedly demonstrated how easily cruelty can be reframed as authenticity, dishonesty as strategy, and public anger as a route to power. The book’s details are futuristic and extreme, but its political instincts feel less like prediction than recognition.

Spider recognizes Callahan for what he is long before the system is ready to confront him. That is where the volume’s central conflict becomes stronger than a simple “reporter versus corrupt president” story. Spider is not just investigating a bad man; he is fighting the machinery that allows bad men to flourish. The City’s citizens are overwhelmed by media noise, consumer distractions, social trends, technological novelty, and the endless stream of minor scandals competing for their attention. In such an environment, truth can be buried not only by censorship but by excess. A revelation does not have to be disproven if it can simply be drowned beneath louder, stupider, more entertaining material.

The City continues to be one of the series’ best creations because it is more than a colorful science-fiction backdrop. It is a civilization that has commodified every aspect of life. Identity can be altered, sold, copied, upgraded, discarded, and turned into another lifestyle product. Entertainment is invasive and often grotesque. Technology has expanded human possibility without necessarily expanding human empathy. Politics has become entertainment as well, reduced to personality contests, public outrage, tribal loyalties, and marketable images. The City is often funny in a deliberately ridiculous way, but the humor always has a sour edge. Its people are not simply stupid targets for Spider’s contempt. They are citizens living under a system designed to exhaust their attention and turn their frustration into something profitable.

That context complicates Spider’s relationship to the public. He clearly cares about people, especially the people who are harmed by the City’s power structures, but he also finds people maddening. Spider’s rage at ignorance, conformity, and complacency can make him seem almost as contemptuous of the public as the politicians he despises. The difference is that Spider’s contempt is not rooted in a desire to dominate them. He wants them to wake up, pay attention, and demand better, even when he expresses that desire through insults, threats, and spectacularly unhealthy behavior. His empathy is real, but it is buried beneath layers of cynicism and hostility.

That is why Channon Yarrow and Yelena Rossini remain so important to the book. They keep Spider from becoming a purely self-contained force of rage. Channon often brings a more immediate human response to the stories they cover. She can be tough and sarcastic, but she has not completely absorbed Spider’s defensive habit of treating emotional vulnerability as weakness. Her presence highlights the people behind the headlines, which is essential in a series where the main character can sometimes become so consumed by the larger fight that he risks forgetting the individual lives at stake.

Yelena offers a different kind of balance. As Spider’s editor, she understands the importance of his work, but she also has to deal with the consequences of his methods. She recognizes his talent and his instincts, while refusing to indulge every destructive impulse as if it were a sign of genius. Their relationship is built on tension, professional respect, and mutual exasperation. Yelena knows that Spider can find the story nobody else wants to touch, but she also knows that his self-destructive behavior can jeopardize the very work he believes in. She is one of the few people capable of treating him as both an indispensable journalist and a deeply difficult human being.

The visual side of Year of the Bastard remains a major strength. Darick Robertson makes the City feel constantly alive, crowded, unpleasant, and funny in equal measure. Every street scene suggests a thousand strange subcultures, consumer products, body modifications, and private disasters unfolding at once. Robertson’s detail is not merely there to make the book look weird. It reinforces the idea that this is a society drowning in visual information. The City is so busy that horror can pass as background decoration, and the reader has to look closely to notice what its inhabitants have learned to ignore.

Robertson’s Spider is equally effective. The sunglasses, tattoos, bald head, cigarettes, and permanent scowl make him immediately recognizable, but the art also captures how tired he is. Spider does not look like a sleek futuristic revolutionary. He looks worn down, unhealthy, and held together by stimulants, spite, and a professional obligation he cannot escape. That physical exhaustion matters because it keeps him from becoming an invulnerable fantasy figure. For all his bravado, Spider is a man who is being consumed by the same world he is trying to expose.

The volume still carries the abrasive humor and deliberately offensive energy that define Transmetropolitan, and that will remain a dividing line for readers. Ellis often pushes jokes, imagery, and dialogue to extremes. Sometimes that excess adds to the punk-rock force of the series, making the City feel like a place where every cultural impulse has been turned up beyond the point of sanity. At other times, the shock-heavy approach can feel like it is fighting for attention with the book’s more serious political and emotional material. Even so, Year of the Bastard benefits from its willingness to be ugly. A story about corruption, exploitation, and media spectacle would lose something if it presented its world too cleanly.

Ultimately, Transmetropolitan Vol. 3: Year of the Bastard is a strong escalation of the series because it gives Spider Jerusalem a political enemy worthy of his fury. The Beast represents the worst kind of public figure: someone who turns cruelty into strength, dishonesty into strategy, and division into a campaign platform. Spider, for all his cruelty and instability, becomes compelling because he refuses to accept that kind of power as normal. He may be an awful boss, a reckless friend, and a man whose personal life is largely a disaster, but he understands that journalism has to do more than politely record the world’s failures. Sometimes it has to expose the bastards responsible for them.

