Loveless: Thicker Than Blackwater v. 2 - Softcover

Brian Azzarello

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1845764536 ISBN 13: 9781845764531

Publisher: Titan Books Ltd, 2007

Synopsis

Eisner award-winning writer Brian Azzarello (100 BULLETS, SUPERMAN: FOR TOMORROW) creates a Western for the new millennium. Reuniting with his HELLBLAZER collaborator, artist Marcelo Frusin, Azzarello fashions a tough-as-nails saga that combines all the bloody action and atmosphere of a Sergio Leone film with the provocative storytelling of HBO's Deadwood.

Wes Cutter is a wanted man running from a violent past - the horrors of the Civil War, a brutal stint in a Union prison camp, and the savage fallout of Reconstruction. Now he's on a quest for the one thing in short supply: peace. Joining Wes is his beautiful wife Ruth, a woman who has been to hell and back herself - and hides dark secrets of her own. The road they travel will be a bloody one, leaving a trail of bodies stretching from Missouri to the Pacific Ocean.

About this title

From Publishers Weekly:

In the title story of this second volume by 100 Bullets writer Azzarello of his jet-black, ultraviolent western set in a corrupt Reconstruction-era town, the universally despised, mean-as-a-polecat new sheriff (and former Confederate soldier) Wes Cutter sets about investigating a series of gruesome murders. But the motives and victims are intimately tied to the town's muddy history, and Cutter finds himself targeted as the next job for the undertaker. The main story is preceded by three shorter character sketches, fleshing out Cutter's personal history as well as the backstories of his wife, Ruth, and a former slave turned bounty hunter, Atticus Mann. The stories are built around a series of flashbacks in which colorist Patricia Mulvihill's palette shifts from dusty, twilit tones to sunbaked sepia. The artwork—two chapters drawn by series cocreator Marcelo Frusin, the rest by Daniel Zezelj and Werther Dell'edera—is as stylized and chiaroscuro-laden as a vintage noir movie. What trips up Azzarello's story, though, is its combination of nastiness and understatement—there's a lot more cussing and bleeding than there is exposition. The book's deep shadows, oblique images and thick dialect impede clarity, and it takes several readings to even make sense of the brutal, surprising conclusion. (Mar.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From School Library Journal:

Grade 12 Up–Living in post-Civil War America, Wes Cutter, a Southern rebel, has returned to Missouri after being detained in a Union prison camp. When he arrives, he finds that his home has been taken over by the Union troops who want Wes to join up with their cause. He is also searching for his wife, who is sometimes seen accompanying him, though readers sense that things are not always what they seem. The story is told in flashbacks that are not always clearly delineated. Wes is a character with questionable morals who wants to reclaim what is rightly his, and he will employ any means necessary–including excessive amounts of violence–to do so. The shadowy art is a perfect complement to this exceptionally dark Western tale. With scenes of appalling violence, coarse language, sex, rape, nudity, and racial epithets, this volume puts the graphic back into graphic novel. It will most likely find an audience with fans of Azzarello's 100 Bullets series and Garth Ennis's Preacher series (both Vertigo).–Jennifer Feigelman, Goshen Public Library and Historical Society, NY
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Titan Books Ltd
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 1845764536
• ISBN 13: 9781845764531
• Binding: Paperback
• Illustrator: Marcelo Frusín, Danijel Žeželj, Werther Dell'Edera