100 Bullets: Brother Lono 8

Alternating Currents: 100 Bullets 8, Drew and PatrickToday, 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. Continue reading

100 Bullets: Brother Lono 7

Alternating Currents: Brother Lono 7, Drew and PatrickToday, 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. Continue reading