After ten years of working on the Vertigo comic book series 100 Bullets, writer Brian Azzarello and artist Eduardo Risso have fired their last round. With the 100th and final issue of the crime comic released less than a week earlier, Azzarello talked to PW Comics week about letting go of the long-running noir series, and the new work he has on the way from the new Vertigo Crime imprint.
PW Comics Week: So how do you feel now that the last issue is finally out?
Brian Azzarello: It’s finally starting to sink in, you know? That I’m done with this.
PWCW: Is it a relief?
BA: No, it’s not a relief. It ended where it was supposed to, and I was able to answer all the questions I’d raised. But it’s something that I’ve been working on for ten years, every month, and now we’re not doing it anymore.
PWCW: Have you gotten any feedback about the ending from fans yet?
BA: It seems to be pretty good, but I’ve been telling people, it’s not going to end the way you’d like it to. You’ve been living with these characters for ten years, and as a writer, I can’t live up to what’s in your head.
PWCW: You can’t make everybody happy.
BA: Right. That’s why I just tried to make everybody miserable. [laughs] Some people have said that it didn’t end the way they thought it would, but it couldn’t have ended any other way. We’ve known the ending since we began. That’s the way you’re supposed to write. And that’s the reason we were able to seed different things and reference back it over a hundred issues, because we knew where we were going.
PWCW: Are there any characters you’re going to miss now that it’s all done?
BA: No. But there were some characters that were very hard to kill. But they had to die. Like the character Milo, he was very hard to kill. It was a blast to write him. And even Will Dennis, the editor, was like, “Do you have to kill this guy? Because I’d like to see him stick around till the end.” But no. He had to die.
PWCW: You started the series with the concept that it would run for 100 issues as a monthly comic book. Do you think the monthly comic format is going to remain an important part of the industry, or are trade paperbacks the future of comics?
BA: I’d like to see things move towards the original graphic novel format. Would it work better if I could release a trade or two every year, the way a lot of crime novelists do with their characters? Could we have done that with 100 Bullets? I don’t know if comic fans would put up with that. Comic fans gotta get that weekly fix so they can get on the internet and tell their friends how much they hated what they just read. But yeah, I would like to see it move in that [graphic novel] direction. With the Vertigo Crime line that’s coming out in August, hopefully we’ll push things in that direction.
PWCW: How did you approach Filthy Rich, your book for the Vertigo Crime imprint?
BA: I just wanted to do a real straight ahead noir. It came out of the sort of celebrity culture that you can’t escape anymore, but I moved it back into the 50s and 60s. It’s really me playing around with the whole genre. Last year I went to Bouchercon, the crime novel convention, and announced it there. And people were really excited by it. I think it was because while I’m coming from comics, certainly [the other Vertigo Crime authors] Ian Rankin and Jason Starr and Gary Phillips—they’re mystery writers that these people they know. Hopefully the [titles] will get racked in the right section [in bookstores]. The same way that 100 Bullets has no business being racked next to Spider-Man. It’s a totally different audience.
PWCW: The crime genre has an interesting history in comics, at least until the creation of the Comics Code Authority—
BA: Yeah, it was kind of an aborted history. Crime comics after 1958 weren’t around anymore. But that’s bullsh-t, because superhero comics are just crime comics where the cops wear capes. The bad guys wear masks.
PWCW: Do you think that we’re seeing a resurgence in crime comics now, with more titles coming out like Criminal, Incognito, and now Vertigo Crime?
BA: Yes, I do. And I think 100 Bullets certainly had something to do with that. I think the success of the book made [comics] publishers think, “Hey, we can do something like this too.”
