Stray Bullets #6: Review

Stray Bullets, David Lapham’s on-again off-again decades long series is back, but with a twist. For readers looking to enter Lapham’s complicated fray of characters in an easy but satisfying way, Stray Bullets: Killers is a great place to start.

Here’s the official word from Image:

In “99 Percent” Virginia and Eli vacation, and meet Boogerman!

After a dicey and poignant courtship Eli, a young teen navigating the world as an amputee, and Virginia Applejack, David Lapham’s long term heroine, are finally a couple. And it’s sweet. Yeah, I know, “sweet” is not a word most Stray Bullet reviewers would regularly use to describe this hard scrabble title but the fact is that writer David Lapham seems much more comfortable exploring the gentler range of human emotion now than he did when the series launched back in the ’90s. In issue #6 we see Virginia and Eli undertaking that trickiest of tasks for any new couple — building a joint future while addressing the ghosts of the past. For both Eli and Virginia the “past” is characterized by an oddball art teacher known as “Boogerman” who played a pivotal role in supporting Eli on his quest to art school, but had some questionable interactions with Virginia when she was younger. The teacher drives a wedge between the couple and Eli and Virginia must come to peace with not only “Boogerman,” but the death of a childhood friend if they are to survive. The plot is classic Lapham –strong tones of grittiness, but with lovely doses of teenage angst.

The art, as always, is provided by Lapham and is just as good as the storytelling. Stray Bullets: Killers #6 provides a wonderful example of why reading books where the artist is also the writer can be such a treat — the script and art sync perfectly, and I was quickly swept away into Lapham’s vision, once again.

Go grab Stray Bullets: Killers #6 today. It’s rocks.