Jonny Double

Vertigo Resurrected

by Brian Azzarello, Eduardo Risso (Illustrator)

In a noir story cloaked in deception and intrigue, broken-down San Francisco P.I. Jonny Double accepts a simple job to watch over a rich man's rebellious daughter. But after being foolishly seduced by the girl he is being paid to keep tabs on, Jonny finds himself mixed up in a scheme to plunder an old bank account belonging to Al Capone. Once the heist is made, Double discovers that his entire case has been full of lies and now the only hard truth that he has is that he is going to die. By the critically-acclaimed creative and award winning team that brings you 100 BULLETS.

Genres: Comics, Graphic Novels, Crime, Fiction, Comic Book, Mystery, Thriller

104 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 1998

About the author

Brian Azzarello (born in Cleveland, Ohio) is an American comic book writer. He came to prominence with 100 Bullets, published by DC Comics' mature-audience imprint Vertigo. He and Argentine artist Eduardo Risso, with whom Azzarello first worked on Jonny Double, won the 2001 Eisner Award for Best Serialized Story for 100 Bullets #15–18: "Hang Up on the Hang Low".

Azzarello has written for Batman ("Broken City", art by Risso; "Batman/Deathblow: After the Fire", art by Lee Bermejo, Tim Bradstreet, & Mick Gray) and Superman ("For Tomorrow", art by Jim Lee).

In 2005, Azzarello began a new creator-owned series, the western Loveless, with artist Marcelo Frusin.

As of 2007, Azzarello is married to fellow comic-book writer and illustrator Jill Thompson.

information taken from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Az...

Reviews

[Ill D · Rating 4 out of 5]

The same team that produced the succeeding series 100 Bullets, is preceded in scope and style by Jonny Double. It's like a prototype and a prequel all rolled into one that very well could be mistaken for an excerpt from the aforementioned. Successes, flaws, and all make for an important read for any Azzarello/Risso fan that sets the stage for the future Eisner/Harvey award winning series beloved by many (author included).

When an ex-cop is hired on by a patriarch to keep tabs on his daughter, the alcohol fueled narrative begins. From a simple odd job, it quickly builds up to an even odder job including a particularly high-stakes heist, Jonny's job spirals out of control. Further layers of deception and lies are revealed with each successive issue, elucidating as much as convoluting the story.

Booze, bullets, and broads find their way into each and every panel. Innumerable dead presidents complete the typical triumvirate+ of gangster fare. And a style that is as descriptive at it is claustrophobic drenches each illustration in meaning and testosterone fueled gusto.

It's a good story yet the same flaws that plagued 100 Bullets are very much here on display as well. Too many threads are on the drawing board and not necessarily all of them coalesce into something cohesive. Questions are left unanswered and answers are left unquestioned.

Instead of an artistic teamtrying to find their style, Jonny Double proves that the style was always there. Just as the typical gangster themes are there, so to are all the platonic materiel that Azzarello and Risso would (re)use for their seminal 100 Bullets series.

Jonny Bullets is a worthy read for fans and casuals alike.

One and a Half thumbs up.

[Philhatch · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not quite my thing, this, but quite enjoyed it all the same. It wasn't clear who was pulling which strings most of the way through, and everything tied together nicely.

[MindProbe · Rating 2 out of 5]

[read in single issues, reviewing trade for convenience]

Jeph Loeb has recalled that upon first meeting Tim Sale, the generationally gifted artist who would subsequently carry Loeb to largely undeserved critical acclaim as his frequent collaborator, he found himself articulating his praise of the samples of the man's work he had seen by saying "You draw such ugly people", having then to clarify at length that he'd meant it as a compliment. Eduardo Risso here likewise excels at ugliness, at coarseness, grit, and grime, made paradoxically beautiful by his striking compositions, by the bold simplicity of his shapes and an eye for telling detail, and by colourist Grant Goleash's lush, absorbing pallette, dirty brown streets under ripe tangerine skies.

all this, complimented by Mark Chiarello's excellent covers, creates a vivid, compelling tone and texture that only makes me wish Azzarello had much more to bring to the table than a wearying air of smug generalised misanthropy. characters needn't be likeable and the world they live in needn't be pleasant, and Azzarello does have a certain ear for the rhythms of terse, hardboiled dialogue, but an overriding authorial voice that's nothing so much as it is snide and self-satisfied grows tedious very quickly (to say nothing of the book's pervading misogyny and, in one scene, overt homophobia).

this is the first of many collaborations between Azzarello and Risso; they would subsequently receive critical acclaim for their series 100 Bullets. I fear this won't be the last of them that I read more for one's contribution than the other's.

