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Stray Bullets Killers #1

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    Ian Jane
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  • Stray Bullets Killers #1



    Stray Bullets Killers #1
    Released by: Image Comics
    Released on: March 12th, 2014.

    David Lapham's fantastic crime comic Stray Bullets vanished from racks back in 2007 but proving that good things really do come to those who wait, Image Comics has brought the series back. Not only are they offering up a collected edition of what came before, but they're publishing some all new material, written and illustrated by Lapham, in the form of Stray Bullets Killers.

    The story begins in 1978 and takes place in a strip club outside of Baltimore. Here a boy named Steven watches his babysitter give an older man a lap dance. Cut to two days later and some of Steven's friends are retelling the story in a backyard. They talk, as boys are apt to do, about boobs and their collective experience, or lack thereof, in touching them. One of the boys, Eli, shows off some drawings he's done and the rest of the boys are so impressed they ask him to do drawings for them. He agrees, but then has to run off to watch his baby sister. And he does, until his dad isn't paying attention, at which point he hides in the car and winds up sneaking his way into the nudie bar where his dad gets a private dance.

    Meanwhile, another of the bar's patrons, a man named Scottie, tells a working girl named Caroline to lay off the coke. Seems she's been needing a little something extra to make it through the night and still try to get to school, but she's failing. Eli realizes this is his friend Andy's hot sister. The club owner, Lonnie, sends Caroline back to work. Lonnie mentions gun running to Scottie while Eli's dad quickly realizes that he knows Caroline, and that he knows her dad. He leaves the club in a panic, Eli still hiding at the bar and his baby sister home unattended. As he flees, he's snagged by Ronnie, the guy Scottie and Lonnie left working security outside. Scottie drives him home and Eli tells him how he made it into the club in the first place but before Scottie can get him home, he tells Eli to look at the ground and cover his eyes. Gunfire erupts and people wind up dead. Scottie drops Eli off like nothing happened and Eli manages to fool his dad into thinking he's been home all night.

    The next day Eli tells one of the other boys, Barry, that he say his sister Caroline at the strip club. Barry responds by beating him up and calling him a liar and a faggot. Eli heads inside and busts his dad on the phone to Caroline, after which he tells him he has to go take care of a sales call. Eli knows where he really went and when dad comes home late at night and asks him to come downstairs and watch Star Trek with him, the boy declines. He's scared of his old man. He's seeing something in him he's not used to seeing in him and he knows he's spending a lot of time in the back room with strippers while his mom is working the night shift. And then Caroline winds up dead…

    This one, and rightly so, ends on one serious cliffhanger. Lapham has not lost any of his touch for crafting interesting and believably human (read: FLAWED) characters, the kind that often have good intentions but which have trouble resisting temptation. You know, guys like you, guys like me. Real people. He writes them well, giving them real personality and offering up enough background information on their respective situations to make us interested in their stories. And with that hook out there, he pulls us into the seedy world where Stray Bullets takes place. Fast paced, nicely drawn in stark black and white and never short on the seedy side of things, with this issue Lapham sets up big things to come. We don't know where he's going to take us yet, how he's going to weave the story of the typically horny boys with that of the obviously ruthless Scottie, a man very capable of murder, but we know he's going to and we definitely want to go along for the ride to see how this all plays out.

    Stray Bullets was away for a long time, but it's back and it's just as brilliant and ridiculously addictive a read as it ever was.











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