By Shirow Miwa
Viz, 212 pp.
Rating: Mature Readers

Shirow Miwa returns to the world he introduced us to in Dogs: Prelude with the first volume in the ongoing series, Dogs: Bullets & Carnage. The original cast—Mihai, Heine, Badou and Naoto—return and continue upon their respective journeys through the noir-ish, sci-fi action series.

Bullets & Carnage wastes little time reintroducing the concepts and the characters and instead dives headfirst into the action as Badou again finds himself in trouble and his sometimes partner Heine is forced to bail him out. It’s a familiar scenario to anyone who read Dogs: Prelude, but unlike that book this volume doesn’t split its time equally among the four protagonists. Instead, it spends the majority of the 212 pages following Heine around and dropping hints about his past and portents about what’s to come. Badou gets a fair amount of face time due to his close friendship with Heine, and Miwa does spend some time on Naoto’s search for her family’s killer and even suggests possible links to Heine’s murky past. Sadly, Mihai is almost completely ignored and appears for a mere seven panels! I’m hoping this won’t be indicative of his treatment in the rest of the series as he and his story were quite possibly my favorite things from Dogs: Prelude. I guess it makes a certain amount of sense, though: he’s a middle aged man while Heine’s a leather-clad, white-haired, angst-ridden, twenty-something and, well, those are always in style.

The action sequences aren’t quite as wild as they were in Prelude, but Miwa still does a fantastic job at depicting the “bullet ballet” that tends to ensue whenever Badou and Heine are involved. The running battle between Heine and the mysterious Giovanni, which takes up a good chunk of the book, is quite possibly the most kinetic gun fight I’ve seen on the printed page and puts most shoot ‘em flicks to shame. Unfortunately, this energy is a bit of a double-edged sword and at times I felt like Miwa was sacrificing clarity for energy. A good example of this comes as Heine bursts through a door in a decrepit building during his fight with Giovanni. The problem is that it’s depicted in such a way that it initially looks like he came through the ceiling, pouncing down upon Giovanni. It is an effective visual, suggesting Giovanni’s on the defensive and Heine’s aggression, but it was still a bit confusing on the initial read. Once again, I found the lack of backgrounds to be a strike against the book as it’s still unclear to me which scenes take place above ground and which take place below.

It’s an interesting start to the ongoing series, and fans of Dogs: Prelude should probably give this a look based upon the strength of that alone. Still, shifting the focus onto my least favorite character and my least favorite aspects didn’t light me on fire, but it’s stuffed to the brim with cool so I’ll be hanging around for a little bit longer.

Volume one of Dogs: Bullets and Carnage will be available on August 11, 2009.