[Brent · Rating 3 out of 5]

Here is some good storytelling and comics by the team that later produced 100 Bullets.
I missed the 1969-1970 DC Showcase issue debut but mostly enjoyed this character - well, the original character, Johnny Double - in a few 1972-3 issues of Wonder Woman by Denny O'Neil and Dick Giordano.
Mildly recommended.

[Berslon Pank · Rating 2 out of 5]

A sketch of what we got in 100 Bullets.

[Roybot · Rating 3 out of 5]

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.

[Shawn · Rating 4 out of 5]

I dug this 4 issue miniseries out of my comics collection to re-read, so if they made any changes when they collected it, this review won't reflect them.

I'm not one for crime/noir fiction (or comics) - it generally seem locked into its traditional tough-guy rituals so securely that I lose interest quickly (although I imagine that could just as easily be said of horror fiction) - I am trying to shake up this opinion a bit, though. That said, I really dug JONNY DOUBLE (and I'm sure Jonny would "dig" that I "dug" it), a Vertigo imprint reinvention of a 60's detective comics character, a bit of a swinging beat detective in his day. Here, we see a roughed up, aged Jonny (I assume he's got to be staring at the early end of 50) still hanging out, living life on skid row and making no money. Jonny's a nice inversion of the "tarnished knight in a corrupt city" cliche of Chandler-esque detectives. He's a beatnik/60's drop-out ex-cop who quit because he didn't like the way the "pigs" worked over the flower people. Now, he's still scrabbling and generally failing because of his bad luck (before the story starts in earnest, he's inadvertently responsible for 2 deaths, a client and a friend), getting drunk and trying to drum up business. This comic follows his adventures as he hooks up with a group of young underground hacker/rave types, trust-fund kids smart enough to plan a seemingly perfect crime, but without the aged persona front-man capable of pulling it off. Cue Jonny, dig?

But, y'know, Jonny doesn't think it's a good idea and initially rejects them. Cue the hot girl, who Jonny proceeds to make a lot of mistakes for....

This is a fun read and I wish they'd have done more with this version of Jonny, he's affable but fallible, a tough guy but a hipster, an anachronism but still smarter than a dumb lug. I hope he's hanging out on a beach somewhere, smokin' gage and jazzin' on the poetry of the wind and the stars.

The art is also excellent, caricatures of the main players, sliding into grotesques in the background. Well worth your time, dig?

[Joe Kucharski · Rating 4 out of 5]

Looking for a hard boiled tale? One of a down-on-his-luck PI who gets wrapped so tightly around the soft, manicured finger of a femme fatale that he agrees to a bank heist? Want to read about a former hipster now rough-talkin’ zero with a craving for bad beers? Then jump on in to Vertigo’s JONNY DOUBLE mini-series. Save for the occasional shark going after that trail of blood, the water’s just fine.

Before the advent of 100 BULLETS – and when 100 BULLETS was a fresh, easy read full of mystery – Brian Azzallero and Eduardo Risso plied their first creative venture in a vein that was, in the late 1990s, only, and successfully, tapped by Frank Miller. Although certainly nothing new in terms of the genre was presented here as the story ran through all the proper cliché beats that such a tale should take – the scheme within the scheme, the backstabbing, the slight twist at the end – Azzarello and Risso create a fun tale that explores not only a relatively new venue of the time, that of cybercrime, but also of the generational gap that was approaching with the end of the Twentieth Century. Double obviously represents that tough era of yesteryear that is fighting to stay relevant using both fists with the occasional head butt. The kids, all beautiful, seem to only care about the present: getting money and going to raves, work be damned. In tales such as these, however, all parties, regardless of their age, are damned.

Risso, like the aforementioned Miller, loves playing with shadows, but doesn’t parlay his use of negative space to the extreme. His panels flow as his characters move. Azzarello’s hip dialogue does its thing equally as well, the on-going monologue a homage to the medium.

Like most genre tales, excellence and entertainment are garnered not from originality, but style. JONNY DOUBLE is loaded with style.

[Wesley · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book collects the four issue mini-series that was the first collaboration between writer Brian Azzarello and artist Eduardo Risso. This was the start of a successful partnership that has since produced 100 Bullets, the current Spaceman and some Batman stories.

