Douglas Rushkoff has written on subjects ranging from religion to technology. He’s been a best selling author for many years, but it’s only recently that he’s entered into the comic book world. His Vertigo book. Testament, examines a near future in which a band of renegades have teamed up to combat threats to freedom.

(excerpted - full interview at SuicideGirls.com)

Daniel Robert Epstein: Testament is a very complex book even for Vertigo standards. I bet Vertigo came to you rather than you going to them to do a book.

Douglas Rushkoff: Totally. But I wanted to do a comic for a while, since 1994. I wrote a book called Playing the Future, which is now called Screenagers. It was a look at the emerging, non-linear, lateral thinking, chaotic culture that we were in before the web existed. What I was doing was looking at the things out there that I thought represented the future of our culture. It was everything that was unknown in the States at the time from Gundam Robots to anime, to Hong Kong cinema, snowboarding, videogames and most of all, comics. I saw comics as non-linear. Not just as we moved into a visual culture, but as we moved into a society that understood there were more subtle connections between different things. We had a generation of kids growing up who could enjoy the roughness, the gaps in reality, rather than needing everything so curvilinear, geometric, Euclidean and perfect. There was both a lower culture and a scientific culture that was saying, “No, it’s in the errors. It’s in the roughness, it’s in the chaos that we’re going to find the patterns and the solutions.” So I wrote this book that talked about the chaos mass, self-similarity and fractals and all that, and on the other hand talked about snowboarders and skateboarders looking for rough patches and going on curves and understanding the urban terrain as do-it-yourself thing that can be hacked. Then I read Scott McCloud’s book Understanding Comics, where he was basically saying that comics have abilities to do all these things and it’s important for people making comics to get that these aren’t just books with pictures. This is a different medium that can work in different ways.

Since then I’ve always wanted to get involved in it. Then I became friends with Grant Morrison, who sees comics as magical sigils. He comes from the Aleister Crowley tradition of comics. Grant excited me about the idea that you could bring weird, literary ideas to comics and that there was some commercial opening for that. Then I shot a flare up into the sky with this weird little comic strip called Club Zero G that I did in this magazine called BPM. I got interviewed about that and when I was interviewed they asked, “Why’d you do this?” I said, “I did this so maybe someone at Vertigo or Marvel would call me and ask me to do a comic.” Then, this guy from Vertigo, Jonathan Vankin, called and said, “Do you want to do a comic?” I said, “Sure!” He said, “What do you want to do?” I said, “Well, I got two ideas. One is to do this weird ass Bible thing and the other is something based off [Andrei] Tarkovsky’s movie, Stalker, about some weird guy who walks people through these bizarre, psychedelic realms and gets their possessed babies back. He said, “That second one is way more likely to happen. I can’t imagine them doing the Bible in this complex way with God outside the frame but pitch both and we’ll see what happens.” Karen Berger, the head of Vertigo, had been a fan of this weird Jewish book I wrote a couple years ago called Nothing Sacred, where I wrote that if Christianity is about the good news, then Judaism is about the bad news. Christianity tends to be, “Don’t worry, there’s a God up there, we’re all saved, all we have to do is this.” Judaism says, “Actually, it’s all up to you. Humans are in charge of this realm. If there is a God, he’s not there anymore. Take care of yourselves.” She liked that and she had a kid that had just been bar mitzvahed so she was on that wavelength that there’s value in in this old text, but that it’s been completely corrupted and re-contextualized by the wrong people.

DRE: Which is more important in Testament, the ideas behind the book or the characters themselves?

DR: They’re one and the same. That’s like asking, “In the Bible, who’s more important, Abraham or God?” The Bible and my book are both about the relationship between human beings and the dynamics underlying our actions and beliefs. Fortunately and unfortunately, they’re of equal importance. I understand that in order to engage a human being in my story, I got to have characters they care about moving through situations that matter. The thing I need my reader to get is that the situations that they’re in aren’t just their own. Even though we believe we’re doing everything we do by free will and out of these great, highly conscious choices, we’re hopelessly trapped in a narrative of our own making. In other words, we’ve written a story that we refuse to budge from and if we don’t budge from that story, it’s going to get really bad, really soon. We’ve got a president who doesn’t care about the environment because the world is going to be over pretty soon anyway.

The story itself is a character in a way that I don’t feel that the plot and ideas are going to overtake the characters. It’s more that the characters are going to be consciously fighting against the plot and the ideas that are informing their actions. In a way, those ideas are characters. That’s why I have God.

DRE: I found a Christian website that said Testament was slightly more reverent than the comic book, Preacher.

