REVIEW: Moonshine #1 - 2

Writer: Brian Azzarello
Art & Colors: Eduardo Risso
Review: Madman

I pulled the first issue of this series off of the shelf for two simple reasons: the title and the epic cover, which is hands down my favorite cover that I’ve seen on a comic in a while. Absolutely perfect. Who isn’t a fan of old school pinstripe-wearing wiseguys? Well, here were have three silhouetted in a grass field packing all kinds of nice toys . . . take my money. I’m not sure when the first issue came out. It just kind of got shelved until recently when issue two suddenly appeared in my folder at the LCS. That’s when I remember I hadn’t read the first issue yet, and it was for some strange reason residing inside of the curio cabinet. For the record, the 2nd  issue's cover is way less awesome than the 1st issue's eye candy, and that was a serious disappointment.

In truth, my love affair with this series sadly ended many pages before I finished reading the 1st issue. What started off like your classical wiseguy story of bootlegging, hustling, beat downs, etc. turned into something else that was taking me places I do not wish to go. Our adventure starts out innocently enough with a boss sending his top wiseguy from New York City down into the heart of Appalachia, Deliverance country deep, after the maker of what is apparently the best tasting moonshine ever. I can respect that . . . I’ve had some good moonshine.  

As soon as our wiseguy gets into the mountains I started caring less and less if I finished the
book. The dialogue kills it for me. I get that hillbillies, the locals, and the New Yorkers have to be
shown speaking differently, but the drawls and dumbed-down redneck twang absolutely killed it
for me. I don’t know, maybe it’s just me, but it came off as forced and really seemed to suck all
the momentum right off the pages. The interior art seemed to be running in place as well.
The panel by panel slow motion shot of a dude dropping his shotgun or whatever was just
torture. The colors were my favorite part aside from the cover and that’s just sad. I took one for
the team and grabbed #2. All hopes I had to enjoy this series died a very violent death as soon
as the werewolf shows up and stops the moonshine from making it  to NYC, crashing the vehicle
carrying the white lightning and eating everybody’s face. I got the impression that the werewolf
was the old timer mountain man running the still . . . more gangster, less werewolf please.

No one likes werewolves anymore . . . that’s over. Sparkling vampires killed the relevance of every
other classic monster except our beloved brain-eating zombies. More gangster, less werewolf. I
get it. It’s clever. Moonshine . . . moonshine . . . werewolf. Nope. Fantastic first cover or not, two
issues was enough. This’ll be my stop. This was a real disappointment in my opinion and the
worst book I have picked up from Image in a long time.