Moonshine vol. 1

Brian Azzarello and Eduardo Risso’s work together on the excellent and long-running “100 Bullets” cemented them as one of the best writer/artist teams in the industry.  Their concurrent/subsequent work on “Batman” also bore this out even though Azzarello’s overwrough vernacular derailed their subsequent creator-owned collaboration “Spaceman.”  The Prohibition-set “Moonshine” is their latest work and I believe the first time they’ve worked together outside of DC/Vertigo.  It involves a good-looking, smooth-talking mobster by the name of Lou Pirlo who is sent by his boss to the backwoods of Appalachia with the job of getting a top-tier moonshiner by the name of Hiram Holt to sign on with them.  Hiram, however, isn’t interested in dealing with any cityfolk lets Lou know that by way of showing him the corpses of the last people who came around asking about his business.  Lou can’t really afford to come back empty-handed, but as he keeps digging deeper into the Holt family business he finds that the secret to their success and security doesn’t lie just with their moonshine.  Rather, it’s because of what happens to them under the shine of the full moon.

In case I didn’t make it obvious, the title of this series is both descriptive of the high-quality homebrewed hooch Holt makes and a pun on what the big family secret is.  Well, it’s only a secret if you’re coming into this series completely blind and didn’t hear Azzarello talk about the series back when it was announced.  As I was listening I found there to be a lot of dancing around that big reveal to little effect here.  In fact, there’s a bunch of literal and figurative dancing around in this first volume that doesn’t really go anywhere either.  While Azzarello and Risso’s storytelling has always been of the “slow burn” variety, there was always something happening in every part of their stories to make the burn induce more ecstasy than agony.  There are moments where things do click — when the other mobsters show up and the bullets and blood start flying — but they’re few and far between here.  Though this first volume ends with the clear indication that things might get more interesting from here, I wouldn’t be too put out if Azzarello and Risso decided to take a mulligan with “Moonshine” and move on to something else instead.