This Guy Gets It

Really nice explanation of Testament at The Sacramento News and Review. Of course, there’s one more collection left to go, but the series is now officially completed.

How else to describe it? Perhaps as omnitemporality—all times exist at once, simultaneously, in separate spaces, in Douglas Rushkoff’s amazing graphic series Testament.

Or, to make it as plain as I can, instead of space as the constant, with events occuring in a temporal order in the same place (like a fire in 1941, followed by a new building in 1942, and a housing project in 1966, following by a vacant lot in 1998), the opposite is true. Everything happens at once; it just happens in different spaces.

Inverts the space-time continuum in a very thought-provoking way, doesn’t it? Sort of like a good Star Trek episode.

But Rushkoff, who among other things is a bit of a scholar of Biblical studies, is out to make a point: That even the writers of the texts we’ve come to know as “the Bible” expected them to change. In Testament, the story is always being told, so it can always be changed.

I’m sorry to those of you whose stores stopped carrying the book. It’s a tricky market out there. But you should be able to get the final collection when it comes out later this year. Then you’ll have the whole series in four books. And while I may have rushed a bit to get to the end a little earlier than I had planned, I think it still ends up pretty clear what I was trying to do with and say about Biblical narrative – as well as what it may have to do with our hyper-technologized and hyper-capitalized world.

Meanwhile, next weekend is NY Comic-Con. I’ll be there. I don’t think Vertigo has any plans for me, but I have been invited to do two panels. One of them is me and Scott McCloud in a one-on-one about the medium of comics. The other has something to do with the book Our Gods Wear Spandex. I’ll get details on all that shortly.

Lots of news, but no time. I’m fighting that weird cold/flu everyone seems to have gotten this season, while trying to write my book, an essay for the Personal Democracy Forum people, my new secret comic, and hosting a new conversations board about Corporatism right here.