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Idle Hands At Work: Thoughts On Maria Llovet and Brian Azzarello's Faithless #1

Maria Llovet (There's Nothing There) and Brian Azzarello (100 Bullets, Hellblazer, Joker) team up for an erotic comic called Faithless through Boom! Studios. True to form, Azzarello's dialogue is both spare and complete. I don't personally care for Llovet's style, I read it as too loose, but when she's on, she's on, and she's more on than off in Faithless #1. I get the impression she's more on when she gets to draw remarkable clothing. Page six, when a character must change clothes, I think is one of Llovet's strongest in this issue. There's an almost tactile-ness to both the racy bra as well as the long sleeve purple and black top.

Faith, currently unable to bring herself to orgasm, causes a drink to spill on Poppy, an attractive woman. Thus, the meet cute. From there, Faith goes through a terrible day with Poppy, until they hook up.

I forgot how good Azzarello is and there's a scene, or say, a vignette, which illustrates it well. Azzarello names a random person on the street after Nobel-prize winning Japanese author Yasunari Kawabata, a man who believed in the power of vignettes over conclusions. Faith and Poppy, after an afternoon of drinking and flirting, run out of money. Kawabata crashes into Faith on the street, and loses his wallet in the process. (Azzarello and Llovet leave it unclear if Faith picked his pocket.) But, Faith chases Kawabata down to return the wallet. Kawabata spots Faith a hundred dollar bill for her honesty. But look at what Poppy would've done if he didn't.

In that one scene, the team delivers character moments, moves the plot forward, and gives the reader a clue as to the nature of Faith's gorgeous new friend. And, they do it using the name of a writer who saw vignettes as the story and not the moralizing conclusion. In basically one page!

I wait impatiently to see how Azzarello and Llovet resolve the issue's cliffhanger. The cliffhanger recontextualizes almost the entire issue and made me go back and look for nods to it in previous pages. In short, Faithless #1 rewards multiple readings. I didn't expect that. I hoped, when I took a look at the issue, that I could count on the elevator pitch: Brian Azzarello (a man who wrote one of mainstream comics' most notorious magicians in Hellblazer) and Maria Llovet (a woman who drew a sex and witchcraft comic already) could put together a good comic about sex and magic. They did.

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