LINK TO FREE WEB COMIC VERSION OF TESTAMENT #1 (NSFW)
Quick reminder that TESTAMENT can get pretty explicit!
Original solicitation copy for TESTAMENT #1:
“From the imagination of best-selling author Douglas Rushkoff (Coercion, Club Zero-G),one of the most iconoclastic and acclaimed minds of our era, comes a series that exposes the "real" Bible as it was actually written, and reveals how its mythic tales are repeated today. Grad student Jake Stern leads an underground band of renegades who use any means necessary to combat the frightening threats to freedom that permeate the world of TESTAMENT— a world very much like our own. They employ technology, alchemy, media hacking andm mysticism, discovering a modern threat that has its roots in ancient stories destined to recur in the modern age. With intricate, darkly detailed art by Liam Sharp (THE POSSESSED),TESTAMENT takes place in an unapologetically uncensored Biblical universe, chronicling the grim confrontations between humans and their angry gods. Those horrifying encounters, full of murder, magic, monsters, sex and sacrifice, echo the forces at work beneath the surface of today's high-tech and highly ideological conflicts. In a story as thrilling as it is sure to be controversial, Jake must overcome romantic, psychic, supernatural and epic obstacles on his way to uncovering the reality behind an eternal story in which he, and all of us, are trapped.”
Right off the bat TESTAMENT announces its intentions to play with the formal structure of the comic page.
In comics we have the panels, the boxes that contain the individual moments of the story, and then there’s the gutter, the spaces in between the panels, which is secretly where the magic happens, as explained by Scott McCloud in Understanding Comics.
Rushkoff & Sharp have created a structure where they have two stories running within the panels,
(one set in biblical times and another in a near-future dystopia) and then another higher reality narrative running explicitly in the gutters, a pantheon of gods populating the spaces in between.
Our current cast of Gods occupying the gutter and bleed space of the comic pages are:
- Moloch
- Melchizedek
- Astarte
Here’s Rushkoff to explain:
“Right in the first issue, I suggest that it's the Canaanite god Moloch (and not Hashem or the main Bible god) who instructs Abraham to kill Isaac. Now the actual Torah doesn't quite say this, but if I say so myself, it's a fascinating possibility. Even conservative scholars would agree that what makes Abraham unique is that, unlike the others around him, he decides not to sacrifice his son. (It's what people did to appease the gods, after all.) This was the beginning of Judaism: a new religion, dedicated to a new, kinder god who did not require child sacrifice.
So why not have the command to Abraham to kill his son come from one god, and then the countermand come from a different god? It makes the shift from one set of gods to another much more explicit.”
From a Reality Sandwich interview with Rushkoff: Testament A Comic Book for the Ages
I’m intrigued that James Joyce and Finnegans Wake both come up as influences on TESTAMENT in that interview…
We actually have pretty in-depth annotations to the series straight from Rushkoff, so some of the job of explication is already done: https://testament-reading-group.neocities.org/TESTAMENT_NOTES_1
Of course it’s one thing to imagine a world like this, and quite another to successfully build it like Liam Sharp has done!
Sharp’s style has this wonderful timeless quality that makes it perfect for this story. He’s just as adept at far flung sci-fi gadgets, aliens, and experimental layouts, as he is with sword and sorcery landscapes, ancient monsters, and grounded storytelling.
Many artists, myself included, have styles that are very timebound, very representative of the era they inhabit. For example: If a future art historian looked at Michael Avon Oeming’s fantastic art from his and Rushkoff’s Aleister & Adolph graphic novel, I suspect they could very easily tell you the era in which it was drawn:
Liam’s art, on the other hand, blends together many styles from many eras, along with his own unique voice, and in the same piece you might see something that simultaneously reminds you of Barry Windsor Smith, Albrecht Dürer, Michelangelo, and nothing at all! An image that could just as easily be a 15th century woodcut as a 21st century digital illustration.
Jamie Grant must be mentioned as well! I’m not always the biggest fan of modern comic book coloring, but Jamie Grant is a very specific exception! I know him primarily from his work on Morrison & Quitely’s All Star Superman, where his gorgeous colors, under Quitely’s delicate perfect lines, helps fully realize some of the best sequential art I’ve ever seen.
My problem with most modern coloring is that it attempts to re-render what the artist already drew, with diminishing returns. What Jamie Grant does is accentuate the line art, bringing it to life, without overpowering the illustration.
Best example I can point to is the panel where Jake and Dinah are sitting beside the water tank. The texture on the tile, the subtle blue glow coming off the water, the refracted water surface details. So great!
This panel stands out to me as well because of the phrase “resonant field.”
This quote from Douglas Rushkoff’s novel Ecstasy Club has stuck with me for over a decade:
“We need to create one resonant field–an ongoing pagan mass–always initiated from the same location, at regular intervals. We keep hitting it, again and again. Each party is a beat of the drum.”
As Rushkoff mentions in his notes, the tank allows our modern characters fleeting access to the gutter/bleed space of the gods, escape from the panels of the comic!
- Bobby Campbell, author of RAW ART, Tales of Illuminatus and illustrator Extraordinaire
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Thank you for posting this. My paper copy should arrive by Friday.
ReplyDeleteExcellent! Looking fwd to your take, Eric :))) And very many congrats! I just got my paper copy of Straight Outta Dublin today, and it looks magnificent!
ReplyDeleteThank you. I love the cover Rasa created.