Transmetropolitan Volume Reviews

Review: 100 Bullets Vol. 4 – A Foregone Tomorrow

Posted on August 29, 2026 by Arleigh

“On your feet, soldier. You’ve just been drafted. This is a war.” — Agent Graves

With A Foregone Tomorrow, Brian Azzarello and Eduardo Risso make it clear that 100 Bullets is done merely teasing the larger story behind Agent Graves, the Trust, and the Minutemen. The earlier volumes built their appeal around a very simple but powerful idea: Graves finds someone whose life has been ruined, hands them a briefcase containing a gun, proof, and one hundred untraceable bullets, then leaves them to decide what revenge is worth. That premise is still present here, but it no longer feels like the whole series. This fourth collection, which gathers issues #20-30, is where the long-running conspiracy really begins stepping out from the shadows. The Trust finally feels like a real organization rather than a few names being dropped in dark rooms, the Minutemen begin to take clearer shape, and Agent Graves starts to look less like a cryptic avenger and more like a man moving pieces around a board that only he fully understands.

The collection opens with “The Mimic,” and it is a good representation of what this volume does best. Azzarello ties together two conversations that seem unrelated at first: one involving Mr. Shepherd and Benito Medici, and another taking place at street level among people trying to survive in a world where even the smallest patch of territory has consequences. The contrast is important. On one side are the rich, insulated people who control entire criminal and financial networks without ever getting their own hands dirty. On the other are the desperate hustlers, dealers, addicts, and low-level criminals who are usually the first ones to bleed when those powerful people make a move. 100 Bullets has always had a strong sense of class anger under all the pulp dialogue and gunplay, but this volume puts that feeling more directly into the story.

Benito Medici is one of the most interesting additions here because he does not initially come across as the kind of polished, ruthless heir one would expect from the Trust. He seems immature, reckless, and more interested in enjoying the benefits of his family name than understanding what it costs other people. But Azzarello does not make him a joke. Benito is a spoiled rich kid, sure, but he is also a young man slowly realizing that he has been born into something dangerous and ancient. The Medici name gives him protection, money, and influence, but it also makes him a target. That uneasy realization gives his scenes some real tension. He is not just learning how much power his father Augustus has; he is learning that power in this world is never free.

The Trust itself is probably the biggest reason A Foregone Tomorrow feels like such a major turning point. Earlier books gave readers names like Augustus Medici and Megan Dietrich, along with hints about a hidden system that existed beyond regular crime families and street gangs. Here, the curtain gets pulled back much further. The Trust is revealed as a collection of powerful old families whose influence stretches across the country, while the Minutemen were created as their enforcers and internal police. The scope is suddenly much bigger than one person deciding whether to pull the trigger on somebody who wronged them. Agent Graves is not simply handing out opportunities for revenge. He is using those opportunities to destabilize a system that has spent generations protecting itself.

That expansion does make the book denser than the first three collections. Readers who liked the clean, self-contained revenge stories from First Shot, Last Call may need a little patience here. Azzarello is deliberately withholding information, and a lot of dialogue involves people speaking around the truth rather than plainly stating it. Characters mention events, names, and old betrayals that do not fully make sense until later. But that is also part of the fun. 100 Bullets is becoming a crime epic where every casual insult, odd coincidence, and brief appearance may eventually matter. The book trusts readers to keep up, and even when the plot gets murky, it rarely stops being compelling.

The Jack Daw material is probably the weakest portion of the collection, though it still has its uses. Jack is a huge, self-destructive junkie who already has one of Graves’s cases when the reader meets him. That is an interesting reversal of the usual formula because we do not see the initial pitch or the moment of temptation. We are instead dropped into the aftermath of a man who has already been given a chance to change his life and has clearly made a mess of it. Jack is not especially sympathetic, and the story never quite reaches the emotional impact of Dizzy Cordova’s or Loop Hughes’s earlier arcs. Still, he feels like another example of the kind of damaged person Graves is collecting. He is not a hero waiting to be awakened. He is a wrecking ball waiting for someone to point him in a direction.

The more memorable material comes from the way Azzarello keeps connecting old threads to new ones. Mr. Branch, who has spent much of the series trying to understand the conspiracy around Graves, becomes increasingly important as someone who sees patterns other characters are too close to notice. The story also takes a detour into the past with a strange, darkly funny episode involving baseball, Hollywood, and the Kennedy assassination. It is the kind of side story that might feel random in another series, but it works here because it reinforces the sense that Agent Graves has been active for a very long time. His briefcases are not a recent hobby. They are part of a much older game.

There is also an unexpectedly funny stretch involving a trip to Mexico, though the humor never makes the story feel safe. Azzarello has a talent for writing characters who can trade ridiculous insults and crude jokes one minute, then become frighteningly violent the next. That tonal balance is one of the things that keeps 100 Bullets from becoming unbearably grim. These people are living ugly lives in ugly places, but they still have personality. They still argue, posture, flirt, lie, and make each other laugh. The humor is usually mean, but it feels authentic to the world rather than forced comic relief.

Eduardo Risso remains the series’ secret weapon, even though by this point it is hard to call him a secret. His art gives every character an immediately recognizable silhouette and attitude. There are a lot of people in this volume, including gangsters, Trust members, old associates, street criminals, and potential Minutemen, yet Risso makes it easy to tell them apart. Benito looks like a privileged kid trying to wear confidence like a costume. Shepherd always carries himself with quiet control. Graves is still composed and unreadable, like somebody who has already calculated every possible outcome before entering the room.

Risso’s layouts are especially strong in the opening material, where different conversations and locations are visually paired to show how the powerful and powerless reflect each other. He can make a simple exchange in a park, a bar, or a hotel suite feel loaded with menace. His use of shadows, extreme angles, and stylized expressions gives the book its distinctive noir personality, but he never lets the style overwhelm the storytelling. You always know where to look and what emotional beat matters most. The guest pinup pages included around the original twenty-fifth issue are a neat bonus, though they do not have the same storytelling impact as Risso’s regular pages.

