Review: Moonshine, Vol. 1

Moonshine, Vol. 1 by Brian Azzarello
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I enjoyed and admired Azzarello’s 99 Bullets, especially the first couple volumes. They struck me as extensions of genuine noir, creating and recreating experiments in applied morality: would you, given the chance to do so without consequences to yourself, kill someone? The fun of the early part of the series was that the answer varied, and it’s still on my long-list of texts I might teach in a noir class.

This one offers some of the same virtues. Azzarello can move a narrative along quickly, and Risso draws with a nice urgency and with enough distinctiveness to character that even recurring background figures seem to have consistent reactions and qualities. In other words, we’re dealing with pros, and it shows. As someone who can’t draw and who struggles with moving narrative forward, I have a sense of how effortless they make this, and that in itself is something to enjoy.

At the same time, this falls short of the excellence of 99 Bullets. I was drawn to this (after finding my taste for graphic novels inexplicably wither over the summer) because it calls on history peripheral to what I write about: the Italian-American booze kings of mid-1920s Prohibition. Other than a recurring reference to Joe Masseria – and why him of all the historical figures you might have chosen? – it turns out to be largely ahistorical, with a name pulled out of the history books as window dressing.

That may not be a turn-off to most people – the book doesn’t promise to engage with actual history, and the presence of a werewolf makes clear it isn’t – but I think a lot of the easy stereotyping might. We get Italians who are always goombahs, Appalachians who are always hyuck-hyuck hillbillys, and African-Americans who are always inscrutable, wise, and generous. In such a context, everyone feels flattened, and – despite Risso’s fine artwork – the characters blend together as tools rather than actors.

The one exception is our protagonist, Lou Pirlo, a handsome hood who’s never gotten over the drowning death of his younger sister. Lou gets a chance to redeem himself in Masseria’s eyes (from a screw-up that I suppose gets revealed in volume two) by trying to buy the high-grade moonshine that mountain-king Hiram Holt distills. It’s an impossible situation because Holt – who, for much of this book [SPOILER] seems to be the werewolf – doesn’t want to sell and Masseria doesn’t want to hear “no.”

Pirlo has undeserved good fortune throughout this. He says more than once he can’t believe he’s alive after some close call, and I feel the same way. Nothing distinguishes him from Masseria’s other thugs, and nothing other than his being visited by the apparition of his dead sister, humanizes him. He’s a cool concept for a main character, but he isn’t really developed. (And, from the evidence of 99 Bullets, character development isn’t necessarily Azzarello’s thing; he deals effectively in types.)

Anyway, I found myself losing interest toward the end of this volume. I can see the wheels moving toward something that feels like saga or at least soap operar: Holt’s beautiful but bewitched daughter has some purpose for Pirlo; Holt himself is up against the limits of his power; Masseria will try again; a chance mention of “silver” will mean something; and the beautiful and mysterious African-American Delia will help Pirlo with the magic only she possesses. From where I’m sitting, though, it feels more like contrivance, a story built more from the need for climaxes rather than the genuine product of character and motivation.

I’ll go back to 99 Bullets, but I’m almost certainly done with this.


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