Today, Drew and Patrick are discussing 100 Bullets: Brother Lono 6, originally released November 20th, 2013.

If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off.

-Anton Chekhov

Drew: Chekhov’s gun is one of my favorite writing principles — it insists that writing be as efficient and purposeful as possible — but as a reader, I often find myself wishing I had never heard of it. When writing, Chekhov’s gun is helpfully prescriptive; when reading, it is frustratingly descriptive. Suddenly every gun introduced is a time bomb — there’s no question of if it will go off, but when. That dovetails beautifully with Hitchcock’s famous explanation of surprise vs. suspense (effectively, that surprise is when a bomb goes off at the end of a scene, while suspense is watching that same scene knowing the whole time that the bomb is there), suggesting that each new element must hold our suspense until it comes to bear on the narrative. Of course, we know that this is rarely the case in practice — few writers can sustain that level of dread for such a sustained period — which is why Brother Lono has been such a fascinating study in suspense. Writer Brian Azzarello took great care in introducing his gun, reminding us that it is cleaned and ready to fire, and waiting until issue 6 to finally use it. Continue reading →