LINK TO FREE WEB COMIC VERSION OF TESTAMENT #8 (NSFW)
Quick reminder that TESTAMENT can get pretty explicit!
Original solicitation copy for TESTAMENT #8:
“The resistance regroups in Part 1 of the 3-part story "Down to Egypt." Jake is
now a fugitive, and his RFID-implanted dog Bucky must divert the army.
Heir-turned-revolutionary Alec Middleton — like his Biblical counterpart,
Joseph — reveals his hidden allegiances. And Amos gets lucky.”
Rushkoff’s Chapter Eight (#8) Notes are available here.
Make sure to keep your eyes peeled for a cameo by a very familiar face!
I’ll add my two cents in the comments again! For real this time!
Just getting caught up on everything now…
And we’ll be back on December 22nd, for issue #9
same TESTAMENT time, same Jechidah channel :)))
December 22nd, in addition to being the day after Maybe Night, is also the first annual INVISIBLE COLLEGE REUNION! More details forthcoming :)))
- from Bobby Campbell, Wilson's Illuminator
There was briefly an error in the html that had a second page 20 instead of page 21, but it is fixed now :)))
ReplyDeleteLiam Sharp returns to art duties after two very solid fill in issues by Peter Gross w/ Gary Erskine inks, with another impressive multi-genre virtuoso performance.
It's not easy to keep multi-page conversations visually interesting, but LS is equal to the task, and then letting loose when the scene shifts to either biblical or sci-fi environs.
The old-school hacker Mr. Wilson, teaching his students how to hack reality is a nice touch!
The moral ambiguity of the TESTAMENT cast continues to swirl around.
Calling out benevolent tech platitudes as manipulation back in 2007 is pretty good!
This would have been around the same time as Rushkoff's Technologies of Persuasion class at the Maybe Logic Academy. Where he did indeed warn us that Web 2.0 was a walled garden trap!
I thought Wilson as disciplinarian was an interesting twist in an issue full of them. Having Alec juxtaposed as Joseph and our protagonists as his slothful and decadent brothers certainly does increase the moral ambiguity.
ReplyDeleteI really like the idea that Joseph's powers came from the pagan gods, thus partially explaining his rise in Egypt.
It is also interesting that Green refers to Alan as "our boy."
We recently wondered what might be the time frame of the ‘present’ in this story and I ventured that it might be just a few years ahead of us in the future. Looking at some of the panels in this issue, I now feel compelled to revise my guess as some elements suggest to me a later date, somewhere in the second half of the 21st century perhaps. I am thinking of the look of the terminals at the cyber cafe, the ruins of a city where vegetation crept back in and makes it look like Chernobyl, or the HR Giger-inspired technology of the military industrial complex.
ReplyDeleteI admit being totally unfamiliar with this particular Bible story. Joseph sports a fantastic multicolored coat, but behaves like a little brat (“wait until father learns about…”).
It’s great to see Mr. Wilson, I just wish he did not ask Alec to become a snitch, pretty uncool of him.
Dinah still goes around half naked just to make sure that the men around her (both in the panels and readers holding the comic book) keep on drooling. Which also makes me think that this resistance group appears very 2000’s. If it was thought up nowadays, half of them would be of unclear gender, and all of them would probably form one big polycule that’s way beyond arguing over who’s been sleeping with whom.
I like how on the panels with Kathleen, a ‘freedom’ graffiti then becomes ‘edom’, which could read as ‘Electronic DOMination’.
Again, I find Rushkoff’s notes interesting. Because it’s the Bible, the strange occurrences are seen as pushes from the Gods. But if one would chose to ignore the gutter and only see the ‘material world’, it then might look like a series of synchronicities. That being said, it does not appear to me as if any of these characters is consciously aligning their will with that of the Universe, rather they all seem to be simply following very gross passions such as pride or jealousy, making themselves pawns of various deities.
“The whole world is made up of code.”
I think we are here getting close to the authors real intent, as Rushkoff already announced that he saw the Bible as a grimoire full of reality-hack tricks, and that the actual aim of the comic series is to empower readers with these very tools.
Spookah, regarding the timeline, your point makes sense. On the other hand, I can see it as still set in the near-future. Science fiction, especially (in my opinion) cyberpunk has a way of overestimating the aesthetics of the near future. While proto-cyberpunk novel The Stars My Destination is suitably set a few centuries from the time of writing, the proto-cyberpunk author PKD seemed to assume that a lot would happen in the late twentieth/early twenty first century. (I guess the "overestimation" is endemic to science fiction in general.)
DeleteThis preyed on the back of my mind when I was a teenager, but Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash made me appreciate how the aesthetics, while not perfect, are still somewhat accurate. I first read that novel in 2010 or so, and while we certainly weren't in Stephenson's vision of burbclaves, ultra-capitalist microstates and the Metaverse this was a period of time I was first noticing HOAs, the bailing out of the banks that caused the Recession and everyone's heads were going up their/everyone's asses via smartphones. (I've always been convinced that Snow Crash was tacitly set during the 2010s.)
While I was going to make a comment about how we do have a Metaverse today because tech moguls are incapable of reading comprehension, I learned that Stephenson has advised Blue Origin. I'm very disappointed.
I absolutely agree that this comic is very "2000s" in spirit and vision. And that Rushkoff is fucking with the characters and readers with Dinah.
Ah, yes: 2010 was also the year America was officially fucked beyond saving by the Citizens United travesty. FOQNE indeed.
DeleteI do not keep up with contemporary cyberpunk literature. Has William Gibson or any of these people been writing some near-future dystopia from the vantage point of the 2020's yet? I mean a version of the world, say, 10 or 15 years into the future and based on the state of things as of today, technology-wise. The recent plague years made me think that health-related reasons, playing on a very primal fear of death, might be used in the future by governments or corporations to steer societies towards fascistic directions.
DeleteThis all makes me want to go read Transmetropolitan again.
Great stuff!
ReplyDeleteI think there's an interesting blending of time periods here creating a nice temporal disorientation.
The prescient media theory and sci-fi visual design gives the cyberpunk timeline a genuinely futuristic feel, but sometimes the realities of the 2006-2007 world poke through, everyone having flip phones for example, but then further, Rushkoff is writing about youth rebellion while he himself is part of the faculty. Consequentially, our cast seems much more like kids from the early 90's, Gen X hacktivists, slackers, etc.
The overall effect of these blended sensibilities creates for me a sense of presentism. (Where literalism fails hermeticism takes over?)
Which I guess is just restating the premise of the book! Using a narrative in the "past" and in the "future" to make the present moment visible.
Though maybe not necessarily our present moment in terms of specific qualities of the zeitgeist, but the living eternal now, the endless opportunity to create something new :)))
Weird to see Joseph's family as white (and white Egyptians before the Greek conquest).
ReplyDelete