Quick reminder that TESTAMENT can get pretty explicit!
Original solicitation copy for TESTAMENT #2:
“The explosive new series by best-selling author Douglas Rushkoff (Coercion, Club Zero-G) and acclaimed artist Liam Sharp (The Possessed) continues. The authorities strike down anti-war protesters with a wrath echoing that of the angry God who rained fire on Sodom and Gomorrah. Just as Lot couldn't save his wife from turning into a pillar of salt, Jake is too distracted by his lust for Dinah to rescue his true love, Miriam, from an even more horrifying verdict.”
I must admit that I needed to consult Rushkoff’s Chapter Two (#2) Notes to help make sense of the biblical story in this issue. Having successfully resisted all Sunday school instruction as a kid, my understanding of the Bible is pretty patchy, and I underestimated how deeply weird it is!
What the fuck is up with that Lot story?!
This seems to dig pretty deep into the fear of the other/strangers/refugees and the resultant horrors of collective punishment/genocide.
It makes sense that we tend to reach back to WWII for our authoritarian / fascist parallels, but it might be useful to follow the roots back to more primal soil. These problems didn’t just suddenly emerge in the 20th century!
Finding and highlighting good people amongst a demonized group is very much relevant currently. Though responding to group dehumanization with lists of exceptions probably accidentally accepts unacceptable premises.
Lot’s wife turning into a pillar of salt is such a vaguely familiar event that I never really processed how deeply strange it is. I guess I assumed there were further details that made it make more sense, but nope! I get why she experienced divine consequences from a narrative standpoint, but the specificity of the salt pillar is so weird, and feels like it comes from a more fantastical mythology.
I like that line from Moloch: “If you kill your own soldiers, old man, you won’t stand a chance against us.”
The simple dichotomy of Moloch as a “bad” god and Melchizedek as a “good” god now appears more complicated.
Also, in-fighting amongst tentatively aligned groups with common enemies seems relevant.
Timothy Leary’s advice to “find the others” remains quite valuable, but how to then achieve harmony with the others, once we’ve found them, remains a work in progress!
The RFID chip attack speaks to our own vulnerabilities via our increasingly symbiotic digital technologies. I know we were all outraged when Snowden blew the whistle on mass surveillance, but I don’t know that we managed to do much to actually stop it, and those capabilities have had another decade to grow in complexity. As bad as it was then, it’s certainly worse now…
Astarte stirring the pot with age gap discourse / taboo sexual fantasies with Jake and Dinah is pretty potent stuff too!
My guess is Jake and Dinah are three years apart in age? He’s still in college and she’s about to turn 18.
Liam Sharp’s art in this issue is especially fun and really shows off his range. I would guess that he was working on a shorter deadline, because Issue #1 was probably developed as a pitch, and he was probably working on his own schedule. Issue #2 is most likely working within the monthly production schedule, which is brutal! Sharp still captures the epic biblical scenes and wild mythic god visuals in the bleed space. For the contemporary scenes he adapts a faster, almost underground, art style, which suits the tone well.
The only thing that tripped me up on the visuals, and this is a pet peeve of mine, is some over rendering by the colorist under some of Sharp’s more cartoony/simple linework.
Jamie Grant, as mentioned in the last issue, is one of the best colorists in the world, and so I’m willing to accept that this is probably something particular to me, but I really don’t like it when the colors overwhelm the lineart.
Now this, on the other hand, is awesome!
Will be curious to see what everyone thinks!
And we’ll be back on June 22nd, for issue #3
same TESTAMENT time, same Jechidah channel :)))
- Bobby Campbell, author of RAW ART, Tales of Illuminatus, Agnosis and illustrator Extraordinaire
I love the discussion of the Lot story in Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein.
ReplyDeleteI like the Timothy Leary blurb on the cover!
ReplyDeleteThat's exactly how I write recommendation letters for my students, iridescent praise!
It's neat that Rushkoff was one of the cool young artists that Leary hung around with in his last few years.