A Foregone Tomorrow is not as emotionally focused as Hang Up on the Hang Low, and it can feel more like a bridge volume than a completely self-contained story. But it is a very important bridge. This is where the series proves that its revenge setup was never just a clever anthology gimmick. The briefcases, bullets, and personal vendettas are all part of a larger conflict between men and women who believe they own the world and the people willing to burn that world down. By the end, Agent Graves is still mysterious, the Trust is still dangerous, and the Minutemen are only beginning to emerge from the past. But the road ahead is much clearer, and much more threatening.

100 Bullets Vol. 4: A Foregone Tomorrow is a strong, complicated, and occasionally messy installment that rewards readers who have been paying attention. Azzarello continues building the series into a sprawling noir conspiracy filled with damaged people, crooked power structures, and revenge that never comes without a price. Risso keeps the whole thing looking stylish, dangerous, and alive. It may not be the easiest volume to jump into, but for anyone following the series from the beginning, this is the point where the larger machine finally starts roaring to life.

100 Bullets Volume Reviews

Review: Transmetropolitan Vol. 2 – Lust for Life

Posted on August 21, 2026 by Arleigh

“You people don’t know what the truth is! It’s there, just under their bullshit, but you never look! That’s what I hate most about this fucking city—lies are news and the truth is obsolete!” — Spider Jerusalem

When you crack open the second volume of Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson’s Transmetropolitan, collected as Lust for Life, you’re not just getting another fix of cyberpunk chaos. You’re getting a book that solidifies exactly why this series is so brutally timeless. The first volume, Back on the Street, introduced us to the magnificent, drug-fueled trainwreck that is Spider Jerusalem and the grotesque, sprawling City he calls home. The second volume, however, is where the series finds its real footing. It’s not just about the loud, visceral shock value—though there’s plenty of that—but about deepening the world and its characters in a way that hits uncomfortably close to home.

Spider Jerusalem is, and always will be, the heart of this series. He’s a chain-smoking, drug-abusing, perpetually enraged journalist in the mold of Hunter S. Thompson, armed with a bowel disruptor and a vicious tongue. He’s a complete and utter bastard to almost everyone he meets, prone to violent outbursts and scatological tirades. And yet, he’s our hero because he’s one of the few people in this future who actually gives a damn. His entire reason for being is his unwavering, almost religious, dedication to “The Truth.” He despises the apathy of the masses as much as the corruption of the powerful, and he’s willing to burn his life down to expose both. This volume showcases that beautifully, adding a layer of vulnerability that prevents him from becoming a one-note caricature. He’s a misanthrope who somehow still cares, and that tension is what makes him so compelling.

Lust for Life collects issues thirteen through twenty-four, and it’s structured more as a series of vignettes than a single, driving narrative. This is actually its greatest strength, as it allows Ellis and Robertson to expand the world and build the supporting cast in ways a more focused plot wouldn’t allow. A major chunk of the book is dedicated to the insane adventure of the frozen head of Spider’s ex-wife being stolen. It’s a gloriously bizarre plot, full of the kind of absurd, high-stakes chaos that Transmetropolitan does so well.

But the real emotional heft of Lust for Life comes from the quieter, more tragic stories woven between the gunfights and drug-induced rants. One of the most powerful sequences focuses on Channon, Spider’s long-suffering assistant. She’s a pillar of strength, constantly cleaning up Spider’s messes, but this volume shows her vulnerability. Her boyfriend decides to undergo a process to become a “gaseous vapor,” leaving his body behind for a formless existence. It’s a concept that sounds completely outlandish, but the execution is devastating. Ellis writes it not as a sci-fi gimmick but as a heartbreaking exploration of letting go, of watching someone you love choose a path you can’t follow. Channon’s pain and helplessness are palpable, grounding the over-the-top world in real human emotion.

Then there’s the story of Mary, a woman from our recent past who was cryogenically frozen and wakes up in the City. She’s presented as a historical relic, a simple photographer from the twentieth century who is completely out of her depth in this frantic, hyper-consumerist future. This is where the book delivers its most potent gut-punch. Mary is us. She’s the reader, trying to make sense of this alien world, and she fails. The City is a claustrophobic nightmare even for the people who were born into it, but for Mary, it’s a terrifying prison of isolation and confusion. Her story is a bleak reminder that this “progress” we’re supposedly heading toward often comes at the cost of our humanity. It’s a deeply existential and sad tale that serves as a harsh critique of the very future we might be trying to build.

Now, while Transmetropolitan is set in a hyper-exaggerated, grotesque future, the reason it remains so relevant is that the satire has proven to be uncomfortably prophetic. The City is a sprawling, neon-drenched hellscape where the line between news and entertainment has completely dissolved, where handheld devices connect everyone to a digital stream of information, and where journalism has devolved into a race for ratings and eyeballs. It’s a world where media personalities are more influential than politicians, and political leaders are cynical, manipulative populists who are experts at gaming the system. Sound familiar?

The landscape of modern journalism feels like a grim step toward this world. The “Death of Truth” that Spider rails against is a concept that has become a cornerstone of our current political and media discourse. The Beast and The Smiler, the corrupt politicians in the series, aren’t just cartoon villains; they’re mirrors reflecting a world of political spin, gerrymandering, and where the “villains” are often the ones controlling the narrative. Spider’s constant, violent struggle to get the real story feels less like a sci-fi fantasy and more like a desperate wish-fulfillment for anyone frustrated with the spin and half-truths of modern politics.

