100 Bullets, Vol. 5

Crime fiction, as a genre fascinates me, although I don't read a lot of it. Part of it's because it's rather uniquely named; science fiction stories, for example, contain fiction driven by science, and horror stories contain horrific elements, etc. A good Crime story, though, isn't really about crime at all - it's about Justice, and that is clearly the case wit 100 Bullets.

There's an interesting moral question asked in the story, one that parallels Plato's Ring of Gyges myth; if you were given the tools with which to kill someone, without fear of reprisal, would you do it? What about if the person you're asked to kill is someone who also ruined your life, and you know that they'll never face justice under the legal system? When does “street justice” become justified?

That philosophical aspect is really what makes 100 Bullets worth reading; if it was just a bunch of stories where Agent Graves gave people a gun with 100 untraceable bullets, it wouldn't be nearly as interesting. I'll definitely be picking up the rest of this series, though, to see what kind of morality tales Azzarello chooses to tell next.