Dave Johnson's Bullets

One of the more ambitious projects currently running in the mainstream comics world is 100 Bullets, a complicated crime drama written by Brian Azzarello with art by Eduardo Risso. Telling a sprawling, complicated tale over 100 issues (a total of some 2,200 pages), it concludes in March. The set-up can best be gleaned from this blurb: 'the mysterious Agent Graves approaches ordinary citizens and gives them an opportunity to exact revenge on a person that has wronged them. Offering his clients an attaché case containing proof of the deed and a gun, he guarantees his "clients" full immunity for all of their actions, including murder.'

Now, whether or not that, or comics in general, are your cup of tea, you'd have to agree that the series' covers, by one Dave Johnson, are wonderful bits of illustration and graphic design. Here are the covers for the various collected editions of the book so far (each containing around 8 issues of the series).
















The limited palettes, large fields of flat colour, and striking use of shadow and line give these covers the feel of old French crime movie posters, from the era before movie posters became almost uniformly dull "big heads in the sky"-style things.






As a bonus, here are some of Johnson's covers for individual issues of the series. It's highly unusual for one artist to work on every issue of a long-running comics series for one of the mainstream companies, so the fact that 100 Bullets has kept the same internal and cover artists throughout gives it a pleasing level of artistic cohesion.