When Spider writes his column, “I Hate It Here,” he’s speaking for a populace that feels powerless and manipulated, a populace nicknamed “The New Scum” by the establishment. This social commentary hits hard because you can see its echoes everywhere today. The series suggests that technology has advanced, but human nature—our greed, our apathy, our susceptibility to manipulation—has not. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but it’s what gives the book its power.

Transmetropolitan Vol. 2: Lust for Life might be a little light on overarching plot for some readers’ tastes. It’s not a major political arc; it’s more of a character study of the city and its inhabitants. But that’s precisely why it’s so effective. It proves that the series isn’t just a one-trick pony of cyberpunk fury. It has a heart, a soul, and a searing intelligence that cuts to the bone of our own societal failings. It’s a book that will make you laugh at its absurdity one minute and then leave you staring at the wall in quiet contemplation the next. It reinforces that even a nihilistic, drug-addled, foul-mouthed bastard like Spider Jerusalem is exactly the kind of hero we need to remind us of what we’re losing.

Transmetropolitan Volume Reviews

Volume 1: Back on the Street

Review: Transmetropolitan Vol. 1 – Back on the Street

Posted on August 14, 2026 by Arleigh

“Journalism is just a gun. It’s only got one bullet in it, but if you aim right, that’s all you need. Aim it right, and you can blow a kneecap off the world.” — Spider Jerusalem

There is a particular kind of jolt that comes from revisiting a story written decades earlier and realizing it was not so much predicting the future as identifying a sickness already taking hold. Written by Warren Ellis and illustrated by Darick Robertson, Transmetropolitan Vol. 1: Back on the Street is exactly that kind of book. It is loud, filthy, hilarious, and vicious in all the ways it needs to be, and it lands differently now than it likely did in the late nineties. What once read primarily as a wild, hyperbolic satire of politics, media, consumerism, and public numbness now can feel unnervingly close to reportage with the names changed. Its 23rd-century City remains an over-the-top cyberpunk nightmare, but the institutions, personalities, and manufactured distractions running it feel very familiar.

The volume begins with Spider Jerusalem living in isolation, hiding in the mountains after abandoning the City and the career that made him famous. He has a book contract to fulfill, a pile of debts to settle, and no actual desire to rejoin civilized life. Unfortunately for him, the people financing his escape have had enough. Spider is forced back into the City, a vast, overcrowded cyberpunk metropolis that seems to have taken every bad impulse of contemporary society and pushed it beyond all reasonable limits. His return is not a heroic homecoming. It is more like dropping an angry, drug-addled, heavily armed journalist into the middle of a garbage fire and asking him to write a column about the smoke.

Spider’s immediate appeal is that he has no interest in performing respectability. He is rude, vindictive, profane, selfish, and fully capable of treating even his friends terribly. He uses violence too casually, insults everyone around him, and carries a bowel disruptor gun that can incapacitate people in the most humiliating manner imaginable. In another book, these traits might make him an unbearable edgelord. Back on the Street, however, understands that Spider’s ugliness is part of a larger contradiction. He is not cruel because he does not care; he is cruel because he cares too much and has no healthy way of processing how badly the world fails ordinary people.

That is what makes him more than a Hunter S. Thompson imitation with futuristic sunglasses. Spider is a gonzo journalist, but his journalism is not merely an excuse for a manic lifestyle or a stage for his personality. At his best, he is driven by an almost old-fashioned moral belief that the truth matters, that citizens deserve to know what is being done in their name, and that powerful people should not be allowed to bury their crimes under public-relations language. The series positions journalism as something active rather than passive. Spider does not just report what happens; he investigates, provokes, exposes, and refuses to let the comfortable look away.

His column, “I Hate It Here,” captures the character’s relationship with the City. Spider hates it because he sees it clearly. He sees the absurdity of its consumer culture, the cruelty hiding behind political slogans, and the way people are taught to accept exploitation as normal. Yet he also understands the City in a way that few other characters do. It is full of strange, desperate, damaged people trying to survive in a system that is too big, too loud, and too indifferent to care whether they live with dignity. Spider’s contempt is not aimed equally at everyone. He has little patience for complacency, hypocrisy, and stupidity, but he shows genuine anger when vulnerable people are victimized by police, politicians, corporations, or public indifference. His idealism is twisted, abrasive, and buried beneath several layers of chemical abuse, but it is still idealism.

The City itself is the book’s other major character. Robertson’s art sells its overwhelming scale and ugliness. Every street looks packed with signs, body modifications, crowds, trash, strange fashion, predatory businesses, and people whose lives have been reshaped by technology in ways both liberating and grotesque. The future is not sleek in the familiar science-fiction sense. It is grubby, crowded, commercial, and deeply human. People can alter their bodies, change their identities, pursue bizarre new faiths, and live inside an endless stream of media stimulation, but none of those developments have solved poverty, loneliness, corruption, or abuse of power.

That is why the book has aged more effectively than many stories set in a supposedly distant future. Its technology is exaggerated, but its social anxieties feel much closer now. The City is saturated with information, yet its people are often less informed than ever. Everyone has access to spectacle, outrage, personality-driven media, and instant distractions, but the institutions shaping their lives remain opaque and unaccountable. The comic’s dystopia is not based on the idea that technology automatically destroys humanity. Instead, it suggests that technology amplifies the priorities already built into society. If a culture values profit, spectacle, division, and convenience over empathy and truth, more advanced technology simply gives those impulses more efficient tools.

