Jonny Double #1-4
Published by: DC/Vertigo – 1998
Written by: Brian Azzarello
Illustrated by: Eduardo Risso
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Jonny Double—a four-issue DC/Vertigo miniseries from 1998—is crime noir as only Brian Azzarello and Eduardo Risso can deliver. They have carved-out a niche of clever dialogue, intricate plots, and surprisingly superbly crafted art.
Eduardo Risso’s art in Jonny Double is like all of Risso’s art—impeccable but overlooked by most mainstream audiences in favor of more highly polished or eye-catching artwork in the tradition of Jim Lee and his ilk. Risso, however, is a master of two-dimensional design, makes inventive use of lighting and camera angles, and embellishes the primary narrative with subtle indicators that his world is populated by lives being lived outside the main cast, among events unrelated to the plot. It is this narrative detail that separates Risso from his contemporaries, despite Risso’s lack of the more common textural and tonal detail—the “flashiness”—of the most well-known and well-loved American comic artists. Risso’s characters are each uniquely designed, another departure from artists—the late and much loved Michael Turner comes to mind—whose muscle-bound men and scantily-clad women have formulaic and interchangeable features.
Stylistically, Risso’s art can be likened to an amalgamation of Mike Mignola’s two-dimensional sense of design and use of shadow and Duncan Fegredo’s expressive and true-to-life characters (before his work on Hellboy when Fegredo started more closely mimicking Mignola himself) with an attention to rendering a complete and realistic world and narrative that surpasses both.
Azzarello is known for his dialogue—a mixture of street slang and double-meanings—as well as plots that keep the audience guessing and turn on a dime, saturated with sexy scheming women and men with guns whose conflicting allegiances make everyone suspect and leave no one to trust. Jonny Double is no different, and, in fact, is the prototype for Azzarello and Risso’s subsequent—best known—work: the one-hundred-issue DC/Vertigo series 100 Bullets. The main character—the eponymous “Jonny Double”—is a down-on-his-luck former cop turned private investigator contracted to keep an eye on the runaway adult daughter of a man with means. In doing so, Double finds himself suckered into a scheme to steal money from a dead mobster that propels the rest of the inexorable plot forward.
Jonny Double is clearly a comic for “mature audiences,” filled with a little sex and more violence, which would render a faithful movie version firmly in “R” territory, but most high-school students—familiar with sneaking into “R”-rated movies and acquainted with the world-wide-web—wouldn’t bat an eye at its content, even if their parents might.
Recommendations:
Anyone whom enjoys Jonny Double is required to look into 100 Bullets and vice-versa. Azzarello’s other writing credits are also worth a look: including issues 620 to 625 of Batman, the mini-series Rorschach—part of the Before Watchmen prequel series of comics—Brother Lono—an eight-issue sequel to 100 Bullets—and Spaceman, all published by DC (each of which are collaborations with Risso except for Rorschach which features the amazing, eye-catching, realistic, art of Lee Bermejo), and Banner and Cage published by Marvel (both drawn by Richard Corben).
Fans of Risso are more limited in their potential Risso diet. Risso is Argentinian and his American comic work is fairly limited. Aside from Risso’s Marvel mini-series Logan (written by Brian K. Vaughan, best known as writer of Ex Machina and Y the Last Man), fans of his style might appreciate the aforementioned art of Mike Mignola (best known for his creator-owned series Hellboy published by Dark Horse, which has spawned numerous miniseries, spinoffs, and two movies directed by Guillermo del Toro) and Duncan Fegredo (whose work on the Peter Milligan-written eight-issue 1993 DC/Vertigo miniseries Enigma is definitely worth a look and whose illustration of the 1998 comedy comic Jay and Silent Bob, also known as Chasing Dogma, written by Kevin Smith, elevates the writing to a realm of sophistication surpassing its crude and silly humor).
Anyone fond of Jonny Double might also want to check out Frank Miller’s Sin City. It is far darker, more violent, and full of more nudity than Jonny Double—and therefore more strictly limited to a “mature audience”—but satisfies the same desire for crime stories populated by morally ambiguous characters and conspiracies that tie them all together—often due to notions of chivalry, crediting Miller’s protagonists with a moral center that drives them to amoral extremes in order to protect the innocent.
The best Sin City graphic novels are the earliest and most well-known: The Hard Goodbye, That Yellow Bastard, and The Big Fat Kill. These stories have been mined by Hollywood as fodder for movies, to varying degrees of success, but there is another, lesser known, still un-adapted, Sin City graphic novel titled, Hell and Back—the first one to include a fully colored narrative sequence—that is worth a look.
Miller’s art is far more stylized than Risso’s and prioritizes mood and two-dimensional composition over realism or literal detail—limiting its palette to black and white and, occasionally, one other color that varies by series, such as the yellow color of the “bastard” in That Yellow Bastard, or the blue sheets covering a beautiful woman in Hell and Back.
Likewise, the movie Brick starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt may hold some appeal. Though it is in no way affiliated with Azzarello it shares his flair for dialogue and successfully transplants the crime noir genre into a contemporary suburban setting.
Brian Bigelow
October 20, 2016
