Testament, Vol. 1: Akedah

Strong start to a very interesting series.

I love the parallel ancient and modern storylines, and think he uses the visual separation between gods and humans very well indeed. I also appreciated the interaction between gods not generally believed in by the same sets of people - he has some really ambitious ideas in that respect and pulls them off pretty well.

The one thing that marred it was a certain amount of technobabble. Sometimes it would have been better to just leave the technology vague, rather than positing things that not only don't quite make sense, but also demystify the story a little too much.

Testament is a comic with an intriguing premise: the juxtaposition of biblical passages with their modern reiterations in an Orwellian new world order. Thus, it's a real shame that its creators don't have what it takes to pull it off.

They make their first misstep in the introduction, where author Rushkoff ever so helpfully explains the first volume in advance: the meaning of the panels (the gods reach in from outside to affect the human characters cause they're gods, not humans!--smart people like Rushkoff refer to this as "symbolism"), that he does indeed mean to draw parallels between biblical narratives and the present, and how he's so totally iconoclastic, like woah, for even daring to mess with the bible in the first place. You show more know, since there's a good chance we readers might not be smart enough to figure any of this out on our own. (Can you feel me rolling my eyes? Cause I'm gonna take a page out of Rushkoff's book here and tell you that yes, I am, just in case you weren't alert enough to catch on without hand holding.)

And then there's Sharp's art, which is colorful and engaging, and also retrograde as all get out. In the Testament world, all of the women are DD cups (presumably implants, given said breasts' immunity to the law of gravity), many of them seem incapable of dressing themselves in anything beyond panties and frilly bras (if they bother with clothing at all); more disturbing still, their waists often appear smaller in circumference than their thigh--yes, that's singular.

Furthermore, there's lots of sex, but it all falls into one of the few following categories: fifteen year old girl aggressively pursues her college-aged SAT tutor; two girls pursue same guy who has simultaneous relationships with both; girls-as-temple-prostitutes; multiple girls give supervillain head; girls get daddy drunk and do him (yes, yes, that's from the biblical tale of Sodom and Gomorrah, but the narrative takes one look at the Sodomy and runs away screaming with its hands cupped protectively over its balls). Publishers and authors: this is why women do not read comics! Catering to standard male fantasies is fine, but you aren't going to bring in any female readers with the gnarly, clothed, unthreatening-to-male-reader options we get here.

Anyway...the story itself owes an obvious narrative debt to Max Headroom (derivative, yes, but I'm okay with that because of my abiding love for Max Headroom), with a mishmash of Orwell, Neil Gaiman, and V for Vendetta thrown in for good measure. There's little by way of narrative development that doesn't attempt to beat readers over the head with the Anvil of DidYouGetThatYet?, and the dialogue reads more like an in-development movie script as opposed to anything people might actually say to each other. Luckily, this makes for one quick and disposable read.

End verdict: Interesting concept that's bolloxed by poor execution. I'm glad I didn't pay money to read it, and I encourage others not to either. show less

Strong start to a very interesting series.

I love the parallel ancient and modern storylines, and think he uses the visual separation between gods and humans very well indeed. I also appreciated the interaction between gods not generally believed in by the same sets of people - he has some really ambitious ideas in that respect and pulls them off pretty well.

The one thing that marred it was a certain amount of technobabble. Sometimes it would have been better to just leave the technology vague, rather than positing things that not only don't quite make sense, but also demystify the story a little too much.

There's nothing wrong with taking tales from the Bible and updating them into modern stories. And Testament does a pretty good job of outlining a just-in-the-future country starting to suppress certain rights, and there's some interesting parallels to biblical times. But there's a lot of time spent in these 128 pages revisiting the ancient stories while not giving enough time to really explore the modern one. (I had written "enough time to flesh out" -- but there's more than enough flesh showing on several pages.) So we get a mediocre story about a kid who is trying to avoid being implanted with an RFID chip, but we barely have time to learn about him, his parents, or his friends, all of whom tend to be stock show more characters.

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LT Haiku:

Perhaps our new tales
are not so much different than
ones that came before. show less

So this was pretty cool. The art was great. It style of the present mirroring the past was fun and I really liked Krishna even though he only had a few lines. Naked punk chicks are always good too.

It seemed like Rushkoff was trying to make this graphic novel "heavier" than it actually turned out. It wasn't as gritty as it could have been but it was still fun. Looks like this series has 3 more graphic novels. Probably won't be able to find them for $1 like I did this one but I would like to see where the whole thing goes.

Second time around it's not that impressive. I'm sorry the first trade doesn't have the notes at the end of vol.2. Those pages clarify a lot and make the bible references a lot more meaningful.