Today, Drew and Patrick are discussing 100 Bullets: Brother Lono 8, originally released February 26th, 2014.

We are what he made us to be. To try and be something else…is the greatest sin of all.

Lono

Drew: I didn’t know religion growing up. My parents never took me to church, and somehow, none of my childhood friends ever went, either. It wasn’t until I entered middle school that I made friends with people of any kind of faith — run of the mill midwest Lutheranism, but they might as well have been the pope in my sheltered mind. Being both 13 and an asshole (I know that seems redundant, but I only grew out of one of those), I enjoyed picking fights with them over simple religious tenants. The simplest — why do bad things happen to good people? — was most commonly answered with the wimpy cop-out of “God works in mysterious ways.” That seems like a simple enough “we’ll never know” (and was probably only ever invoked to get me off their backs), but as with most religious answers, that simplicity masks a world infinitely more complex than the question itself. Is everything that ever happens part of God’s “mysterious” workings? If “bad” things can be part of God’s plan, doesn’t that throw the whole notion of morality out the window? These questions lie at the heart of Brother Lono 8, though the answers Brian Azzarello and Eduardo Risso come up with may not be what anyone suspected.

The plot here is as straightforward as can be — Lono rains fiery vengeance upon the likes of Las Torres Gemelas — but as with the rest of the series, it’s the details that really matter. Take, for example, Father Manny’s quasi-crucifixion. I noted last month its bizarre combination of christian and anti-christian imagery (and the loadedness of making the most overtly religious figure a sacrificial lamb the month before that), but Azzarello and Risso take it a step further here, cursing Father Manny with boils and blindness.

Effectively, he’s been the recipient of an anti-miracle, thoroughly punishing the most devout character in this series.

Lono, on the other hand, suffers a crisis of faith so profound, one might call it a conversion, yet he ends the issue kicking back with a big cigar.  The implication is that maybe amoral, even faithless men, are necessary to do (and are rewarded for doing) God’s work. Manny was too passive to stand up to the evil Las Torres represented, but Lono had the strength and ability to do so on his own. He is able to affect justice against those that would threaten a mild-mannered priest and an orphanage full of innocent kids because he is neither mild-mannered nor innocent. He’s exactly the necessary evil, no more, no less.

Azzarello fills in the contrast between Manny’s piety and Lono’s descent (and their respective rewards) with Sister June (who we learn here is actually Linda May). June’s faith was a put-on, and while she ultimately isn’t without some kind of morality, she is more than capable of getting her hands dirty. Her reward? A gunshot wound to the belly — somewhere in between permanent blindness and a relaxing stogie.

If we can take everyone’s status at the end of the issue — dead, wounded, or alive — as indicative of God’s desires (and that’s a big “if”), it’s clear that the ability to do what needs to get done is paramount. That is, so long as you aren’t also threatening a bunch of orphans. Lono is similar to the men he’s fighting in many ways (as Maddon points out around this issue’s midpoint), but because they’ve been established as being evil, we understand their enacting of their own will as bad, while we understand Lono’s enacting of his will as justice. Actually, with Las Torres being so overtly, unequivocally evil, the moral here of doing what needs to be done may not require the judgement (or even existence) of God.

That’s a moral that’s thrilling right down to the 13-year-old atheist in me. Not because it disavows the existence of God, but because it’s so deeply ambivalent about it. Maybe there’s a God, maybe there isn’t. Maybe he punishes the bad, maybe he doesn’t. Maybe our concepts of good and bad hold true, maybe they don’t. It edges “God works in mysterious ways” a little closer to just flat-out accepting that the universe is a chaotic, random place. Again, it doesn’t mean there is no God, but it suggests that there ultimately may not be much of a difference.

Of course, for Lono, it’s not so much that he doesn’t believe in God, but that he may no longer believe in the kind of prescribed lifestyle that the Catholic church would like him to. Inasmuch as there is a plan, Lono is part of it, no matter what. Indeed, according to the quote I opened with, it would be wrong for Lono to restrain himself. To paraphrase Oscar Hammerstein, fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly/Lono gotta cut a hand off some guy.

