LINK TO FREE WEB COMIC VERSION OF TESTAMENT #5 (NSFW)
Quick reminder that TESTAMENT can get pretty explicit!
Original solicitation copy for TESTAMENT #5:
“Concluding the controversial first story arc. While Abraham dispatches the giants with his spear, Alan Stern must rely on more high-tech methods to destroy the deadly demolition robots. But the Pharaohs past and present will not take this defeat lying down.”
As per usual, Rushkoff’s Chapter Five (#5) Notes provide a guide through the biblical material.
I’m going to forgo the pre-analysis this month, as it’s my busy time of year, finishing up Tales of Illuminatus! #2 and starting the 2025-2026 school year, but will pop into the comments to cuss and discuss!
And we’ll be back on September 22nd, for issue #6
same TESTAMENT time, same Jechidah channel :)))
What an issue! A perfect culmination of the first storyline into a multifaceted crescendo that sets the stage for a truly wild ride.
ReplyDeleteLiam Sharp is ON FIRE this month! I especial enjoyed the panel cubes in the non-local gutter space. There's a panel where Fallow is casting off his robe in his palace that is just a perfect illustration. This may not be something non-visual artists recognize, but drawing realistically folding and bunching fabrics is a standard art school litmus test for competent draftsmanship, and LS is a master!
The mixture is too rich and my time is too short to itemize everything interesting about this issue, but I at least wanted to toss in my 2 cents worth :)))
Comic book reading seems like a skill to me. I loved Vertigo comics so much back in the 1990's, but I don't read comics much in recent years. I like that books stores like Barnes and Noble have trade paperbacks of comic books and that one can sit there and read them, but I struggle to get into them the rare times I try to read them. I stopped reading Vertigo when The Invisibles stopped in 2000, and I stopped going to comic book stores when Cerebus stopped in 2004. From 2016 to 2019 I read The Walking Dead every month, but since then I have read few comics. Man, I lived for Sandman back in the 90's. I even have the Vertigo Tarot.
ReplyDeleteThe very first page, showing various deities in a scroll library outside of time, reminded me of the concept of the Akashik record.
ReplyDeleteAbraham looking as if he’s straight out of Frank Miller’s 300 with his bodybuilder’s appearance makes me laugh.
I have now decided that Dinah, despite being younger than Jake, is definitely more mature. Miriam has been annoying since the beginning. Maybe she and Jake deserve each other, and Dinah deserves better.
I’m pretty sure that this reading group brought up the money burning as sacrifice discussion before the series came up with theme of currency and gods’ image on coins, which in turn appears eerily concordant with nowadays talks of digital currency in the US and the EU.
Bobby, are we making it happen IRL just by reading the comic book online?
Since the beginning of this series, we’re being presented with the idea of the same mythological battle being reenacted throughout millennia, with humans as pawns of the Gods. But I cannot help but think that, if I was a God, I couldn’t be bothered with such lowly and petty distractions as peeing around the material world in order to signify my control of it. These are supposedly powerful and transcendent entities but they all seem to operate primarily from an emotional-territorial place…
Man, this Moloch dude’s just so anal! Witness him exclaiming “this isn’t fair!” I suspect that Wilhelm Reich would have much to say about the enormous muscular armor he built for himself...
These Gods want to keep on existing? What’s the point of being a God if you are still afraid of your own mortality?
Such immaturity and lack of confidence suggests to me an as above/so below parallel starting from the bottoms up rather than the opposite. Meaning, humans nowadays, for all their technological advances, appear still unable to conceive of the Heavens as anything but a projection of their own most primal fears and passions. What Testament suggests to me is that, in 5000 years, the human race has not evolved a single bit spiritually speaking.
Unfortunately, the Old Testament demiurge and his four-years-old mentality of “me want this now or me break everything!” can indeed be observed in the behavior of many a political figure as of 2025.
Ultimately, I see my suspicions strengthened in the private lives of the bloodthirsty puppet-masters Khammu-Rabi and Mr Fallow.
