Rushkoff Deconstructs the Bible in Testament
This story originally appeared in PW Comics Week on Jan. 3, 2006 Sign up now!
By Ian Brill -- Publishers Weekly, 1/3/2006
In comics, adaptations of Bible stories have been nothing new, as any reader of Classics Illustrated could tell you. But Douglas Rushkoff has decided to adapt the Greatest Story Ever Told not from an angle of telling old stories but to continue with a type of storytelling he feels is relevant today. That is the point of his first ongoing comic book series, Testament, with art by Liam Sharp, just out from Vertigo.Rushkoff is an influential commentator on new media, thanks to such books as Coercion: Why We Listen to What "They" Say and Media Virus: Hidden Agendas in Popular Culture. He's also written a book on the history of the Torah, Nothing Sacred: The Truth About Judaism.
Testament draws parallels between stories that are told in the Bible and those that are happening in the heightened reality of the modern world Rushkoff has created. The first issue opens with Abraham about to sacrifice his son Isaac. That story is told alongside that of a modern-world father agonizing over giving his son up to a military draft that uses computer chips imbedded in skin to track soldiers.
"The original idea was to find a way to bring the Torah to comics," Rushkoff says. "The idea of making explicit modern parallels came later, as I was working on the actual proposal for the series. I needed to show that these stories aren't historical descriptions, but rather enduring allegories."
Rushkoff chose comics for this story because"I see so many parallels between the [Torah and comics]: the way they move backward and forwards in time; the way they convey both temporal and timeless reality; their ability to mix the mundane, the mythic and the metaphysical; their marriage of form and content; their sense of extreme efficiency; their use of iconography and particularism, as well as their invitation to interactivity."
This is not Rushkoff's first comics-related project; he has written a graphic novel, Club Zero-G, published by the Disinformation Company. Rushkoff explained why he went with Vertigo this time: "Dan Clowes and Chris Ware may be high art, but the DC/Vertigo world is still lowbrow, vid-game culture in the eyes of many. That gives me the freedom to tell a much more dangerous story than I could tell in a regular novel or nonfiction book."
Rushkoff wrote in the Vertigo column "On the Ledge" that he sees this comic as "a media hack" to continue an open-ended story, which is how he sees biblical text. He calls the Bible a great piece of "psychic revolt," and hopes the allegories he draws between then and today will open people's minds.
"Let's face it: I'm writing a third testament to the Bible," Rushkoff said. "And I'm following a great tradition of doing that in the most vernacular realm available."
