Before you decide that Karen Berger and the editorial staff of  Vertigo have radically changed the imprint’s focus, let creator Douglas Rushkoff explain what his new series Testament isn’t... and what it is.

First off, it isn’t an adaptation of the Old or New Testaments.

So what is the premise of Testament?

“The premise of Testament and the premise for Testament are two very different things,” Rushkoff said. “The premise of Testament—at least as much of it as I’m willing to give away at this point—is that we’re moving into a new kind of fascism that it has its roots in some very old patterns of thought and behavior.  

“Testament takes place in a world that looks very much like ours — except for the fact that corporate interests run the government, the draft is being reinstated, terrorism is being used as a pretext for population control, the medias has become a highly controlled propaganda space, all university research is funded in one way or another by military interests, citizens are being tracked by RFID implants, money has become a kind of thought virus that people actually believe in and...wait a minute, that is pretty close to the way things really are!  

“Our main story follows a group of renegades who refuse to submit to the cultural program. They use alchemy, computer networking, media hacking, and a bit of sex magick to see behind the illusions and fight against the powers that mean to eliminate novelty and free will from the human equation.  

“What they slowly come to realize, however, is that these battles have been fought before. Each of their trials has a corollary in the narratives described in the Bible. Does this mean the Bible really happened? Or what?

According to DC’s description, the book addresses the question “What if the Bible were happening right now?” Does that mean that it follows the framework of the Bible, updating the stories to a contemporary milieu, or is it using the Bible less as a story frame and more as a thematic one?

“This gets to the premise for the book. I’m really sick and tired of the Bible being used by fundamentalists as a way to shut down thinking and inquiry. It just stinks, and it goes against the very premise of the Bible—which is about weird revolutionaries who fight for autonomy against all sorts of oppression. I can’t help but think if any of these people actually read the Bible, they’d rise up against their ministers and smite them on the spot.    

“So my big slap in the face to these fundies is to say ‘hey, the Bible isn’t so important because it happened at some moment in history. The Bible is a big deal because it’s happening now. In every moment.’ Every day, I am Cain, discouraged by the way someone else—some Abel—gets credit and attention for doing the same thing I did. We are still living in a world where the monetary system invented by Joseph and Pharaoh enslaves us in lifetimes of debt, where we lose track of our most core desires and disconnect from our compassion.    

“As far as the characters in the comic are concerned, the relationship to Bible develops slowly. I don’t want to give too much away or it’ll be less fun for everyone. So let me say that I begin by telling parallel stories. Abraham’s attempted sacrifice of Isaac becomes a parallel for whether or not Alan Stern will implant his son with an RFID tag so he can be tracked for the military draft. Both are examples of father’s sacrificing their sons for false gods.  

“And in the telling, I hope to reveal the real Bible stories that have been suppressed for so long. Most people think God told Abraham to kill Isaac as some kind of test. If they read the actual Bible and other ancient texts, they’d see that people sacrificed their first sons all the time! It was the normal thing to do. There are still remnants of giant altars in Israel with furnaces into which the babies were dropped. What made Abraham unique was not that he was willing to sacrifice his son, but that he was willing not to sacrifice his son. But the whole story got changed around during the Crusades, when people were supposed feel okay about sending their kids off to war, or letting their children die rather than being converted.  

“So if people see the real story, it’s so much more horrible and exciting, and so much more relevant to what’s happening now.—it is precisely what’s happening now. People sacrificing their children to war in the name of false gods to whom they’ve been literally programmed to pay allegiance.”

Is Testament set in a world where the Bible as such doesn’t exist before this series begins? If so, how does this reality differ from ours? If not, then do the characters at any point realize how strangely Biblical some of their experiences are?  

“I don’t have the vampire problem—you know, where your modern vampire story has to either ignore Dracula completely, or make some reference to it as fictional. Certain characters will become aware that there’s something parallel going on. I suppose I already believe there’s something parallel going on. To me, it’s so very striking in our own reality.  

“But yeah, the Bible exists in this world. It’s just that it’s more than simply a story in a book. It’s a narrative that contains everyone. I can’t say much more than that without telling the next four or five years of story.

“For continuity, there are the characters of the gods, who live outside the frames of the main stories. In fact, they can’t go inside the frames—the frames are occurring in linear time, and the gods live outside it. But the gods will be outside frames from both eras, and will provide a bit of context for the relationship between Bible time and our own.  

