With this first issue of Stray Bullets: The Killers, David Lapham reminds everyone why they should feel bad about themselves for not missing Stray Bullets more. It's a new story, but it hits all the best beats the series used to hit and nothing else has hit since.
It opens with a stunning sequence with preteen boys talking about women. Fantastic dialogue, fantastic balancing of dark and not. Then Lapham gets into the protagonist's screwed up home life–deadbeat salesman dad who heads to the strip club while the mom works. The protagonist tags along, hidden in the back of the station wagon.
At the strip club, the kid forms a bond with one of the bouncers. Lapham gets in small town suffocation, the father's levels of guilt, the bouncer's personal morality, the kid's inability to understand any of it.
It's a phenomenal issue. I should've been missing Bullets daily.
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CREDITS
No Take-Backs; writer, artist and letterer, David Lapham; editors, Karen Hoyt and Maria Lapham; publisher, Image Comics.
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