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STRAY BULLETS #23
Highly Recommended (9/10)
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El Capitan Books
Writer/Artist: David Lapham
Editor: Deborah Dragovic
Price: $3.50 US |
After a lengthy hiatus for Murder Me Dead, David Lapham has returned to his gritty crime creation Stray Bullets for another run, and he starts off with a story featuring two of his most memorable characters, the deranged young Joey and the psychotic Spanish Scott. It's another in the "done in one" series of stories that Lapham has written for Stray Bullets, a standalone crime/human drama story with a darkly humorous edge. However, this one also ties in to the over-arcing stories of these characters, with more information about Scott, Joey and various other characters that we have seen at various stages of their life in the Stray Bullets comics.
As always, the twin components of any good Stray Bullets story are sex and violence, and this story has plenty of that. Spanish Scott is a skuzzball but in the world of Stray Bullets, he's got a
sexuality about him that most of the characters lack, largely due to his
dangerous nature. So it's only natural that he would get involved in something
with Janice, in an affair that is scandalous and wrong, but still quite
interesting to read about. Mixing this up with Scott's previous dealings with
criminals only makes the whole thing more seedy.
While sex and violence play
the big roles, however, it's the damage to the human psyche that has always been
at the heart of this book. That's what has separated it from a lot of crime
books. It's the inclusion of poor Joey, a character who revealed the results of
years of mental scarring in the very first issue of this title, that gives this
issue its real kick. Poor Joey is a slightly hyperactive, not very bright kid
whose role models all seem happy to help bring him up until he becomes an
inconvenience, at which point he gets locked away and forgotten. There's
something quite sad about it, but at the same time, the way Lapham writes it,
it's also sick and funny.
Lapham's artwork is another
big part of what makes the book work, as he manages to convey a gritty and ugly
world, exaggerating the darker parts of the setting, but he still gives it a lot
of realism. His storytelling on the book, often sticking with an eight-panel
grid and never going with double-page splashes, allows for a lot of story as
well as easy reading, and it also gives this lawless world a bit of external
structure.
Each Stray Bullets issue, at least for the last half-dozen
or so, has been a good self-contained story for readers even if they haven't
picked up the collected editions of the book. This one is no exception, and it
contains the same dark sense of humor, solid storytelling and intriguing
characters that I have come to expect from the book.
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