“The other reason for playing with the Bible is to break everyone of the notion that the Bible is filled with all this holy stuff. It’s so not. It’s filled with people killing each other with rocks, men raping men, fathers having sex with their daughters—or offering their daughters to strangers in return for stuff.

“And there’s tons of sex magick in there, too, that no one likes to talk about but is completely apparent to anyone who bothers to read the words on the page. Abraham’s wife is a Temple Prostitute. Lot has sex with his daughters—and every messianic character comes from the offspring of that union. Moses has man-to-man sex up on Mount Sinai. God has fights with other Gods. There are monsters and giants praying to Astarte (basically Kali). There’s aliens having sex with the human women. I mean, you actually read the stuff and your jaw just drops. Abraham did what? And he’s a hero?!”

For those who wonder what Biblical passages Rushkoff is referring  to, he offers a few citations. “God of the Bible battles the other gods in some of the Psalms. Mordechai and Ester are based on the Persian Marduk and Astarte. Joshua was Moses’s apprentice, and the Bible talks of their encounters ‘face to face’—which, as any Greek knows, is the sexual position reserved for man-to-man sacred sex - women are to be done from behind.    

“Lot has sex with his daughters because they fear his seed won’t continue. They get him drunk and lay with him. This incest actually leads all the way down to Christ.  

“The Anakim giants pray to the goddess Astarte. Do a Bible search online for Anakim – they’re all over the place. The Horites are big giants, too.  

“But why get your answers this way? It’s like turning the text into a porn movie. You want to get the real goods, you can’t just pull out the nasty bits. You have to see it in context. If you want two easy ones,” Rushkoff added, offering the following Biblical quotes from the King James Version of the Old Testament:  

"The Nefilim were upon the Earth in those days and thereafter too. Those sons of the gods who cohabited with the daughters of the Adam, and they bore children into them. They were the Mighty Ones of Eternity, the People of the Shem.”
— Genesis 6:4  

“There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they; bare children unto them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown.”
-Genesis 6:4

The star of the series is Jake Stern, a man who definitely does not operate in the world outside our window. “Well, it’s not outside our windows exactly, but it’s in quite a few garages and basements. I do a little workshop annually at the Omega Institute with the Disinformation folks—artists like Grant Morrison, Genesis P-Orridge, Paul Laffoley—and lemme tell you, the people who show up to these events are pretty cyber-alchemic already. It’s just a matter of knowing how to cross a few unconventional thresholds, and then navigate the terrain you find there.

“Talk to your friends who have explored sex magick, entheogens, sigils, or even simple Burroughs-style cut-up, and their real experiences will rival anything you’ve seen in a comic book.  

“Consider the magick that goes into creating a cultural icon like the Coke bottle or McDonalds arches. Or the dollar itself—its value is based in nothing but our belief, and its artificial scarcity.    

“And where was ‘artificial scarcity’ invented? In the Bible.  Joseph and Pharaoh. Seven years of feast, seven years of famine, and a whole lot of storage bins.    

“But the kids in my comic are a bit more advanced than most practitioners these days. They live in a giant abandoned indoor city swimming pool, and have all sorts of cool equipment to play with. Kind of like a Survival Research Lab meets Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test fantasy. And they can venture a bit more deliberately through the other realms.  

“As for the main world of the story itself, I suppose it’s basically USofA: the day after tomorrow. The impending economic crash has already happened, the Gulf War has been concluded, fundamentalist Christian doctrine has been institutionalized, and a world anti-terrorist army is being formed under false pretenses.”  

While Testament is Rushkoff’s first comics work, it’s far from his first published work. Rushkoff has found critical and sales success as a writer of both fiction and nonfiction. “I guess I’m best  known for writing some books in the early nineties about cyberculture, electronica, the psychedelic revival—that sort of stuff. I just happened to be writing about it earlier than most people, so it put me on the map. I also wrote book called Media Virus, which unintentionally launched the whole ‘viral marketing’  craze. I meant it as a culture hacking manifesto, but too many advertising executives read it...    

“The underlying message and concern in all my work is that people come to recognize that we are creating reality, together. The world we live in is not a creation of some God—some pre-existing condition. It is a living thing. Meaning emerges through our interactions.  

