LINK TO FREE WEB COMIC VERSION OF TESTAMENT #4 (NSFW)
Quick reminder that TESTAMENT can get pretty explicit!
Original solicitation copy for TESTAMENT #4:
“Abraham's epic war with the Anakim giants reverberates through time,
as Alan Stern steels himself to do battle with an army of gargantuan
war machines. But his true enemy is a force more powerful than any robot.”
As expected, Rushkoff’s Chapter Four (#4) Notes help illuminate the biblical details!
Liam Sharp’s art is especially great in this issue. The visual language of the world has,
at this point, been well established, and he’s wielding it very effectively.
I especially enjoy the stylistic tweaks that make the biblical scenes feel ancient and the cyberpunk scenes feel modern, but also that the split is not so extreme that the resonances are lost.
This is such a great image!
I’m reminded of Jack Kirby’s Granny Goodness from New Gods and the wild organic tech from Frank Miller’s Ronin.
Also, the recurring christo-fascist imagery of a plasticine blonde woman advocating
for heartless cruelty with a gold cross dangling just above her cleavage.
We’re starting to get into the plot elements that inspired this group re-reading,
where you can see the emergent prescience of the work.
Weaponized robotics, data tracking, neuroscience, and soon digital currency,
“coin of the realm.”
Our villain is revealed as a decadent tech bro billionaire, really kinda before
that archetype was well established, I think?
I feel like we mostly still had Kingpin/Lex Luther style business magnate/industrialist villains
back in 2006. (Both of whom had specific and intentional DJT inspired make
overs in the mid 80’s.)
Maybe Bill Gates inspired villains started popping up, but Fallow seems more
in the contemporary mold of a Peter Thiel character type.
Dr. Green and Alan Stern both speak of control, which reminded me of the
Law of Eristic Escalation: Imposition of Order = Escalation of Disorder.
Though both order and disorder represent a false dichotomy of pure chaos :)))
It would be interesting to ask the creators, and maybe I will at some point,
to what degree do they consider this work expository vs. visionary?
Certainly sometimes they give us specific opinionated messaging,
but other times it seems like maybe the story takes on a life of its own, and
things emerge organically.
There’s an interesting tension between the early vision of the internet/digital
technology as a tool of decentralized empowerment and the current mood
of authoritarian control. Underneath both of these trends the
McLuhanesque/physical biases of these devices continues to reshape reality
in ways too ubiquitous for us to reasonably perceive:
THE DISSOLUTION OF BOUNDARIES.
I like this line:
“They are slaves-- they fight against the strength of their own will, and cannot win.”
And we’ll be back on August 22nd, for issue #5
same TESTAMENT time, same Jechidah channel :)))
And don’t forget, tomorrow is MAYBE DAY 2025!
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Before catching up, I can certainly see the comparison to Granny Goodness. One of my friends brought up a campaign to have Kathy Bates as Goodness in the DCU and I thought it was a great fit.
ReplyDeleteOne of my favorite moments in any comic is in Tom King and Mitch Gerads' Mister Miracle book when Big Barda tells Orion "Only Granny can teach" https://i.imgur.com/x9YVAM0.jpeg
ReplyDeleteIn The New Science, Vico refers to the Giants who once populated the Earth. One might assume that the Anakims fit into this.
ReplyDelete“Giants naturally existed among all the earliest pagan nations. This is clear from the references to natural history found in Greek myths, as well as from physical and moral proofs we find in civil history.”
“Humankind was at first divided into two kinds of people: the giants, or the pagans; and the people of normal built, or the Jews. This must reflect the difference between the brutish upbringing of the pagans and the human education of the Jews, which shows that the origin of the Jews was different from that of the pagans.”
“The giants in turn should be divided into two kinds. The first were the sons of the Earth or nobles, who gave their name to the age of giants. Indeed they were giants in the proper sense, described in the Bible as ‘mighty men which were of old, men of renown’. The second kind, who are less properly called giants, were the giants ruled by the first kind.”
“By contrast to the giants, the Jews were taught cleanliness and feared God and their fathers, and therefore kept the normal stature with which Adam was created by God […] Indeed, it was perhaps in abomination of giantism that the Jews observed numerous ceremonial laws regarding the cleanliness of the body.”
This last part to me reeks of racism, but I find the parallel between giants and pagans very on point in relation to the story depicted in Testament. As Rushkoff writes in his notes, the giants are “servants of Ishtar—Babylonian for Astarte.”
Interestingly, Vico seems to believe that the giants descended from Noah:
“The impious race who descended from Noah’s three sons lived in a brutish state for many years. Wandering like beasts, they were scattered and dispersed throughout the earth’s great forest. And because of their brutish upbringing, they produced giants in the age when the heavens thundered for the first time since the flood.”
Hilariously, after spending the past few days over at rawillumination raving about Bigfoot due to its appearance in Vineland, I had the mind-bending synchronicity of stumbling unto this theory from Vico:
“The giants by nature had enormous bodies. They must have resembled the grotesque savages whom travelers at the foot of South America say they found in Patagonia, the land named for these Patacones, or Big Feet.”
The gutter is in this episode very well used, as for instance in the panel that shows Moloch/mecha-insect blasting off the VW van on one side, and Astarte intervening on the other. Fantastic art going on there!
ReplyDeleteOn the next page we see a butt-naked Dinah asserting: “Jesus, Jake. This stuff is really hot.”
I couldn’t agree more.
Alan Stern’s wife says to him: “When we met at the academie, you were so idealistic. You’d quote the Situationists!”
Debord’s Society of Spectacle indeed seems apropos here, with the Govt propaganda and fake news being shown on their TV screen as they speak.
Here’s a Situationist quote: “Plagiarism is necessary, progress implies it.”
Put this in perspective with Testament’s showing of the same story being repeated throughout the ages, or Vico’s view of History as cyclical.
If "progress implies it", perhaps the correct way to do it would be for humanity to work its way through the Ages by 'cleaning up' its karma, like an individual supposedly going through successive incarnations, in order to finally escape the wheel of samsara, or "awake from the nightmare of History."
What amazed me the most with this early depiction of an evil tech bro pulling the strings is more specifically how the authors knew already what we all suspect nowadays: that these guys in their secluded private paradise surrounds themselves with naked nubile people having orgies.
I cannot get over how ‘Mr. Fallow’ looks like J.R. Bob Dobbs, minus the pipe. Praise Bob!
Another Debord quote might be welcome at this point: “The more powerful a class, the more it claims not to exist.”
“Dr. Green and Alan Stern both speak of control, which reminded me of the Law of Eristic Escalation: Imposition of Order = Escalation of Disorder.”
I would add that, when referring to Fallow, it seems to me that Green himself realizes that the situation is getting out of hands (he sweatingly describes it as being “far beyond the original plan and attracting even more attention”). Fallow seems totally disconnected from reality, thus illustrating the SNAFU principle as well.
I’ll end with yet another Situationist quote: “Quotations are useful in periods of ignorance or obscurantist beliefs.”
I enjoyed the Mr. Miracle comics in the nineties and underwent A Course in Mr. Miracles.
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