LINK TO FREE WEB COMIC VERSION OF TESTAMENT #7 (NSFW)
Quick reminder that TESTAMENT can get pretty explicit!
Original solicitation copy for TESTAMENT #7:
“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.”
Rushkoff’s Chapter Seven (#7) Notes are available here.
I’ll add my two cents in the comments again!
And we’ll be back on November 22nd, for issue #8
same TESTAMENT time, same Jechidah channel :)))
Also! Oh, frabjous day! Tales of Illuminatus! #2 "The Invisible Crown" is now available!
(Digital versions available now! • Print pre-orders are otw!)
Buy links and preview pages all available here!
https://talesofilluminatus.com/
https://talesofilluminatus.com/
- from Bobby Campbell, Wilson's Illuminator
My, comic books have changed over the decades. Lately I have looked at Avengers covers from the sixties.
ReplyDeleteFor me, this is where the Bible goes from being temporarily weird to utterly nonsensical. Douglas Rushkoff’s notes help, but only a bit.
ReplyDeleteSo we have Cain working his ass off to produce something of value, necessary for the subsistence of life, and who then freely makes an offering of it to God. But no, that’s no good. “You have not learned the lesson that your brother Abel has.” Said brother Abel kept his fat ass sat on the grass, didn’t do a thing, and then took an animal’s life like the bloodthirsty psychopath he is, and THIS is being rewarded, THIS is the correct behavior that Nobodaddy wants to see. Man, sorry to say but God is a complete douche.
Cain even masturbated onto his crops, I mean, what could say ‘I <3 U God’ better than this?
Moreover, if that is the foundation myth all three monotheistic religions have, I’d say it’s no wonder civilizations arising from those have slowly but surely for the past 3000 years been working their way towards the self-destruction they now seem to be on the verge of.
As for getting rewarded for not doing anything while those who work hard get punished, this sounds to me suspiciously like the birth of capitalism.
I was lucky enough to be born and raised outside any sort of religion, meaning I never held much of a personal beef against it. But discovering now how filthy and repulsive many ideas in the Old Testament appear to be, I am starting to see it as a sort of manual on how to become the worst possible kind of human being.
At this point I wasn’t even surprised that the two biblical brothers would fight about who’s gonna get to have sex with their mom. What did surprise me was Rushkoff’s explanation that this element was his, for the sake of simplicity.
Cain hiding a dead body under the rug so God won’t notice made me laugh.
(‘Abel? Nah, haven’t seen him in a while, definitely nothing to see under the soil here, God’)
In the other timeline, Greta going for both men made me roll my eyes, like come on girl! I won’t blame her for being promiscuous (although Alan wants to see it as “date rape”, she clearly has been letting it happen), but I would blame her for a complete lack of foresight veering into sheer stupidity. She also has terrible taste in men, going for pedantic, self-absorbed, unethical psychos with hubristic egos.
I guess chances are high that Greta’s child might very well be Mr. Green’s rather that Alan’s. Especially seeing how Green is the one most knowledgeable about fertility.
Sorry if my comment this time around sounds pretty negative, but I find that there’s a painful lack of likable characters in this comics series. Sure beats Sunday school, though!
Spookah, I finally caught up with the series and, like you, I'm having a hard time "rooting" for anyone here. While I was raised in the Methodist Church, generally one of the more "tame" branches of Protestantism in the States, I have a strong dislike of the Biblical God and Abrahamic faiths. As a child I almost raged at a Sunday School teacher when I learned one of the stories about the Ark of the Covenant. In Samuel this one guy, who's name eludes me right now, tries to keep the Ark from falling to the ground. (If you remember your Indiana Jones, you can't touch the Ark.) So God, being the capricious bitch he is, strikes him dead. Five year old me couldn't wrap my head around the story at all.
DeleteI always liked the pagan gods much better because at least no one was trying to justify their actions to me and I could contemplate them on my own.