“So it’s basic ‘reality hacking,’ with a bias towards empowering people to take up their pens or brushes or computers and begin co-authoring our world.

“I’ve also made a couple of Frontline documentaries—‘The Merchants of Cool,’ about how MTV creates teen culture for them. And ‘The Persuaders,’ about the way marketers infiltrate more and more of our reality. So I’ve been working on the same main problems in a number of different ways for quite a while.”    

Rushkoff has been described as a culture critic; will readers find evidence of that in Testament? “Totally. The beauty of this series is that I can put what’s that’s going on in the real world in a great perspective. Just as science fiction helps us see modern issues by playing them out on a fantasy future landscape, a stark, mythological landscape gives me the ability to show the huge repeating dynamics in our cultural obsessions.  

“Really, this is the most radical thing I’ve ever thought to do: showing the Bible as it really is means exposing reality for what it is.”  

Testament also, obviously, offers Rushkoff an opportunity to address an element of our culture that continues to fascinate and frustrate him: religion. “Religion has become its opposite. Religion is the enemy. Religious institutions today are the very forces actively preventing the essence of Torah—the lifeblood of spirituality—from manifesting in this realm. Religions are the gatekeepers on our awareness. The Bible actually says this. God punishes Adam and Eve for seeking knowledge. Who is this God?    

“Today, we punish pretty much anyone who tells it like it is. What happens to reporters or newscasters who challenge the fascistic propaganda of our current regime? What is happening to public broadcasting? And who is supporting this regime? Who is programming their followers to focus on the unborn instead of the living soldiers dying every day?”

Don’t look for political “equal time” in the pages of this series!... .  

One of Rushkoff’s nonfiction works, Nothing Sacred: The Truth About Judaism, seems to encourage an analytical, intellectual, questioning, engaged approach to religion; is it safe to say that Testament, while a work of fiction, syncs with that attitude--and if so, how? “The idea of Nothing Sacred was that the Bible—and religion—are not set in stone. They are being written as we live. That’s the whole point of the Torah (the first books of the Bible). Instead of worshipping death (building pyramids) and sacrificing our kids (to senseless wars), we’re supposed to celebrate life and develop a compassionate ethical system. The newly escaped slaves in the desert said ‘L’chaim’—which is more than some toast in Fiddler on the Roof. It means ‘to life’ and it was a radical thing to say. It was blasphemy in ancient Egypt, and punishable by death.    

“The main point of Nothing Sacred is that the story is still being written. By us. It’s not a closed book, at all. The problem is our ministers and rabbis tend to promote this idea that the Bible is holy and set in stone. That the human story has already been written by God. And we’re supposed to sit and wait for judgment day or the messiah or whatever. When the point of these religions—the reason they were invented—was to give people the strength to revolt against their gods, against the idea that the story is already written. To help people cope with the fact that we are in charge of what happens here.  

“But I better not give too much away...”

What led Rushkoff to develop Testament as a comic book rather than a novel? “I’m an on-again-off-again comic book reader. I have these six-month odysseys into the comics world, then I emerge for maybe a year or two. Something or someone always drags me back in again.  

“I’m telling this story in comics because it’s the safest place for me to do it. I mean, my Jewish book got me blacklisted by a lot of organizations who saw in it a threat to Israel’s public relations  efforts in America.  

“Comic books are still under the radar in some regards. Because of their appeal to ‘kids,’ many people don’t realize how rich their content is. For me, sequential narrative is also a great format in which to tell a story that lives both inside and outside of time. I can have parts of the story happen in frames, and parts of the story happen outside them. Since the deepest theme in my work is really about the relationship between chronos and mythos—historical time and mythological time—it’s great to have a medium in which the most interesting things can happen in the spaces between frames rather than in the frames, themselves.”  

Joining Rushkoff on this series is artist Liam Sharp. Did Rushkoff choose the artist, or did Vertigo put the two creators together? “Vertigo found him and put us together—but he’d be my choice for the book. The process of finding an artist was actually a bit arduous. It’s a matter of finding someone who has enough time—which usually means they’re just coming off a major project. And that means they’re tired as hell.  

“The visualization of these worlds is particularly complex, and requires someone who can drawn in a number of styles and handle new kinds of layouts. Very inventive stuff. Liam seems born to work on something like this.”

Testament, a monthly series from Vertigo/DC, is scheduled to premiere in November.

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