The political material in this first volume is especially pointed. Ellis is interested in the gap between public image and actual power. Politicians do not need to be secretly subtle or brilliant to be dangerous; they only need to understand how to manipulate fear, identity, frustration, and media attention. The institutions around them—police, corporate media, wealthy interests, and political operatives—help sustain the illusion that ordinary people have meaningful control while making sure the system remains insulated from consequences. The book’s vision of power can be blunt, but bluntness is part of its style. Transmetropolitan does not whisper its anger. It shouts because it believes politeness is often one of the tools that lets abuse continue unchallenged.

At the same time, Back on the Street is not flawless. Its satire can be so broad that it occasionally feels like the story is pointing at a target with both hands and yelling until the reader gets it. Some of the shock humor and sexual material carry an intentionally trashy late-nineties edge that may feel juvenile or dated. The supporting cast is still taking shape, so many people primarily exist as foils for Spider’s verbal attacks or examples of the City’s bizarre social landscape. The book’s relentless attitude can also wear readers down if they need a more emotionally grounded entry point.

Still, the excess is usually purposeful. This is a world where the boundaries between entertainment, propaganda, commerce, and personal identity have all but collapsed, so subtle world-building would almost be dishonest. The visual and verbal overload puts the reader in Spider’s position: constantly assaulted by nonsense, constantly asked to separate meaningful horror from everyday noise. The absurdity makes the real injustice sharper. A city can be full of outrageous fashion, talking animals, hallucinogens, and body-modification trends, yet its most disturbing feature remains how easily human suffering is turned into content, data, or a political talking point.

Ultimately, Transmetropolitan Vol. 1: Back on the Street works because Spider Jerusalem is not presented as a clean solution to a corrupt society. He is a mess, an irritant, and sometimes a monster in miniature. But he is also someone who refuses to be numb. In a world built to keep people distracted, passive, and exhausted, that refusal has real value. The book’s cyberpunk future remains wildly over-the-top, but its central warning feels uncomfortably familiar: the most dangerous dystopias are not always the ones with impossible technology. Sometimes they are the ones where the public is flooded with noise, the powerful face no consequences, and telling the truth becomes an act of open rebellion.

Artist Profile: Alex Ross

Posted on August 11, 2026 by Arleigh

Alex Ross fundamentally transformed the visual language of American comic books by introducing a level of photorealistic fine art painting previously unseen in the medium. Eschewing traditional pen-and-ink line work, Ross utilized gouache, watercolor, and ink to render iconic superheroes with a tangible weight and texture that made them feel startlingly real. His approach treated comic book characters not as colorful abstractions, but as living, breathing figures existing in a recognizable world. By grounding these fantastical beings in reality through meticulous brushwork, realistic lighting, and lifelike facial expressions, Ross elevated the comic book cover and interior page to the status of gallery-worthy illustration, forever changing the expectations of comic book artistry.

Ross’s impact is indelibly tied to his defining projects for the industry’s “Big Two” publishers. At Marvel Comics, his groundbreaking 1994 miniseries Marvels recontextualized the Golden and Silver Ages of the publisher’s universe through the weary eyes of an ordinary photojournalist, capturing the awe and terror of living alongside gods. He later expanded this sprawling mythos with the Earth X trilogy. However, it was at DC Comics where Ross arguably cemented his legacy. His 1996 magnum opus Kingdom Come offered a grand, prophetic, and deeply moral vision of the DC Universe’s future, utilizing his painted style to bridge the gap between the publisher’s Golden Age innocence and modern cynicism. Through works like Justice and Peace on Earth, Ross continually reimagined DC’s most famous characters, stripping away decades of dark reinterpretations to restore their fundamental nobility and mythic grandeur.

The legacy of Alex Ross extends far beyond the individual pages of his graphic novels; he essentially spawned an entire subgenre of painted comic book art that dominated the industry in the late twentieth century. While many imitators emerged attempting to replicate his style, few could match his nuanced understanding of color theory, historical costume design, and emotional resonance. Furthermore, his aesthetic influence has bled heavily into broader pop culture, with his conceptual character designs serving as direct visual inspiration for numerous animated television shows and live-action films. By proving that superhero mythology could be approached with the same gravitas and classical technique as Norman Rockwell’s illustrations or Renaissance portraiture, Ross forced the comic book industry to permanently expand its artistic boundaries.

Review: 100 Bullets Vol. 3 – Hang Up on the Hang Low

Posted on August 10, 2026 by Arleigh

“I never told you to kill him. I just gave you the opportunity.” — Agent Graves

With Hang Up on the Hang Low, Brian Azzarello and Eduardo Risso continue to prove that 100 Bullets is far more than a series about revenge fantasies and mysterious briefcases. The first two collections introduced the basic concept of Agent Graves approaching damaged people with a gun, one hundred untraceable bullets, and proof of who ruined their lives. That premise was already strong, but this third volume starts showing just how much uglier and more complicated the world around Graves really is. This is where the series begins to feel less like a set of loosely connected crime stories and more like a large, carefully constructed noir epic. The revenge angle is still present, but it is no longer the whole point. The people who receive Graves’s offer are getting pulled into a much bigger machine, whether they realize it or not.

