Review: Jonny Double

Jonny Double by Brian Azzarello
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This pre-100 Bullets work from Brian Azzarello and Eduardo Risso pulls obscure DC beatnik private eye Jonny Double and puts him into a typical noir detective set-up. A bunch of restless twenty-somethings out looking for thrills think they've come up with a clever get-richer-quick scheme: steal the money from an inactive bank account belonging to the now-deceased Al Capone. Jonny, who is being paid to watch over the daughter of a wealthy client, gets pulled into the scheme. Of course, nothing goes as planned, and when it hits the fan, Jonny has to figure out who he can trust, and who wants to put a knife in his back.

As a huge fan of 100 Bullets, I wanted to love this a lot more than I actually did. The plot, from Azzarello, is solid enough, but relies on a series of coincidences that end up feeling a little bit like a cheat. As the saying goes, it's ok to use coincidence to get characters in to trouble, but it's cheating to use coincidences to get them out. Unfortunately, a lot of the plot of Jonny Double relies on coincidences, both to get him in and out of trouble, which makes the final act a little unsatisfying.

Risso's art is all orange and blue and heavy shadow. Risso's work is perfect for urban crime fiction, and this is no exception. His work often has a cinematic quality, with scenes playing out in unusual angles and the point of view shifting between characters. One of Risso's trademarks seems to be the big panel showing a wide scene with smaller, close-up, panels laid over it.

While Risso's art is generally well laid out and really matches--or sets--the mood of the story, there's a scene (the nightclub scene) where the Risso and Azzarello have too many things happening at once, and too much of the action is happening off the page, so that it's really hard to tell exactly what is really happening. Over the course of three pages, two characters are seriously injured, but it's not clear at all who did it, despite most of the action happening in a heavily occupied bathroom.

If you're looking for a decent noir mystery, or looking for a work that could easily be a 100 Bullets side story, this is a good option. While the conclusion relies too heavily on chance for my taste, and the club scene is hard to parse, the book does show Azzarello's command of urban crime fiction. Even the smallest bit characters are given a real sense of being, and Azzarello puts a lot of tiny details into the story that really shine through as slice-of-life moments.

View all my reviews