Oh boy, Patrick, I’ve rambled on here, and still left plenty of juicy tidbits on the table (just like that hand I mentioned). I didn’t really dig into Cortez’s ultimate fate, or even Maddon’s monologue, though both illuminate Lono’s actions in interesting ways. I also neglected to talk about Risso’s art in any meaningful way. Or that Craeno’s ringtone for Cortez was a love song whose refrain translates to “do not tell me no, please just say yes.” Did any of these details catch your fancy?

Patrick: Oooh! So many details to choose from! From that list, my absolute favorite is Maddon’s monologue to Lono — partially because of the powerful poetry of Azzarello’s language, but also how it expands on your idea of whether or not it matters if there is a God. Let’s pull the whole speech out and look at it here.

I’m not going to turn around. I’m not going to see your face. I’m not sure that’s going to spare me but, what the fuck… it might.

Already, we’re off to an interesting start – Maddon’s making the choice to not look at Lono. This is like God, you can either acknowledge a God or ignore it, the end result (regardless of the existence of God) is the same. Whatever’s going to happen to Maddon is going to happen anyway. This turn where he decides that not engaging with Lono might possibly save him is classic denial. Just as denying the existence of Lono won’t save him from a brutal death, so too will denying the existence of God not save him from judgment.

You’re obviously here to kill everyone. I don’t know why exactly, and I don’t fucking care. There’s a lot of blood on your hands, I’m guessing… Mine too. I been in yer shoes. What I never get is why someone with a gun pointed at them begs to know what they did to get it there. At that point, why would you fucking care? It’s as fucking real as reality fucking gets, and you want to know “how did I get into this spot?”

This is is the situation Lono has found himself in for the majority of this series: faced with a crisis of faith, Lono does little to actually reform. Sure, he throws himself in the drunk tank every night and actively tries to shut himself down when he’s moved to lust (blood or otherwise), but he can’t actually change.

The only question to ask is, what can I do to get out of it? When you hear that? That fucking question makes the gun heavier, doesn’t it? Yes sir. You start considering options. Most of the time there’s nothing we can do, but still… the gun’s heavier. And the question’s more of a killer than you are. I mean, there will come a point, man, where that gun is too heavy to lift. It’s inevitable. The trick? Is living to that poi[nt].

This is where Azzarello starts playing around with a couple different ideas at once. The gun represents judgment, and the man holding the gun is God. For as much figurative weight as that carries, it’s also almost literally true. The man with the gun decides who lives and who dies. Redemption — or so Maddon claims — comes from asking over and over again for the will to change. That’s part of the reason we are able to buy Lono’s journey as redemptive, even when it ends in a gratuitous bloodbath: he tirelessly fought to find a way to change, even if he never found it. Then there’s the matter of “the gun,” which Maddon attempts to counteract with a knife. And you know the old saying – never bring a knife to a gun fight. Cortez actually makes a similar reference a few pages earlier.

Now, I can’t quite wrap my head around what this means. Perhaps the only point is that fear of judgment by a divine presence isn’t the only thing that motivates people, but the knife is beaten at every turn in this issue. At least as far as Lono is concerned, that judgment is the be all end all. I think it’s interesting that we don’t see Lono collecting Maddon’s hand — one second it’s there and the next, there’s a gush of blood and it’s separated from his arm. You’d think it was a gun, that Lono shot the hand off, but the BAAMs, BOOMs, and BDUDDAs from the other gunfire in the issue is nowhere to be found. Just one strange sound effect that I sure as shit can’t identify: NNTCCCK.

Well, now I’ve rambled on at length without mentioning Risso’s art. Well, we’re all bad people: maybe I can just kick back and smoke a cigar in the ruins of this Alternating Current.

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