I don't know that I would have guessed that RAW's legacy would be so much more vibrant and active than Leary's a quarter of the way through the 21st century.
Though I do think Leary's ideas and mythology will outlast his complicated reputation and we may yet see a revival of his folk hero narrative.
Generally speaking, most people are way more impressed by the one book cover I did for Leary than the mountain of RAW work I've done.
Rushkoff’s notes are both informative and illuminating, thank you for sharing them as well, Bobby.
ReplyDeleteAll this time I had thought that this particular story from the Bible was about the childish Old Testament demiurge having one of his irrational bouts of anger directed at people who had committed the ‘sin’ of enjoying sexual activity in the ‘wrong’ orifice. So it came as a shock for me to discover that the whole city was in fact peopled with Sadean degenerates basically always on the lookout for someone to brutally gang rape.
And that thing with Lot the ‘good guy’ offering his two daughters to the town in order to make sure that nothing happens to a complete stranger? I find it even worse than Abraham’s attempt to sacrifice his son, at least he had the excuse of ‘God told me to.’
Apparently, Lot’s wife is turned into a pillar of salt because she had “sinned with salt.”
“On the night the two angels visited Lot, he requested that his wife prepare a feast for them. Not having any salt, Lot's wife asked her neighbors for some, which alerted them to the presence of their guests, resulting in the mob action that endangered Lot's family.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lot%27s_wife
But it also seems that this story comes from the fact that an actual salt formation exist there. Indeed, the entirety of Mount Sodom appears to be made of salt evaporated from the Dead Sea.
https://deadsea.com/explore/historical-sites/biblical-sites/mount-sodom-lots-wife/
I have to say that I find a story about an entire city by the Dead Sea being destroyed by great balls of fire falling from the sky to be, let us say, very much in keeping with events happening right now as I am typing this. Eerily so. Talk about circular time…
About the Jake and Dinah thing, Bobby I think you must be right in your evaluation of the age difference. In the dream/fantasy sequence, she is 15 and Jake about 18 or 19. I do not find it particularly shocking, and let’s face it, this type of things happens all the time in real life. Regardless of what local legislation might have to say, if both parties are consenting, I say who cares? A 15 year old willingly having sex is, in my opinion, in much less trouble than a 15 year old sniffing glue on a parking lot or considering suicide.
What I do find potentially more problematic is the comic book itself, presenting its audience with a young woman, drawn in a way that makes her look more like she’s at least 22 (kind of like these teen movies where every actor and actress is in their late twenties), being teasingly sexual and offering herself, but then we’re told that she’s underage. That seems manipulative to me. Like, am I supposed to hate myself for getting sexually aroused? “I’m just fifteen and you’re my tutor” sounds straight out of a bad porn movie. I really would like to take this whole thing in a sex-positive way, but I cannot help feeling uneasy about it, as it creates for me more cognitive dissonance than anything else.
In my view, it’s either a cheap, dirty and unfair trick played at the reader’s expense, or an indication that the authors themselves are getting off on underage girls… Please, someone prove me wrong here.
That being said, within the context of the story, I like that Dinah is the one making things happen. Not only she clearly isn’t being coerced, but having a young woman being romantically proactive and taking responsibility for her sexual needs seems empowering and affirmative to me.
Bobby, your cover art for The Game of Life is fantastic! But hopefully in a few years you’ll be known as the “Illuminatus comic book guy.”
Right on, Spookah!
DeleteI appreciate those additional details on Lot's wife's story.
Her turning into salt seems much less random in that context.
Lot offering up his daughters appears as the true WTF moment in the whole sequence.
And yes, absolutely, we seem to be stuck with the recurring history of cities destroyed by fire from above.
When the comic originally came out readers probably would have connected it to Iraq in the same we can connect it to Gaza now.
The nightmare of history and the horror of the situation.
I agree the Jake and Dinah scene comes across as genuinely problematic and if I'm wearing my editorial/publisher hat I wd have suggested to cut or change it.
Though if we assume good intentions on the part of the creators, and we really have no reason not to, and we deal strictly with what is on the page, there are additional ways to interpret the sequence...
