A collection of interesting, loosely linked stories won the Eisner Award. The black and white drawings get a bit too busy on occasion but this is otherwise an engaging graphic novel.

A bit like Brubaker's "Criminal" series. Each issue is a separate story that is loosely connected to the other issues. Characters recur and the timeline jumps around between the late 70s and the 80s. It centers on a community of street criminals and a little girl who's life is wrecked because of them.Very dark stuff. Some of the stories are quite good, but the Amy Racecar issue throws everything off. It seems to take place in the same "world" but it's grimly farcical instead of just grim. It doe...

Stray Bullets is a group of interconnected noirish crime story vignettes, jumping through time. It originally came out in 1995, a year after Pulp Fiction which I can only assume was a heavy influence given it's similar story structure and themes. Modern day, it's going to get a lot of comparisons to Brubaker's and Phillips's Criminal even though it preceded it by 20 years.In these 7 issues we get introduced to many of these characters which will keep popping up. We also get the first Amy Racecar...

Really awesome art and stories. I hope the stories become more connected in the following volumes. Only a few of the 7 stories presented here contained the same characters. I wasn't shocked by any of the violent themes, although at first they did seem to only be there to shock and entertain. The later stories, however, were more restrained. For a slim graphic novel this explored a lot of territory. I'd recommend this to fans of comics, as well as fans of violence/crime stories.

So my friend told me this story once how she accidently rented 28 Days Later, the zombie horror flick, instead of 28 Days, the warming tale of an alcholics journey to recovery. She said she had a blanket over half her face and kept wondering when Sandra Bullock was going to show up.This was me and Stray Bullets. I'd heard recommendations for 100 Bullets, but it had been awhile and when I saw this title I picked it up. So I'm starting to feel like shit as I read about these people and drugs, sexu...

I feel like I missed the bus on this series. I remember hearing about it years back, but never picked up an issue. I now just started reading and most stuff put out by El Capitan is out-of-print right now. These stories are great. If you read graphic novels at all, you should check this out. You can still get good deals on them at eBay.

This is an amazing first volume. I love the structure of the book, with its kaleidoscope focus on some many characters in some many timeframes. More than once I found myself flipping back and forth to make sure I understood the connections. The storytelling is also very strong, with most of the issues ending with rather shocking moments of the sort that a more traditional comic would be afraid to include, because they'd create too much change.But the interconnections aren't just critical for thi...

At least the pictures were neat. This collection of tales stretches from the morbidly retarded to the why-you-gotta-be-so depressing, yet the storytelling and sequencing sometimes show genuine talent. The portrayals of low-lifes and shitty family dynamics are a little too real, with all the good-time chunks thrown out and replaced with basic bareboned black humor. The more interesting stories tie together the same loose company of strangers (think Tarantino's Pulp Fiction, do doubt an inspiratio...

This was interesting...an interconnected series of stories, most of them revolving around one young girl, who witnesses a murder one night, and how her life kind of goes to hell after that. I'm not sure everything here really works, though, and this volume doesn't wrap up neatly. The story about Amy Racecar, world's greatest thief, seems wildly out of place and pretty nonsensical to boot. Lapham's artwork is rather slapdash and kind of hard to follow at times. I'd read another volume if it came

So I started maybe five years ago but had never finished this volume of Stray Bullets, a pulp fiction series from the nineties, not fully appreciating the art at the time (I was probably reading some stuff that was more polished, more stylized, such as 100 Bullets or Sin City, at the time), but some conversation here nudged me to check it out again and I felt very differently this time about it. It reminded me right away of the (also nineties) over-the-top gutter violence of Tarantino’s Pulp Fic...

Stray Bullets gives me a lot of anxiety. So much so that when I first started reading this volume in June, I had to stop halfway into the book, I was so unnerved by the stories. But I finally picked it up again today and finished it.I have to say, it's an incredibly written book. The plots are very tight and tense, the art is moody, it's all great stuff. But the stories themselves are absolutely miserable and depressing, it's the noir-iest of noir comics out there. And it seems like it only gets...

I didn’t read this in the ‘90s when these comics were first released because I was experiencing my own loss of innocence and running from troubles while getting into worse ones...:) So, this series scratches those nostalgia and regrets itches soooo satisfyingly.

An interesting collection of loosely interlocking violent crime stories, that left me with intrigued but mixed feelings.This volume collects a number to self contained, typically violent, crime focused stories, which when read together start to show some connected characters (with one exception set over 1000 years after the other stories). Individually each story works quite well, often playing with the readers expectations and taking the story is the opposite direction from what is expected.Whi...

It’s tricky to talk about Stray Bullets without acknowledging Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, which came out the year before Stray Bullets debuted in 1995. The clever dialogue, likeable criminal characters, and violent, interlocking stories must’ve felt derivative like the million Tarantino copycats that popped up in his wake. And yet Stray Bullets is its own thing. It shares only superficial similarities to Tarantino’s masterpiece and possesses notable differences to make it stand out separately. Inn...

My first five-star read of the year!I've been meaning to read this book for years. I can't remember where I came upon it, but I read someone somewhere compare it to Quentin Tarantino (who I was a big fan of when I was a teen - I've watched Pulp Fiction more times than I can count), which is what persuaded me to add to my neverending to-read list. I wish I had picked this up sooner, because it's already shaping up to be one of my favourite comics series ever and I'm only one volume in.The work re...

An exceptional book on so many levels - but note for those that it is applicable, there are triggers galore!Exceptional in that each issue deals with a different period in time, with the first trail blazing issue set 20 years AFTER issue 2!! Technically crime fiction, but much more a look at the dark underbelly of crime with the people on the edge in the mostly American White communities - with a superb cast of characters across all ages and genders. One of the key characters is a sub-teen girl

'Stray Bullets, Vol. 1: Innocence of Nihilism' collects the first seven issues of the series from the mid 1990s by David Lapham. The art is great and the well written stories veer crazily out of control between morbid humor and outright violence. Ready?The stories take place over a variety of years and a few of them are linked. From low lifes sent out to bury bodies, to an innocent young girl who's life is changed when she witnesses a murder. Things take place at a crazy party where a bright you...

A great collection of short semi-related stories.

4 1/4 stars

I'm slowly working my way through the issues in between other things and it's clear that Lapham is long form plotting in a big way because the size of the storyline (44 issues, I think) and the first seven are very disjointed at first. The characters are starting to overlap enough now that the shape of it all is a bit more in view but it's still very rough at this point.