And there were plenty of superstitious and bigoted folks in my church, although we "weren't as bad" as other churches. This led to my longstanding mistrust of anyone who professes to be Christian. "Good" Christians were never as outraged by the actions and words of "bad" Christians as I was. Oftentimes I was told by the "good" Christians around me that my reaction was worse than the ignorance and hate the "bad" Christians spewed.
For example: as an older teen I worked as a clerk in my family's pharmacy. One of the customers was also one of the vilest human beings I had the displeasure to share air with. I refused to wait on him and would go into the back when he came in- someone else had to do it. If I had had my druthers, the guy would have had to get his medication elsewhere. At least once a month he would write a letter to the local paper, usually spewing homophobia but occasionally some sort of other prejudice. He kept a sign in his yard that charmingly said "Reject Jesus and Burn." But I was the one who was being dramatic because I didn't want to deal with him. (He was, needless to say, extraordinarily rude and uncooperative. I hope you've found out the truth of the adage that "hell is reserved for those who believe in it," Mr. Neil Eddy- you lived a much longer life than you deserved.)
Sorry for the rant, I guess I'm concurring? I don't even know...
Dr. Green really aged like shit, huh? I guess that's what smoking grass will do to a body.
ReplyDeleteWhat year do we think this is taking place?
I'd rather believe that Mr. Green's heartbreak is what made him age so much, although he already was ugly from the inside. He probably gave up weed shortly after, or engineered his own strain laced with weird evil transhumanist compounds that binds onto the endocannabinoid receptors. Note how he also gave up the hippie necklace.
ReplyDeleteFrom plant lover, his sexual frustration turned him into an angry fascist who feel the urge to take it onto the rest of humanity, just like W. Reich predicted (I'm still going through the Mass Psychology book).
I suppose that part when Alan, Greta and Mr Green are young is supposed to happen a few years after the original publication of the comics, say ~2010. And the events told in the first issues are about 20 years later. I like how they remain vague about precise dates. 'The story is timeless' type of things.
Good to hear from you, and thank you for your rant. I was myself feeling like I might have gotten overboard with my previous comment, getting emotional and using meaningless terms such as "filthy", rather than keeping the amused distance I usually practice maintaining while exchanging online around those parts.
Hope you'll be following along in the future, as I nonetheless still enjoy this particular reading group, but it does feel a tad lonely in the comment section.
I think your heartbreak theory is correct. I was joking about the weed- or at least I hope I am, as I'm not going to age all that gracefully if my quip proves true.
DeleteI am fully planning on following along. This Thanksgiving break I'm hoping to get some more stuff done on the blog. I am finishing up Vineland so I can add something to Oz's excellent final post on Tom's blog. I'm also a year overdue reviewing Bobby's adaptation of Illuminatus!. I am also going to propose another slower paced reading group later this month.
@Eric - I love those early Kirby Marvel books. It took me several years to really get Kirby's art. It wasn't until I saw some of his original pages that I was able to see the dynamism and extra-dimensionality.
ReplyDeleteFair amount of conceptual overlap between Kirby's New Gods and TESTAMENT, in terms of participatory divine myth-making. Interesting that the New Gods were originally conceived as the next iteration of Norse Gods after Ragnarok in the Thor book, but Marvel wouldn't let him.
@Spookah - I like the theory that the rejection of Cain's vegetarian offering probably has something to do with the earliest Gods having their basis in the predatory animals that terrorized our early hominid ancestors. Bear goddesses and all that.
No qualms at all about acknowledging the negatively charged aspects of the story!
Rushkoff seems very much a "touch of grey" type of writer, and I don't think you'll find many all good or all bad characters as we proceed further.
@Gregory - I share your antipathy for the Biblical God! Though being an entity comprised of narrative consensus seems quite vulnerable to retroactive continuity adjustments :)))
I love the Bible as a piece of writing, hate it as a guide to life. (But that does probably have to do with so many interpreters of the book.)
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