Jonny Double is an ex-cop turned private investigator whose latest client has just turned up dead. The down on his luck Jonny is then hired by a mysterious Mr. Hart to find out what crowd his daughter, Faith, is running with and to keep her out of trouble. Everything seems fine until he is persuaded to impersonate the son of Al Brown (AKA Al Capone) to close out his daddy's inactive bank account. However, the account is not as inactive as the Faith's crew think and instead of scoring $300,000 they lift $7 million. Jonny's world goes downhill fast as the kids start turning up dead and Jonny has to protect Faith from a legendary hit man.

This is an excellent book from Azzarello and Risso. A modern day noir crime caper with all the elements one might expect including a dumb PI falling for deadly femme fatale. Some of the parts of the story might be a bit too clichéd but the quality of the writing and art is such that you drawn along into the twisted narrative completely. There are enough red herrings to keep you guessing throughout the story and the ending neatly wraps up all the threads from Jonny's past and present. The only thing that slightly jarred for me was Jonny's speech patterns which were infused with 60s beatnik/hipster figures of speech. But otherwise this fabulous book should appeal to fans of 100 Bullets if they haven't read it already.

[Brendan · Rating 2 out of 5]

A hard-boiled noir crime story cut from the same cloth as 100 Bullets, both in style, art, and writing. Jonny is a low-rent P.I. who gets roped into helping pull a burglary, only to find that the job and its aftermath are way more complicated than he'd expected. This has everything: mobsters, a femme fatale, a sap with some gumption, and a bunch of violence.

The comic is okay, but the mystery gets a little confusing at the end. Azzarello jumps ahead and tells the last pieces in flashback, which doesn't really work for me -- I had to puzzle over the pages a few times to understand it. It's a nice little noir story, but probably not worth the $13 price tag on the back. Read a 100 Bullets collection instead.

[Kevin · Rating 3 out of 5]

There isn't really anything wrong with this graphic. It has everything you'd expect to see in a noir story or movie. It's vulgar, witty, keeps you thinking and even manages to entertain, but the one thing it lacks is compassion. The main character isn't even all that likable so it makes it difficult to even care what happens or who it happens to and how. Not bad for light reading.

[Fugo Feedback · Rating 3 out of 5]

No recordaba para nada que había leído esta primera colaboración entre Azzarello y Risso. Ojalá le hubiera escrito una reseña entonces porque ahora no puedo opinar mucho de nada hasta no pegarle una relectura.

[Andrea]

I like Azzarello's stuff, I really do, and seeing him with Risso again is obviously very nice. However, I just couldn't finish this one. Sometimes his storylines (while expertly crafted)are a bit dense and I had more compelling things in my stack. Perhaps I'll get back to it sometime soon.

[Caleb · Rating 3 out of 5]

A perfectly solid, enjoyable crime drama by the 100 Bullets creative team, who have the genre down pat.

[Álvaro Arbonés]

A veces olvidamos que ningún género es sus tropos. Sólo sus tropos. Nadie negará que en el noir el crimen que sale mal, el tipo duro de vuelta de todo y la femme fatale deben estar ahí, pero eso no significa que sea necesario que estén de la forma que cabe esperar. Existe espacio para reinventarlos. Para darles una vuelta de tuerca. E incluso cuando no se hace, todavía queda espacio para otra cosa: ser interesante en la ortodoxia.

Brian Azzarello es un autor ortodoxo. No ortodoxo en el sentido que podríamos decirlo de Ed Brubaker —quien respeta los códigos de los géneros para ir más allá, para profundizar en la psicología de personajes y tropos—, sino ortodoxo en el sentido puro del término. Ortodoxo como un novelista clásico de noir.

Jonny Double tiene todos los elementos clave. El tipo duro, la femme fatale, el plan que sale mal. Incluso una mínima patina de política de ala izquierda, tan característica del género cuando no se sumerge, directamente, en el hardboiled.

El problema es que hasta allí llega. Hasta la ortodoxia.

Todo intento de Azzarello por hacer misterioso, profundo o con un revés profundo al conjunto acaba pareciendo vago y perezoso. Si es que no directamente ininteligible. Algo a lo que no ayuda que el dibujo de Eduardo Risso, por lo demás lo mejor del cómic, recuerde poderosamente al de Frank Miller, haciendo inevitable la comparación con la obra seminal de aquel, Sin City .

Y en la comparación, Azzarello sale perdiendo.

Pero seamos justos. Jonny Double es un buen noir. No uno revolucionario. No uno elegante. Pero sí uno que tiene todo lo necesario para disfrutarse como cualquier novela de dos centavos e ideas movidas por vertiginosas sacudidas en el carácter y las circunstancias de los personajes.

Porque en ocasiones, todo lo que necesitamos, es una buena y noble dosis de vieja ortodoxia.