The beauty of Keanu Reeves’s BRZRKR is how the premise lends itself to a wide range of genres, especially since its protagonist B is immortal. Not only does it result in the greatest elevator pitch ever – “What if John Wick was a Highlander?” – but it’s led to stories set in different periods including the fall of Atlantis. (I’m not joking.) BRZRKR: A Faceful of Bullets #1 continues this trend, venturing deep into the Western genre for B’s latest adventure.
In 1855, a wedding gone wrong leaves the groom full of lead and the bride seeking vengeance. She finds it in B, who promises to take her to safety. But her desire for revenge conflicts with his desire to find peace – not to mention the wide array of killers her father sends after the pair. That’s where the other cool part of the BRZRKR franchise kicks in.
Reeves has worked with a wealth of comic talent to bring the world of BRZRKR to life, including Matt Kindt on the main series and Mattson Tomlin on the Bloodlines spinoff. With A Faceful of Bullets, he’s landed another great pair of co-collaborators in Jason Aaron and Salvador Larroca. At this point I’m hard pressed to think of a comics publisher Aaron hasn’t worked for this year. He’s been turning out some gems, and that continues in A Faceful of Bullets. Aaron understands that the Western genre has often been used to contemplate the pitfalls of revenge – who’d understand those pitfalls better than an immortal? But he also writes in plenty of action sequences featuring the carnage that’s come to be part and parcel of BRZRKR.
That violence is rendered in plenty of detail thanks to Larroca. Take the opening sequence: when B is saved from being hanged by a boy, the boy’s father comes after him in a drunken rage, swearing he’ll make him “eat the gun”. One page later, the gun is literally buried in the drunk’s face, with teeth and blood going everywhere. Another page has B and his trusty horse being shredded to ribbons by a Gatling gun until there’s nothing left but a skeleton with clumps of flesh and blood hanging off its frame. As if this wasn’t disturbing enough, the color work from Lee Loughridge washes the page in a fiery orange, resulting in an apocalyptic image.
BRZRKR: A Faceful of Bullets #1 continues the expansion of the BRZRKR universe, delivering the violence and character work that’s defined its world within the framework of a Western. Here’s hoping that Reeves continues to scope out great talent and explore different genres with future installments.
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