The main character this time is Loop Hughes, a young man who has spent much of his life acting tougher, smarter, and more connected than he actually is. He is a small-time street hustler, someone who talks a good game but clearly has no real direction in life. That makes him an interesting choice for Agent Graves. Loop is not someone who has already been crushed by a terrible tragedy in the same direct way as Dizzy Cordova or Lee Dolan. His grievance is more personal and more complicated: his father, a man known as the Rain, abandoned him and his mother when he was still a child. Loop has built up years of anger around that absence, even if he has never really known what to do with it.

When Graves gives Loop one of his trademark attaché cases, it seems at first like another straightforward setup. Loop has the gun, the bullets, the evidence, and the freedom to act without legal consequences. The temptation is there, and Azzarello makes it easy to understand why Loop would want to pull the trigger. The Rain did not just leave; he left a hole in Loop’s life that the younger man has filled with insecurity, bravado, and bad decisions. But the story becomes much more interesting when Loop finally finds his father and discovers that the Rain is not some helpless old man waiting to be punished. He is deeply involved with dangerous people and has his own place in the criminal underworld.

That is where Hang Up on the Hang Low really finds its momentum. Rather than immediately becoming a story about a son taking revenge on his father, it turns into a story about Loop being drawn into the world that helped create his father in the first place. The Rain is connected to organized crime, old grudges, and the kind of people who can make a murder look like business as usual. Loop thinks he is finally getting some answers, but every answer only opens another door to something worse. He is in well over his head almost from the beginning, and the book does a great job of making the reader feel that constant pressure.

Loop is one of the more sympathetic characters in the series so far because, underneath all of his posturing, he does seem to have a conscience. He is not innocent, exactly, and he certainly makes some dumb choices, but he is not naturally cruel. He wants respect, money, and an explanation for why his father left, but he also cares about people in a way that many of the hardened gangsters around him do not. Azzarello does not turn him into a saint, though. Loop is still immature and easily manipulated, which is exactly why his journey through this volume becomes so tragic. He keeps thinking he has found a way to gain control over his life, only to learn that somebody else has already decided the terms.

Agent Graves remains the most fascinating figure in the book. In the early volumes, he could be seen as a mysterious avenger or a kind of grim wish-fulfillment figure, handing victims the tools to get justice on their own terms. This collection makes him feel more unsettling than heroic. Graves is not necessarily lying to Loop, but he is absolutely steering him toward a result that serves some larger purpose. He is a man who sees people as pieces on a board, and even when he gives them a choice, it is hard to believe that he does not already have an idea of how they will respond. The briefcase may offer freedom from prosecution, but it never offers freedom from consequences.

The book also continues expanding the larger mythology involving the Trust and the Minutemen. Azzarello is still not explaining everything, and that can be frustrating if someone wants clean answers right away. At the same time, the lack of full explanation is part of what gives 100 Bullets its pull. The reader gets the sense that every crime boss, stray conversation, and seemingly random killing could matter later. People who initially seem like minor players keep revealing hidden ties to the larger conspiracy. Even the deaths and betrayals carry an extra weight because they do not feel random. This series is building toward something, and by the end of this volume it is clear that Graves has been setting events in motion for a long time.

Eduardo Risso’s artwork continues to be one of the best things about the series. His characters look stylized without ever feeling too cartoonish, and he gives every person a distinct physical presence. You can tell who is dangerous just by the way they stand in a room. You can tell who is nervous by the way they avoid eye contact. Risso’s visual storytelling is especially effective in the bar scenes, street confrontations, and quiet moments when characters are trying to decide whether to trust someone. He knows how to make a room feel crowded, seedy, and tense without overloading the page with unnecessary detail.

Risso also has a great eye for the ugly atmosphere of this world. The bars look worn down, the apartments feel cramped, and the city streets always seem like they are one bad decision away from turning violent. The noir influence is obvious, but it does not feel like a cheap imitation of old detective stories. It feels more like a modern crime story filtered through noir imagery: low lighting, cigarette smoke, suspicious looks, crooked power structures, and people who keep trying to escape the past only to be dragged deeper into it. The coloring helps the art stand out as well, giving the grimy environments and tense confrontations a little extra visual bite without making the book look overly polished.

The ending is what really makes the volume stick. Azzarello does not rely on a giant surprise twist so much as a sense of inevitability. You can see the bad outcome coming, but that does not make it any easier to watch. Loop spends most of the story trying to become somebody who matters, somebody with control and power, and the cruel part is that the criminal world is more than happy to let him feel that way for a little while. By the time reality catches up with him, he has learned that the people offering him opportunity were never offering him a real way out.

100 Bullets Vol. 3: Hang Up on the Hang Low is the strongest collection in the series so far. It has a more focused central story than Split Second Chance, while still pushing the wider conspiracy forward in a meaningful way. Loop is a memorable lead because he is flawed, angry, and trying desperately to look fearless when he is really just lost. Azzarello keeps the dialogue sharp and streetwise, Risso keeps every page visually charged, and the larger story continues to get more dangerous the more we learn about it. This is the point where 100 Bullets stops merely promising that it has a major story to tell and starts delivering on that promise.

