This term is sometimes used to describe the unintended fallout that can occur during office politics:

"Well, you know that director hates PC based projects. Your project was just caught by a stray bullet"

"It's nothing personal, you just got caught by a stray bullet"


A comic book (or funny book) written and drawn by David Lapham and published by his independent press, El Capitan Books.

It's about a cast of lowlifes and hoodlums making their way through a maze of small time misadventures. The series is known for it's tragically high mortality rate of innocent bystanders, children especially have a habit of careening into harms way during the course of events.

Each issue in the series stands on its own but also works as part of an over-reaching arch as the stories threads between an ensemble of familiar (but ever changing) cast of characters.

What sets Stray Bullets apart from similar comic books, most notably Frank Miller's Sin City, is Laphams focus on smaller more character driven moments. That said, when SB gets ugly it gets botched nose job ugly

The series is divided into three volumes, each collected in graphic novel form. Innocents of Nihilism, collecting issues 1-7; Somewhere Out West, collecting 8-14;and Other People,collecting 15-22. For a while with Other People it had seemed like the series was heading into a rut, it never seemed like the story worked as a coherent whole, but with the current arch the comic has reached new heights.

Lapham has a awesome talent for creating characters who are morally ambiguous (at best) and who we still find ourselves caring about as they march eagerly to destruction. The characters in Stray Bullets Often find that they are their own worst enemy.

These themes play an especially central role in the current arch (starting with issue #25) as Virginia Applejack/Amy Racecar is held in the clutches of one of the creepiest fictional characters ever cooked up, ever.

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