<p> Last week the last collected edition (#13) of <em>100 Bullets</em> arrived. So I started back at the beginning and read all the way through.</p> <p> This is not a shiny, happy story. To give you an idea, if you look at the Wikipedia page <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_characters_in_100_Bullets">listing the main characters</a>, there are only three who are not at least presumed deceased, and of the ones who are marked indeterminate, I, personally, would only consider one of those to be truly likely.</p>

<p> Brian Azarello and Eduardo Risso have created something pretty amazing–a distnictly noir-influenced comic that I like <strong>despite</strong> the rampant, generally brutal and often graphic violence.</p> <p> I picked up the first collection about a year ago, and read all the collections to that point over the course of about a month–picking up the next collection or two each week. The twelfth (and, I suspect, given the significance of 13 in the story, penultimate) collection just came out last week, so over the last couple of days I re-read the whole story–I thought about waiting until the last collection was going to be out, when I realized it was going to be another year. I sure wasn&#39;t gonna wait that long.</p>