MOONSHINE: A GRAPHIC NOVEL SERIES

Just discovered a fun 2017 series by Brian Azzarello and Eduardo Risso

I grew up collecting comic books back in the ‘60s when they cost 12 cents. I favored Marvel’s Captain America, Iron Man and the Avengers over most D.C. comics, though I did have a soft spot for the Justice League members Green Lantern and Hawkman, who attempted to draw many times in the back of elementary school notebooks. By the time adolescence hit me so did an interest in girls and pop music. The day my mother finally tossed out the stack of comics that had growing in my closet, I really didn’t protest, though now I know I could have financed my college education with some of those titles.

Cut to the graphic novel era of Frank Miller’s Sin City circa early ‘90s I began to dip my toe about into comic book storytelling. I’d become fan of noir films and hard boiled novels in preperation for trying my hand at crime prose. So Miller’s black & white vision of Sin City, plus his Dark Knight revival of Batman, made me a semi-regular at comic shops for the first time in my adult life.

But what really hooked me back into buying was the Brian Azzarello and Eduardo Risso series 100 Bullets. Beginning in June 1999, and ending 100 issues later in April 2009, the series began with a simple offer: a wronged person was approached with an handgun, 100 uncompletely untraceable bullets, and proof of who was behind their misfortune. This offer brings you into a world of global conspiracy, bitter rivalries and bloody violence that, admittedly, got me lost more than once. However Risso’s art was always stylish and even beautiful and Azzarello, even at his most obscure, had a deft ear for dialog. The duo won the Eisner (the Oscars of graphic novels) numerous times.

I knew both men had kept working, but had lost track of them until a recent visit to Forbidden Planet in New York, where I found Moonshine Volume 1. The premise of this series is fun as hell — what if you mashed up the Depression, big city gangsters, Prohibition, backwoods moonshine, and werewolves? I ripped through Volume 1, published in by Image Comics in 2017, and was happy to find the series was five volumes deep. I now have all but Volume two and find them more visually striking and narratively engrossing than all the overseas pot boilers on Netflix and Amazon.

If you’ve up for a mix of classic gangster and horror (think Humprey Bogart meets Lon Chaney), then Moonshine could be a good companion this winter.