Eduardo Risso

Eduardo Risso draws the way noir sounds: shadows with the texture of smoke, faces weathered by every secret they’ve kept. The Argentine artist has spent four decades turning crime into a visual language, and his masterpiece remains 100 Bullets, the hundred-issue conspiracy saga he built with Brian Azzarello at DC’s creator-owned Vertigo imprint. Similar in style to the stark cinematic shadows of Frank Miller’s Sin City and the expressive brushwork of Alex Toth, Risso’s art is a masterclass in making black and white feel richer than any palette.

Born in Leones, Córdoba, Argentina in 1959, Risso began drawing professionally in 1981 for the newspaper La Nación. In Argentina and Europe he built his reputation alongside legendary writers — Ricardo Barreiro on Parque Chas and Caín, Carlos Trillo on the celebrated Fulú — honing the expressive figure work and razor-sharp storytelling that would later define his American career. His DC talent profile documents the arc from those early years to his US arrival in 1997.

The partnership that made him a legend began almost by accident: the 1998 Vertigo miniseries Jonny Double paired him with Azzarello, and the assignment led directly to 100 Bullets, which ran a perfect one hundred issues from 1999 to 2009 with no fill-in artists. The book won the Eisner for Best Serialized Story (2001), Best Artist (2002), and Best Continuing Series (2002 and 2004), plus Harvey Awards for Best Artist in 2002 and 2003 and the Yellow Kid Award in 2003 — an awards haul The Beat revisited in a 2021 interview.

The Azzarello–Risso team became one of comics’ great writer/artist partnerships, with a body of work that spans genres: Batman: Broken City (2003–04), the Wednesday Comics Batman serial (2009), Flashpoint: Batman Knight of Vengeance (2011), the surreal sci-fi Spaceman (2011–13), the sequel 100 Bullets: Brother Lono (2014), and the Prohibition-era werewolf saga Moonshine (2016–2021) for Image Comics. Risso also delivered Dark Night: A True Batman Story with Paul Dini (2016) and Before Watchmen: Moloch with J. Michael Straczynski (2013). The pair reunited for Blood Brother’s Mother (2024), a horror series at the creator-owned publisher DSTLRY, and return to crime with the eight-issue 100 Bullets: The US of Anger at DC Vertigo, announced at New York Comic Con 2025.

Beyond the page, Risso is a pillar of the Argentine comics community — since 2010 he has presided over the organizing committee of Crack Bang Boom, the annual international comics convention in Rosario, helping rebuild a scene he inspired a generation to join. Readers can follow his work on Instagram and collect his original art through NRissoArt. Perfect for fans of high-contrast noir, Vertigo’s creator-owned golden age, and any crime comic that understands light as a weapon.