Today, Drew and Patrick are discussing 100 Bullets: Brother Lono 7, originally released January 8th, 2014.

…I’m afraid the heart of religion is fear.

Father Manny

Drew: It’s hard to deny the importance of fear. It is the fundamental driver of our sense of self preservation, and may very well be the most basic, universal emotion there is. Of course, that also makes it the easiest to manipulate. Modern life is filled with organizations trying to scare us: corporations want to scare us into buying their products, political parties want to scare us into electing their candidates — but none of those organizations are about fear in quite the same way that religion is. I’m not just being cynical (and I don’t think Brian Azzarello or Father Manny is when he makes the above statement) — underneath all of that scary stuff about hell and sin is an elemental fear of the unknown: what if our ignorance of things we couldn’t possibly know (i.e. the meaning of life, the existence of a creator, etc.) was bad? Brother Lono 7 finds almost every character confronted by some unknown entity, and the results are decidedly bad for all of them.

The issue follows three separate threads (which Azzarello lays out up front in a breathless opening three pages): Lono’s torture at the hands of Craneo, Manny’s pitiful appeal to Cortez for forgiveness, and June’s attempt to track down Cesar for help. Paulo insists on helping June, but by the time they find Cesar, he’s already been killed by the cartel, and apparently set as bait. Paulo manages to protect June from the ambush, but at the cost of his life. Meanwhile, Manny finds a sympathetic ear with Cortez — that is, until he stumbles upon that pickled baby Cortez keeps behind his desk. Turns out, Cortez was pulling a Usual Suspects all along — he and that baby are Las Torres Gemelas, and he’s going to need to kill Manny to keep that under wraps. Oh, and because this series is this series, that death is going to be doled out in the most religiously loaded way possible.

It’s impossible for this image (with the splayed arms, the rocky hilltop, the dying religious leader) NOT to evoke Christian imagery, but what fascinates me about it is how it sits alongside decidedly non-christian symbology. Manny is pointedly not on a cross, and the fact that he’s tied at five points (wrists, ankles, and neck) in the rough shape of a pentagram feels downright satanic. Mitigating those two extremes is Cortez’s  offhand suggestion that god will sort out his sins, rather specifically recalling Arnaud Amalric‘s bone-chilling sentiment to “Kill them all and let God sort them out.”

Reminding us of a famously Christian justification for indiscriminate killing is fitting for Lono’s story, where he predictably turns the tables on Craneo, unleashing the Lono we’d been waiting for since issue one. There’s plenty of religious parallels to be drawn — mostly from the gratuitous torture we’re already duly familiar with — but I’m more interested in what Lono means to Craneo’s men.

That look of terror on their faces stems from the same fear of the unknown that makes religion so powerful. Only in this case, that unknown is a super pissed-off Hawaiian. I like the idea that both religion and Lono have that same edge on the self-consciously demonstrative scariness of the cartel. Sure, we’ve seen exactly what kind of horrors Craneo is capable of, but maybe Lono’s unseen horrors are scarier. Even this issue’s title — Hell Comes Home — suggests that these poor goons had never seen the really bad shit.

I had settled into a reading of this series as largely critical of Catholicism, but I should have known not to assume anything with this series. To me, this issue is at most ambivalent about our fear of the unknown, but it may very well endorse the notion that we should fear what we don’t know. Then again, Las Torres Gemelas seemed a lot scarier before their secret was revealed, and pulling back that particular curtain has effectively deflated their mystique. It’s tough to say — there are so many fear-mongers these days that could use this kind of scrutiny, which means that the themes are certainly relatable, if not entirely mappable.

As expected, this issue blew my socks off. Azzarello’s potent mix of religion and violence finds a fascinating pulse on both, and Eduardo Risso’s surprisingly subtle art continues to be as precise-yet-ambiguous as ever. Patrick, there’s too much good stuff here for me to tie you down to any kind of prompt, so instead, I’ll just make a statement: I’ve consumed my fair share of stories that grapple with religion, but this is the first one that I’ve ever liked.

Patrick: Well, I patently refuse to accept that you don’t like the 2000 directorial debut of Edward Norton, Keeping the Faith.

But I think you’re right to point out how effectively this series tackles the themes and ideas of Christianity without engaging in them directly. This issue might be the first time that any of the characters address God or religion so directly as to make a statement like “the heart of religion is ___.” Filling in that blank with anything risks making the themes too explicit. But Azzarello is also careful to keep the series from becoming strictly allegorical: even at the end, Lono is not the personification of the motivating fear of religion. As Drew points out after nearly every assumption he’s ever made about this series, nothing herein is ever so straightforward.

Take, for example, the one thing that appears to get a rise out of Lono in this issue: fire. Craneo sees his reaction and makes the obvious connection — Lono is afraid of fire because he’s afraid of eternal hellfire and damnation. Pretty sound reasoning for a serial torturer, right? However, Lono ends up being motivated by Craneo talking shit about what’s going to become of the orphans, and not what’s going to become of Lono’s soul. I think that’s the real crux of Azzarello’s expression of Christianity here: the scale-balancing doesn’t happen in some abstract hereafter, but in the present and it effects people who are alive and scared right now. That’s the blood that Lono can’t stand to have on his hands, and it’s what drives him to break his bonds and become the motherfucking law. I love that moment he gets up from the chair — seemingly having already defeated his captor — and irony of Cesar’s badge seared into his chest melts away.

It’s a marvelously simple image, immediately evocative and empowering after having our hero at the hands of one of the most well-established monsters I read in comics this year.

Actually, Risso’s on fire in this issue — his drawings may be simple, but every scene is so effectively staged that it hardly matters. My favorite scene in the whole issue is June discovering Cesar’s body hanging from the overpass. There are two consecutive pages that play the suspense for all it’s worth, with June approaching the car cautiously, until the camera suddenly shifts to corpse perspective. Blood droplets fall down on June like something out of Halloween. The second page marvelously shows us all the information at once, the unifyingly horrific vertical image of June finding herself under Cesar’s butchered body tying all these moments together in the same instant. If you read this issue digitally on a webbrowser, those pages are presented simultaneously, so the suspense that leads from one to the next is lessened a bit, but I read the issue on my Kindle, so the second page came as a perfectly grotesque surprise. Can anyone let me know if there was a page-turn between them in the paper copy? I think it makes a world of difference. Either way, though, what a marvel that second page is.

I feel like I make this observation every month, but look: Risso signed this page — he clearly knows how good it is.

Drew, there are still quite a few obstacles for Lono to overcome before he can free the Orphans from Las Torres Gemales. And I don’t know that having the curtain pulled back on Cortez and his little brother kills their mystique all that much. The mundane truth — if that’s what it is intended to be — is still pretty fucked up, and implies that this is a guy who still has a few tricks up his sleeve. Hell, to your point, we’re not 100% on what Maddon is capable of, and with Craneo out of the way, he’s going to be the next name of Lono’s list. I am certain that it doesn’t matter within the narrative if Lono is successful in his assault on the compound, but I hope, for the sake of my fragile little heart, that Azzarello and Risso believe in Lono just enough to pull him through. I think I want Manny and June to make it out alive as well, but it’s fascinating how their stories are really just extensions of Lono’s journey.

For a complete list of what we’re reading, head on over to our Pull List page.  Whenever possible, buy your comics from your local mom and pop comic bookstore.  If you want to rock digital copies, head on over to DC’s website and download issues there.  There’s no need to pirate, right?