The first gets his kicks off by getting tied up and f*cked (he calls it a ‘ceremony’), showing an insightful twist in the authority-and-submission mentality, and thus suggesting both de Sade and Reich again, with his psychology of fascism.
The latter, on the other hand, escapes into the void of ketami...some substance that he injects, looking for forces he doesn’t understand, all the while asking for his mommy and facing his own loneliness, as everyone else got excluded from the emotional-anal territory of his own making.
Sadly, I doubt that those who need to hear this the most will ever get the message.
Right on, Eric!
ReplyDeleteI think TESTAMENT's experimental layouts and narrative dissolves probably exacerbate the usual comic book reading difficulties.
I wonder if part of Watchmen's success as a general audience graphic novel is due to the rigid nine panel grid structure?
Great stuff, Spookah!
I have a long standing idea for a general principal, that actually developed during Rushkoff's Technologies of Persuasion course at the Maybe Logic Academy, way back in like 2006: FEEDBACK = CURRENCY
So yes indeed I would very much say our activities here generate digital currency, though more of the manna than money variety :)))
The annotations spell out pretty explicitly the predicament these petty, conniving, all-too-human gods find themselves in:
"The battle lines are drawn between the monotheists and their polytheist counterparts. But the conversation between them essentially gives the whole of TESTAMENT away: without the story, the monotheists are lost. And without active worshippers, the polytheist deities cease to exist."
I tend to think of any divinity that takes on a personal form as a human creation. Not to say their existence has no independent effect, because clearly a well crafted and maintained egregore can have a huge impact, but ultimately they remain limited by their human origins.
Now general principals, like the Dao, seem to have a more durable independent existence.
I suspect Khammu-Rabi, Fallow, along with their contemporary counterparts hunger for manna, but mistakenly pursue money instead. It's not that the hunger itself is insatiable, but rather they feed on the wrong substance, hence the hunger remains, grows even.
Would you care to develop what you mean by "feedback = currency"?
ReplyDeleteWould that be something like feedback as a continual exchange of information, and information = wealth, with the caveat that the communication is done in good faith, since 'adequate communication is only possible between equals', as per the SNAFU principle.
I suppose that 'manna from heaven' could be translated in this case as meaning 'food for thoughts.' I certainly find these reading groups enriching.
You've got the general gist of it, except in this case no caveats, and value neutral exchanges.
ReplyDelete(TLDR: No such thing as bad publicity!)
Also, in our very networked and quantized world almost any interaction can qualify as feedback.
In addition to all the usual forms of feedback, reactions, suggestions, word of mouth, buzz, etc, we have data metrics. The presence and/or absence of sales, clicks, views, shares, comments, algorithmic virality, etc.
The tendency that I noticed, and unfortunately legions of hacks did as well, suggests that both positive and negative feedback can create currency in equal measures, AND even more unfortunately, you don't have to expend as much energy to create negative feedback. Hence click bait, rage bait, hate campaigns, hostile influencers, all optimized for maximum efficiency.
You can see this aspect of the process in action When a bigot racially abuses a child in a public park, and gets powerfully shamed for it, creating a surge of negative feedback, that converts to a 100K GoFundMe campaign.
Not that all feedback gets so successfully harnessed, nor necessarily so literally into cold hard cash. Currency, like feedback, comes in many forms.
The general cyclical process: Information -> Feedback -> Currency
In a healthy cycle the information gets refined by well informed feedback which creates the shared wealth of new and improved information, over and over again.
Optimistically, I suspect we might just need time to adapt to this new cybernetic info ecosystem.
The virtuous cycles should outperform the vicious ones in the long run.
Think of Kanye West, someone who seems to have overfished the negative feedback seas, who now sees diminishing returns on his increasingly, desperately, negative information.
INFORMATION = SURPRISE and no surprise exists in KW saying something inflammatory, so less feedback, and less currency.
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ReplyDelete