ReplyDeleteAleister and Adolph's art actually reminded me strongly of Lynd Ward's woodcuts. Yet Sharp's work seems very bound to the early-aughts style of comic book art. It reminds me of Jacen Burrows' style of illustration. I would wager my perspective is, as the less informed, skewed.
ReplyDeleteI am very interested in where this series goes with Moloch and Melchizedek. (Of course, I'll keep my eye on Astarte.) I am personally very divorced from reverance of any of the Levantine deities, and I wondering who I should root for.
You did a great job highlighting the technical brilliance of this issue, I look forward to more of your illuminations!
I see what you mean w/ the stark/simple black and white shapes in the Lynd Ward woodcuts!
DeleteIt actually looks like he was one of the early forerunners of that late 20th/early 21st century cartooning styles that I see in Michael Avon Oeming's work.
Something real quick on the contemporary storyline in TESTAMENT: Speaking of that early 2000's era! Something that I noticed w/ my own comic, "Agnosis!," is that the bleakness of the second term George W Bush years do feel very compatible with our current times. That grimy dark paranoia, sinking down towards some awful unknown rock bottom, with callous postering excusing horrific dehumanization.
Same as it ever was I suppose, but the vibes feel roughly synonymous to me...
First of all, many thanks to Bobby Campbell for leading this new reading group, and to Apuleius for hosting it. I like the idea of having a group study of a comic book.
ReplyDeleteI have to say, I really like where you’re going with this post, Bobby, very interesting.
I was not familiar with Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics, but I definitely want to check it out.
Just to make sure I understood correctly, the pace will be one issue per month, with the start of a new one on the 22nd, and there’s 22 issues, correct?
22 Issues, because of the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Has each letter been assigned to a given issue by the authors? If so what is the order?
This discussion about “the gutter” I find fascinating, particularly the use of it made by Rushkoff and Sharp. This way of giving a visual aspect to the idea of the Gods delving in a dimension intrinsic to the material world the characters inhabit, but that somehow they can only observe the end product of the deities’ actions.
Bobby, you bring up the panel with the water tank in order to make a point about the coloring style. But if I got this right, the water tank in the story also allows the characters to get a glimpse of what’s going on in the gutter. This is suggested by the fact that Astarte is there, amidst their multiple visions.
The tank being connected with the idea of a ‘resonant field’ reminds me of Rupert Sheldrake’s morphogenetic field, a term which RAW borrowed when renaming the neurogenetic Circuit in Quantum Psychology. This would indeed be the realm of (lesser) gods and demons, elves and fairies, archetypal figures etc. This is where the boundaries between personal unconscious and Jungian collective unconscious blurs. With this in mind, I find that Rushkoff’s mention of Joyce and Finnegans Wake in particular makes a lot of sense, as FW attempts to recreate such a space.
I also think it on point that on this very panel, a mention of ayahuasca appears, since the brew seems to take psychonauts to a similar space as well.
According to Rupert Sheldrake’s more scientifically oriented theory, this field does in fact work through resonance (see for instance his experiments with maze-solving rats).
Although he was talking about editing in cinema, this quote from film director Raul Ruiz might equally apply to comics, the gutter, and our current discussion:
“Two images placed side by side are linked and mutually concerned, though they do not stop reaching back to the field that they came from.” (from his book of essays ‘Poetics of Cinema’)
I find that this works well with the idea of the battle of the gods happening outside of spacetime, which explains the resonance between the story of Abraham and the modern dystopian arc going on. It could perhaps be said that the Biblical arc and the modern one are actually happening at the SAME TIME.
This seems sadly true to this day, with the Middle-East still being such a hot spot that, through a butterfly effect of sorts, the Western world appears very much impacted by these events, and thus the entire planet. I do not necessarily want to steer the discussion towards this political can of worms, only to point out that this looks very much like resonance to me.
Now, in his introduction, Douglas calls the Bible “the source code on reality hacking”.
DeleteBobby, I heard you, probably on Maybe Night, advancing the idea that with FW, Joyce was perhaps attempting to write ‘a new Bible’. The Wake seems to be out of spacetime, and with RAW calling it a ‘psychedelic book’ on several occasions, one might wonder if FW might become a modern source code on reality hacking, one that might resonate more with the headspace of 21st century critters.
In fact, I also wonder if Illuminatus! might be such a book as well. Bobby, you have noted how historical and fictional events from the trilogy seem to be part of the reasons of the mess we’re in nowadays, and I have pointed out that Nkrumah Fubar’s voodoo dolls of the political heads of USA, Russia and China could be welcome today just as they were 50 years ago. I suspect that Illuminatus can indeed be used as source code for reality hackers, and if Operation Mindfuck worked, then Operation Mindfix could work just as well with Tales of Illuminatus.
One last word. In Doug’s introduction, he also declare: “we still practice idolatry through our worship of the almighty dollar (in God we trust).” Since this first issue of Testament concerns itself with the notion of sacrifice, I feel compelled to quote Jonathan Harris (AKA Money Burning Guy), from his Money Burner’s Manual:
“For two thousand years the dominant archetype of sacrificial ritual -the pure form to which all sacrifice aspires- has been of the Son by the Father. This is the ultimate sacrifice that can be made without killing oneself. It is the most powerful representation of the most complete annihilation of one’s sovereignty that we have been able to imagine thus far. But thanks to the madness of Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty in a boathouse on the Isle of Jura on the 23rd of August 1994 we have a new archetype. My view is that it moves us forward. And if we’re able to assimilate money burning into the way we are, then we open up new possibilities about what we may become. It could be powerful stuff, this money burning magic.”