100 Bullets Vol. 13: Wilt [Paperback]

Brian Azzarello (Author), Eduardo Risso (Illustrator)

Book Description

Series: 100 Bullets | Publication Date: July 14, 2009

Brian Azzarello and Eduardo Risso's riveting crime saga "100 Bullets" reaches its epic conclusion!

This dark and intriguing Eisner Award-winning series features a mysterious agent named Graves who approaches ordinary citizens and gives them an opportunity to exact revenge on a person who has wronged them. Offering his clients an attaché case containing proof of the deed and a gun, he guarantees his "clients" full immunity for all of their actions, including murder.

In this final volume, we learn more about the past history of The Trust and the Minutemen's place in contemporary history as secrets are revealed about what really caused Graves' war with the Trust.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The final collection of Azzarello and Risso's 100-issue crime comic book crushes its grand construction into Grand Guignol as the series concludes in an inevitable bloodbath, with its high society cabals, sleeper assassins and no-one-is-innocent bystanders blowing each other to smithereens in the name of hollow revenge. Azzarello's writing serves his thematic purposes (the endless reverberations of violence in American culture), and his punchy, vernacular dialogue glistens with vulgar brio. Where Wilt stumbles, oddly, is its often scattered and distracted plotting, which blunts its impact. Some crucial plot points breeze by with only a baffling allusion, while others get driven home with a jackhammer. By midway, Azzarello's tone has gone fully manic, as his characters brutally destroy themselves in the hope of bringing some pain to their enemies. What never falters, though, is Risso's artwork. He juggles the book's enormous cast, densely packed action sequences, subtleties of facial expression and acrid noir atmosphere with aplomb, balancing spidery line work with monumental, jagged chunks of negative space, augmented by Patricia Mulvihill's twilit earth-tone palette. Even as the story crumbles—the final scene, fittingly, is in a burning, collapsing building—its images are scaldingly vigorous. (July)
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Product Details

• Reading level: Ages 18 and up
  
• Paperback: 304 pages
• Publisher: Vertigo (July 14, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1401222870
• ISBN-13: 978-1401222871
• Product Dimensions: 6.6 x 0.7 x 10.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #322,915 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Brian Azzarello has achieved both huge sales and acclaim with his comic 100 Bullets, and has also recently completed a run on Hellblazer, and Marvel's Cage. Lee Bermejo is the illustrator of Superman/Gen 13, and has contributed pin-ups to 100 Bullets and WildC.A.T.S.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Rapid-fire pace, fabulously menacing art, and a killer conclusion, July 17, 2009

By 

Mir (North Miami Beach, FL USA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)   

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This review is from: 100 Bullets Vol. 13: Wilt (Paperback)

If you haven't read this series, don't pick up this issue first. You'll be confused as heck, cause there is no time to take a breath due to a breakneck pace that winds up the deceptions (mebbe), the betrayals, the conspirings, the shiftings of loyalties (which is no loyalty at all, really). Greed and power and violence and familial dysfunctions of all sorts weave and collide in a climax that is full of all sorts of nasty strategies and nasty ways of dying.

A thing really can become too big and wild to control, and I'm not just talking about Jack or Lono when I say that. :)

A marvelous, blood-soaked, bullet-riddled, and power-mad ride. I think some folks will not like the ending, but that last panel is a mighty resonant one, and many will close the last page and ponder it a bit. I think this would have benefitted from a bit more time to dig just a scosh deeper into a few characters before they got offed, but, okay, still rocks.

Fierce storytelling, some really whack and wonderful characterization, and artwork that has cinematic pizzazz (some really fast "cuts" in this finale, too) and real dark potency.

The episodic attache case with 100 bullets and impunity in their use was a great hook into this tale that became about much more than vigilante justice of a unique sort. And it ends with alligators, flames, knives, strangulations, and yes, bullets.

Horribly dark, compelling, and page-turning stuff. Depending on your POV and character loyalties--heh--this is a justly fitting, perhaps even happy (if seeing violent people meet violent ends is happy to you) or a tragic ending. Take your pick.

Don't bother with this series if you like your stories tame and neat and endings jolly.

Mir

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The end of an era., July 28, 2009

By 

Robert P. Beveridge "xterminal" (Lakewood, OH) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: 100 Bullets Vol. 13: Wilt (Paperback)

Brian Azzarello, 100 Bullets: Wilt (Vertigo, 2009)

If you've been following 100 Bullets, you've probably got the idea that when it came down to the last volume, Azzarello and artist Eduardo Risso were going to blow up the entire world. And they fulfill pretty much every expectation you have in Wilt, the thirteenth and final volume in the series. And while I adored it as much as I've adored every other book in the series, I found myself thinking over and over again that while everything is blowing up, the really big feeling I thought I was going to get from this volume just wasn't there. There's all the physical violence one would expect from the big finish of a noir series, to be sure, but the emotional violence feels...copped-out, I guess. We get it, as we always have, but to a scene, all of it comes from tying up loose ends in the series. (Ever wonder what happened to the thread at the end of The Hard Way that never got tied up? Don't worry.) It almost seems like the authors have spent so much time with these characters that they wanted us to simply cheer at the end. I kept waiting for that other shoe to drop, which has been an inevitability in this series, and it just never comes. (Though I'm sure an argument could be made that the last page delivers it; me, I kind of thought it had the feel of the scene from Hannibal that annoyed so many people and I thought was insanely predictable.)

Still, if you take that aspect away from it, this is as satisfying a series ending as I've seen in the world of graphic novels, and readers who have been following along won't be disappointed. And if you haven't been following along, well, the series is now complete; you can read it all in one gulp, if you like. One way or the other, 100 Bullets is very, very much worth your time. ****

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Best story ever told through comic form, September 2, 2009

By 

Patrick R. Blanchette - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: 100 Bullets Vol. 13: Wilt (Paperback)

100 issues, 13 graphic novels, it's all nasty! Azzerello and Risso make the most clever and spectacular series...that's it, it's just the absolute best.
Patrick B