In the desert, a man is running.
He runs blindfolded, acting on a dream, taking it on faith.
And his faith is rewarded...
... in a way.
Julian Demond unearths something that should have been left hidden, and breaking it open...
... releases something that was locked away...
...locked away for a reason.
It is called Wick...
... and it is God Himself,
freed from an imprisonment that has lasted for thousands of years.
The Creator at last stands revealed....
...beautiful, childish, omnipotent and...
... murderous.
The above is all from issue 1 of the 12 issue series. Forgive me if I went overboard on the pictures but it is quite the set-up and I wanted to convey that; this isn't a throw-away comic.
It might be just another horror comic to the audience at large, but for me, as I already made clear in the Road of Faith posts,
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Which are three posts that are very personal, and centered around my faith, and on how it shaped me and how, because of it, I now have an occasional predilection for stories that are biblically coloured.
It also goes off on a long ramble on some of my theories for how Bakker's The Second Apocalypse would play out (and I still haven't read either the Great Ordeal or The Unholy Consult as of 31/01/2018, this part will be edited when I finally do)
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anything that marries Biblical mythology with violence and supernatural overtones becomes very, very interesting, and I will seek out those tales like a dog sniffing for treats if the mood takes me.
Barker's Next Testament then, is perfect for me:
Insanely violent, horrible, blasphemous, beautiful and fascinating, it tells of God returning to Earth and proving to be an omnipotent, sociopathic sadist, giving an intriguingly plausible explanation for the 2000 year gap of divine silence since the death of Christ, while also shedding light on the contradiction between the bloodthirsty God of the Old Testament and the forgiving one of the new.
There's a quality and some genuine heart here, in both Haemi Jang's Art and Mark Miller's storytelling. The heart lies primarily in the Elspeth and Tristan storyline, who are important to the plot and its resolution, but who are so upstaged by Wick at every turn that it becomes simply uninteresting to either grant them pictures or to talk about them.
Three more pictures after the jump which do spoil issue 2, which I wanted to show you anyway because it's just such a perfect panel.
After this it all goes straight to (figurative) hell. It's a lovely comic book, provided it is your thing.
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