100 Bullets Volume Reviews

Review: 100 Bullets Vol. 2 – Split Second Chance

Posted on July 31, 2026 by Arleigh

“Asking questions is free… but the answers—they can cost you your life.” — Agent Graves

In the first volume of 100 Bullets, Brian Azzarello and Eduardo Risso laid down a stunning thesis for their magnum opus: a world where the wronged are offered the ultimate temptation of consequence-free vengeance. That volume, First Shot, Last Call, functioned as a potent thematic introduction, establishing the series’ central moral quandary through self-contained stories. With Split Second Chance, the creative team makes a crucial pivot. This collection, gathering issues #6-14, successfully preserves the gritty, anthology-style explorations of revenge while beginning to weave a much larger, more intricate conspiracy that feels poised to consume everything in its path. If the first book was a promise, this second volume is the first, gripping step toward its fulfillment, even if it occasionally stumbles under the weight of its own ambition.

The volume opens with “Short Con, Long Odds,” a two-part story that initially feels like familiar territory. We are introduced to Chucky, a small-time gambler fresh out of prison, who is approached by Agent Graves. As before, Graves offers incontrovertible proof of a betrayal and the tools for retribution—this time against Chucky’s childhood friend, Pony, who has seemingly built a successful gambling empire on his partner’s misery. What makes this story stand out is its focus on the petty, desperate world of gambling. Risso’s art is especially potent here, capturing the sad, seedy underbelly of street-corner hustles and back-alley games. The story’s conclusion, which unfolds off-panel, is a masterclass in implication, leaving the reader to piece together the grim aftermath. It is a solid entry that reinforces the series’ core premise, but its real purpose becomes clear retroactively as the larger plot comes into focus.

This is the volume where the series’ title begins to earn its meaning. Agent Graves is no longer just a cipher; he is revealed to be a man with a history, and Split Second Chance doles out those histories with deliberate, tantalizing precision. The most significant revelation comes in “Day, Hour, Minute… Man,” where we learn about The Trust and the enigmatic Minutemen. This arc peels back the curtain, suggesting that Graves and his associate, Mr. Shepherd, were once part of this shadowy organization before faking their deaths to escape its clutches. The introduction of Lono, the chilling hitman from the first volume’s “The Samurai,” becomes far more significant. His meeting with Graves is charged with a dangerous, unspoken history, confirming that Graves’s “gifts” are a part of a larger, more personal agenda. The plot is thickening nicely, and the promise of a sprawling, interconnected narrative starts to feel exhilaratingly real.

However, it is in the standalone stories that Azzarello’s writing truly shines, showcasing his ability to extract raw, human emotion from his noir framework. The standout is undoubtedly “Heartbreak, Sunnyside Up,” a single-issue story that follows a hard-working diner waitress named Rose. Rose’s life is a grinding cycle of poverty and worry for her runaway daughter. When Agent Graves appears, he doesn’t just offer her a gun and a target; he delivers a slow, agonizing explanation of how her daughter became a heroin-addicted prostitute after being molested by her own father. It is a moment of pure, unflinching tragedy. The brilliance of the story lies not in the revenge itself, but in the horror of the revelation. Azzarello forces the reader and the character to sit with the unbearable truth, making the subsequent act of violence feel less like empowerment and more like a desperate, last resort. It serves as a powerful reminder that “sometimes evil is closer to home than we think.”

“The Right Ear, Left in the Cold” offers a fascinating twist on the formula by introducing Cole Burns, a deadly assassin living undercover as a neighborhood ice cream man. This story introduces the concept of the “sleeper agent,” a tool that Graves and Shepherd can “reactivate” for their own ends. Cole is a more capable and cold-blooded protagonist than the average victim, which makes his story less about moral choice and more about professional obligation. Yet, it deepens the mythology, showing that Graves has an entire network of operatives at his disposal, further blurring the line between righteous avenger and puppet master. His ultimate task of retrieving the briefcase from Dizzy Cordova in the final arc, “Parlez Kung Vous,” masterfully ties this new plot thread back to the series’ very first protagonist.

Throughout it all, Eduardo Risso’s artwork remains the series’ undeniable and consistent anchor. His style, which perfectly captured the cold, deliberate mood in the first volume, continues to excel in Split Second Chance. Risso’s panels have a cinematic rhythm; his compositions are economical yet expressive, using deep shadows and stark contrasts to build a world that feels dangerous and morally unstable. He excels at conveying unspoken tension and character attitude through posture and expression, a vital skill for a noir story where much is left unsaid. While some readers may find the depiction of female characters hyper-sexualized, Risso and colorist Grant Goleash unquestionably create a visual language that is sleek, uneasy, and unmistakably noir. The story’s pace may occasionally lag, but the art is always arresting.

100 Bullets: Split Second Chance is a more challenging and rewarding book than its predecessor. It sacrifices some of the first volume’s focus and self-contained impact to lay the foundation for something much grander. This is the volume where the series starts to earn its reputation for dense, interwoven plotting. It is a work of deliberate, intricate world-building that asks the reader to be patient and pay close attention. It is not without its flaws—some stories feel more like necessary setups than complete narratives, and the unrelentingly grim tone can be exhausting. Yet, the moments of genuine human tragedy, like Rose’s story, and the thrilling expansion of the central mystery make Split Second Chance an essential step in the journey. It confidently expands the world of 100 Bullets, deepening its mythology and proving that this is a saga built for the long haul.

100 Bullets Volume Reviews

Volume 1: First Shot, Last Call

Guilty Pleasure No. 107: Ironwood (by Bill Willingham)

Posted on March 15, 2026 by Arleigh

Bill Willingham’s Ironwood is the sort of graphic novel that lives in the uneasy space between bawdy escapism and unexpectedly thoughtful worldbuilding, making it a quintessential guilty pleasure that some readers insist on treating as near–high art. It is at once shamelessly pornographic and surprisingly committed to telling a coherent sword‑and‑sorcery story, which means your mileage will depend heavily on whether you can accept explicit sex as an integral—often dominant—part of the narrative rather than a tacked‑on indulgence.

