Today's reommended comic is Stray Bullets Vol. 1 by David Lapham. Celebrating the 10th Anniversary of this Eisner Award winning series, a new printing of the first story arc hits the stores today giving the uninitiated a great opportunity to read the best crime comic being published today(sorry Sin City).

Written, illustrated and self-published by David Lapham, Stray Bullets is an exploration of how unforseen events can lead desperate people to do desperate things. Each issue is a stand alone story but read together they form a fragmented narrative that jumps around in time between the early 80s to the early 90s and across the loosely connected lives of various characters.

In this volume we meet: Joey, both as an emotionally stunted child and as an emotinally stunted, dangerous adult; Virginia, a young girl who witnesses a double murder that will forever change her life; Led, a hood who meets the girl of his dreams at a party and winds up overstepping his boundaries; and Orson, a young man who gets involved with an older woman and is dragged against his will into adulthood.

The stories are Tarantino-like in their violence and the way that the character's lives fit together as a puzzle. The more you read of the series, the more important minor, background characters become. Lapham's real strength though is in how he can get you to relate to these people, who aren't so different from us, they've just found themselves too far gone in situations that have gotten way out of hand. Could probably happen to any of us.

Check out your local comic shop today. If you don't know where your local comic shop is, find it here: http://www.the-master-list.com