The characters don't know it, but the readers can see that this dream sequence is actually a shared psychic experience facilitated by Astarte.
Meaning, this isn't a flashback to the actual event, but actually a present day encounter on an astral plane.
Astarte has created a simulation of taboo breaking.
It's an interesting thing about the trope of taboo breaking in mythology, esoteric literature, or counter-cultural media, where it is treated as inherently good and liberating.
Taboos in this context are arbitrary restrictions imposed by authoritarian villains and the only problem involves the punishment for rule breaking.
Though really, when confronted with taboos in reality, I find the concern is actually about participating in the causing of harm.
By the way, and just to clear up any potential misunderstanding, obviously my comparison of the biblical destruction of the town with current events stops there. I wouldn’t want anyone to think I’m implying that the real life people getting bombed over are equivalent to the crazed inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah. But perhaps that is how the ones doing the bombing see them? In order to behave in such a way, one has to completely dehumanize the Other, and what the Thinker thinks…
ReplyDeleteI do not think that having the scene we are talking about being a dream sequence in the story fundamentally changes anything. Although Astarte might be the one pulling the strings and making it happen from the gutter, the authors of the comic book are the ones pulling Astarte’s strings, in a sense ‘from the gutter of the gutter’, if you will. Of course, one might argue that Rushkoff and Sharp themselves could unconsciously be under the influence of Astarte, infinite regress, turtles all the way down and all that jazz…
But I hope I do not end up sounding puritanical, as I originally only wanted to point out what seemed like a delicate and controversial issue to me. I agree that we should assume good intentions from the authors. Indeed, the ethical concerns raised by this sequence stem more from our current and local cultural values rather than from any sort of Ultimate Truth. Besides, the joyful and sensuous hanky panky between Jake and Dinah (even if imaginary), stand in stark contrast to the brutal and soul-crushing conception of sex the Biblical story presents us with.
For the adventurous film-lovers out there, there’s an obscure low-budget 1984 flick called Dreams Come True which features a couple having fun and sometimes sexy adventures together when they meet in the dreamworld. Rather than really being a depiction of the astral plane, or of lucid dreaming, we get something that (as I understood it) looks more like teleportation through dreams (maybe?)
The film truly is an oddity, but I found it surprisingly entertaining.
https://letterboxd.com/film/dreams-come-true/
Dreaming about someone I know making an important life decision, and this person having the same dream on the same night (despite us being thousands of kilometers apart that night), is one of the most magical thing that happened to me so far. Although the dream’s content wasn’t sexual in nature, Astarte could have been at play, as I sure had a thing for this person. Sadly, nothing came out of it, possibly because in real life, said person did not make this life changing decision. So it goes.
My relation to her has somehow always been bathed in synchronicities related to Discordianism. For instance, we originally met for the first time randomly in the streets of Krakow, Poland, as I was on my way to attend a Bill Drummond talk. We eventually sort of fell out of touch, for no particular reason. Then, after quite a few years, she popped out of nowhere and back into my life again, literally two days after I had arranged my afterlife proceedings by securing myself a spot in the People’s Pyramid.
One can never be sure if the Cosmic Joke is on us, so just in case, better laugh along. Amor & Hilaritas!
All very right on, Spookha!
DeleteI was actually thinking that the characterizations of the people of Sodom and Gomorrah seem more like dehumanization propaganda than they do the genuine behavior of a depraved populace. A kind of protesteth-ing too much!
And yes! The infinite regress of Astarte's influence. Thinking of the Grant Morrison idea that the Gods manifest emotionally. When our thoughts turn to love, sex, etc, those thoughts comprise the reality of Astarte. (In some sense!)
Love those dream@wake adventures!
And I think I now better understand the emphasis on Pataphysics back in the Maybe Logic Academy days, by both RAW and the more senior students.
Because we have the overwhelming experience of these boundary dissolving connections cascading across spacetime, but they remain completely unreliable and unpredictable.
Thus the mystery continues!