DR: Well the Bible stuff in there is really well-informed. The Bible stories are told in an involved, interesting and off-the-wall way enough to get Jesuit priests debating about it online, along with Jewish rabbis. I get really interesting responses from highly educated religious people. Even if I’m saying stuff that any good Christian would think is blasphemous, it’s very informed blasphemy. If it’s going to be that informed, they welcome you to the table. Preacher wasn’t really about the Bible or about Torah. Preacher was about, what if God ran away? It wasn’t what in Judaism we call Midrash, which is what my book is. My book is saying, “How are the actual stories and dynamics in the Bible being played out today?” along with Jewish rabbis. I get really interesting responses from highly educated religious people. Even if I’m saying stuff that any good Christian would think is blasphemous, it’s very informed blasphemy. If it’s going to be that informed, they welcome you to the table. Preacher wasn’t really about the Bible or about Torah. Preacher was about, what if God ran away? It wasn’t what in Judaism we call Midrash, which is what my book is. My book is saying, “How are the actual stories and dynamics in the Bible being played out today?”

DRE: Are you finding writing comics to be much different from writing novels?

DR. Totally different. The weird thing is because I have been an outsider to comics for so long I think I was able to imagine ideas that people who were raised in comics may not have. I’m just having a blast with the idea that real-time happens inside the panels and God Time, which is this timeless reality, happens outside the panels. How do those two things interact? There’s a God on a page outside a panel trying to affect the action, and he’ll reach his hand in, but once his hand crosses the line, it can only come into the panel as fire or water or some cloud of an idea. They don’t have corporeal presence in our reality. Likewise, there are very few ways for people inside the panels to access what’s outside. Most of us have only gotten to do that through meditation or taking some psychedelic or something. I remember in the old days, my challenge was that I wanted to write about nonlinear experiences in a linear medium. So I’d write books about psychedelics and the Internet and Hypertext and chaos mass in books with no pictures. I remember [Timothy] Leary was looking at my books and he was like, “Line, line, line, line, line.” He was so pissed, he was like, “Why don’t you use subheads and charts or pictures or anything! This is old. This is Renaissance era. This is not a suitable medium for our age!” But that was the challenge. Comics have been such a liberating experience because I’ve been so trapped in the Microsoft word reality of publishing with 300 page books. Now I have books of 22 pages with a bunch of dialogue with pictures and maybe a few captions. It’s totally challenging, but completely liberating.

DRE: I read that there is going to be an homage to SuicideGirls in an upcoming issue of Testament.

DR: The idea of this comic is that the God of Torah doesn’t really exist, but Adonai Eloheinu, that God, Yahweh, was a creation of three demigods. If you read Torah in order, you see God starts out as this fire-breathing god. Then he calms down and then becomes more of a human god. Then he becomes more of the Indian God as more influences came through and the various Prophets talked to different holy men of different regions. I have three gods come up with the great, big, unknowable God as a way of thinking they could make peace in the God world. That way we won’t have to fight. It’s in the way of having a corporation, having a nameless entity through which we’ll pledge allegiance to this thing and how humanity will create this Bible that has that God in charge of everything. It’s this great idea, but what ends up happening is that they repress the feminine because it’s abstract and it’s not based on Earth. It’s a theological system based in scarcity, various Prophets talked to different holy men of different regions. I have three gods come up with the great, big, unknowable God as a way of thinking they could make peace in the God world. That way we won’t have to fight. It’s in the way of having a corporation, having a nameless entity through which we’ll pledge allegiance to this thing and how humanity will create this Bible that has that God in charge of everything. It’s this great idea, but what ends up happening is that they repress the feminine because it’s abstract and it’s not based on Earth. It’s a theological system based in scarcity, abstractness and ideas, rather than abundance, the ground and fertility. What has to happen in my story is that in order for our characters to really liberate themselves from Torah, without just being Satanists or anti-Torah, punk reactionaries, is they’ve got to somehow create a marriage between this whole male culture and the female culture that got repressed. If you look in Torah, you can see all the matriarchs in Torah are actually sacred priestesses. All of them along with Sarah and Rebecca are temple prostitutes. There are little hints by the things that they do, who they’re having sex with other than the husband and when husbands are offering their wives up to strangers who come to the door. This isn’t just you offering up your wife because since these are temple priestesses it’s a blessing. But that whole aspect of history ended up getting repressed. I look around the world now and I actually see things like Suicide Girls as efforts to reclaim some of the power. The survival of the species is about that, whether or not we’re going to reintegrate what we call the feminine archetype back into our understanding of the world,

f’Even though we belive we’re doing everything we do by free will and out of these great highly conscious choices, we’re hopelessly trapped in a narrative of our own making.”