Brian Azzarello

Brian Azzarello talks like his characters: sharp, profane, and coiled with menace — the voice of a man who has spent three decades writing the most dangerous people in American crime fiction. As the creator of 100 Bullets, the hardboiled saga he wrote with Eduardo Risso across a perfect one hundred issues for DC’s creator-owned Vertigo imprint (1999–2009), he rewired what comics could do with the crime genre — and he remains the benchmark it’s measured against. Perfect for fans of Vertigo’s creator-owned legacy, from The Sandman to Neil Gaiman, alongside Frank Miller’s Sin City and Garth Ennis’s Punisher MAX.

100 Bullets handed its central conceit to readers in every issue: the mysterious Agent Graves approaches victims of terrible wrongs, offering an untraceable handgun, one hundred untraceable bullets, and proof of who ruined their life — with the promise that no investigation will ever follow. Out of that elegant engine of revenge stories, Azzarello and Risso slowly revealed a shadow conspiracy called the Minutemen nested inside the American century. The series won Eisner and Harvey Awards, made the New York Times bestseller list, and earned Azzarello a reputation for dialogue with a flawless ear for region and slang. After the 2014 sequel 100 Bullets: Brother Lono, the team reunites on July 1, 2026 for 100 Bullets: The US of Anger, an eight-issue DC Vertigo series rendered for the first time in black and white, as Lono returns to a fractured America on the eve of its 250th birthday. “A lot of blood, blood, blood,” Azzarello warned at NYCC 2025. “Some characters are coming back, though not many of them lived the first time.”

That “coming home” feeling extends beyond one series. Azzarello broke in at Comico in 1992 as production coordinator, rising to Editor-in-Chief before the publisher’s 1997 collapse — a crash that pushed him into freelance writing and straight into the pages of Vertigo. His partnership with Risso is one of the great writer/artist teams in comics: Batman: Broken City, the fever-dream sci-fi Spaceman, the Prohibition werewolf epic Moonshine for Image, and the 2024 horror series Blood Brother’s Mother for DSTLRY, where he sits as a founding creator. He is also one of the architects of the newly relaunched EC Comics line, contributing to the first new EC anthology in nearly seventy years.

His DC resume is dizzying in its range: the villain-viewpoint classics Joker and Lex Luthor: Man of Steel with Lee Bermejo, the New 52 Wonder Woman relaunch with Cliff Chiang that made Diana the daughter of Zeus, Hellblazer and the revisionist western Loveless with Marcelo Frusin, Superman: For Tomorrow with Jim Lee, the pulpy First Wave initiative, and the boundary-pushing Black Label horror Batman: Damned. Popverse has followed the arc of a writer who turned his back on corporate superhero comics only to return for the creator-driven DC Vertigo relaunch — the same story Publishers Weekly has chronicled since the days of 100 Bullets and the Joker.

These days Azzarello writes creator-owned work almost exclusively, still based in Chicago alongside his wife, artist Jill Thompson, and still tweeting only when he has something to say. Whether revisiting the Minutemen or breaking new ground with DSTLRY, he remains the rare talent who built an entire genre’s template — and then made it look effortless.