Published by Eros Comix in the early 1990s, Ironwood ran for eleven issues and was later collected into two trade paperbacks that have acquired a minor cult status among fans of erotic fantasy comics. The premise follows Dave Dragovon, a juvenile dragon who appears entirely human because he has not yet matured into his full draconic form, as he is hired by the beautiful and cursed Pandora Breedlswight to seek out the wizard Gnaric and break the spell on her. It is a familiar quest hook—hero, sorcerer, cursed damsel—but Willingham uses it as a loose scaffold on which to hang an almost nonstop parade of sexual encounters, bawdy gags, and bursts of fantastical incident.

As a narrative, Ironwood is better than its reputation as “porn with plot” might suggest, though that label is not entirely unfair. The story is consciously serialized in the classic fantasy‑adventure mode: Dave and Pandora move from one locale to another, encountering wizards, monsters, political schemes, and rival factions, all while the central quest to undo Pandora’s curse gives a sense of forward momentum. Various readers have pointed out that there is genuine political intrigue and thought given to motivations, and you can see Willingham testing out the sort of layered plotting and character dynamics he would later refine in Fables, even if here they are wrapped around mandatory explicit scenes. There are moments when the story is engaging enough that the sex almost feels like an interruption, a dynamic Willingham himself has reportedly acknowledged when noting that fitting in each issue’s required sex scene could break the flow.

Tonally, the book leans heavily into adult humor, but it is not mean‑spirited. The jokes range from clever wordplay and situational comedy to unabashedly adolescent gags, the sort that make you groan even as you recognize they fit this world of oversexed dragons, lecherous wizards, and magically enhanced perversions. In this regard, Ironwood is very much a product of its era: a 1990s underground/alt sensibility that treats fantasy tropes and sexual taboos with the same irreverent shrug. When the humor lands, it gives the book a disarming charm, but when it doesn’t, the dialogue can feel like an overlong dirty joke that mistakes sheer explicitness for wit. Still, there is a lightness here—especially in Dave’s reactions and the deadpan absurdity of certain magical mishaps—that keeps the series from tipping into grim or exploitative darkness, despite its plentiful kinks.

Visually, Willingham’s art is the most persuasive argument for why some readers champion Ironwood as something more than disposable smut. His linework is clean and expressive, with a confident sense of anatomy, staging, and page composition that gives both the action and the erotic scenes a fluid, readable rhythm. The fantasy settings are detailed without being cluttered; taverns, towers, and mystical landscapes all feel like lived‑in spaces rather than generic backdrops for sex scenes. The character designs, especially Pandora and the various magical oddballs, show a cartoonist relishing the chance to exaggerate physicality and personality in equal measure, which goes a long way toward making these figures feel like characters rather than mere bodies.

That said, the erotic content is not merely frequent—it is foundational, and that is where Ironwood becomes a textbook guilty pleasure. This is an unabashedly hardcore series: explicit sex acts, imaginative uses of magic for sexual purposes, and sequences that leave nothing to implication. Devices like a hydra‑head spell repurposed so a character can pleasure multiple partners at once are emblematic of the book’s gleeful “power perversion potential,” embracing the logic of a sex‑obsessed Dungeons & Dragons campaign. For readers comfortable with that premise, there is an undeniable energy in the way Willingham integrates erotic spectacle into battles, spells, and negotiations; for others, the same material will read as juvenile, repetitive, or simply exhausting.

Reception among those who have sought out the collected volumes tends to be surprisingly positive, with many praising Ironwood as one of the rare “sex comics” where the story can stand on its own, even if stripped of the explicit content. Fans often note the balance between story, humor, and eroticism, arguing that the plot is engaging enough that the sex becomes a bonus rather than the sole reason to read. This is where the “high art” argument creeps in: within certain circles of fantasy and underground comics readers, Ironwood is celebrated as an early sign of Willingham’s strengths as a writer and artist, and as an example of how erotic comics can pursue worldbuilding and character arcs rather than simple vignettes. Yet that enthusiasm coexists with acknowledgment that, without the sex, this would largely be a light, sometimes flimsy adventure—a fun romp, but not a lost masterpiece of the medium.

In a broader context, Ironwood sits at an interesting crossroads in Willingham’s career and in the evolution of adult comics. Knowing his later mainstream success, you can see how this early project let him experiment with long‑form storytelling, recurring cast chemistry, and a blend of mythic and mundane concerns, all while operating in a corner of the market that gave him almost total creative freedom. That creative freedom is both the book’s greatest strength and its biggest barrier to entry: it delivers exactly the kind of unfiltered fantasy‑erotica hybrid it promises, but that same purity of purpose locks it firmly into the realm of niche appetite.

Ultimately, Ironwood is best approached with clear expectations and a sense of humor. As a graphic novel, it is technically accomplished, often funny, and occasionally more narratively ambitious than its reputation suggests, which explains why some fans will defend it as a minor classic of erotic fantasy comics. At the same time, its relentless explicitness, adolescent impulses, and lightweight core plot mark it firmly as a guilty pleasure—one that knows exactly what it is and never pretends otherwise, even as a devoted subset of readers insists on elevating it to the status of “high art.”

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