Chronicles of Wormwood: The Last Battle #4

[stolisomancer]

Roberson posted scans from Chronicles of Wormwood on SD a while back, during "Garth Ennis Week." So far, there have been three Wormwood series: the original, a one-shot entitled The Last Enemy (which has some pretty awful art overall), and the current series, The Last Battle.

Last Battle is on a schedule that could be charitably described as "quarterly." Part of it may be the new artist, Oscar Jimenez, who's a pretty good fit for the material. The series is quite gory and features a great deal of apocalyptic imagery, so it may not be to everyone's taste. Personally, I read it for everything but the demonic/Biblical plot.

A quick summary of Wormwood: Danny Wormwood is the Antichrist, and he's buddies with Jay, a.k.a. Jesus Christ. Jay took a hit to the head from an LAPD riot cop a few years ago, and since then, has been having a very hard time making himself understood.

Apparently that is not so much the case anymore.

After the cut: a right-wing radio personality takes a call from Jesus Christ.







Tags:
creator: garth ennis
creator: oscar jimenez
publisher: avatar
title: chronicles of wormwood

Comments

[foxhack]

Yeah, I like this depiction of Jesus. Always have.

[shadur]

And the depiction of Heaven in this.

... Just if only he hadn't slipped off his meds when it came to the depiction of god...

[stig]

It's like the sequel to the 'Cock, Cock, Cock' scene in Preacher. Ennis probably just likes the conceit of using comics to make fun of idiots on the radio - there's the obvious comparison with Beck and Limbaugh.

[stolisomancer]

Yeah, I'd forgotten completely about that scene in Preacher. Damn.

[dimwit90]

I totally forgot I wanted to buy this, the art is more than iffy for me but I'm a sucker for this idea of Anti-Christ!Danny + Jesus being BFF

[jlroberson]

I really like this series as well. However, I should also mention Ennis is kind of riffing on himself here. Somewhere around the middle of PREACHER, Jesse did exactly the same thing to a radio show with a right- AND left-wing jerk.

Not that it's not always fun.

[stolisomancer]

Yeah, I didn't remember that bit from Preacher until stig brought it up, which does diminish my enjoyment of this scene to some small extent.

Then again, talk-radio idiots are, if anything, a bigger problem now than they were ten years ago when Jesse did it. The idea of this happening to Mark Levin or Michael Savage fills my heart with glee.

[psychopathicus_rex]

Now THIS guy I could get behind. A Christ who wants nothing to do with Christianity? That's damn REFRESHING, that is.

[espanolbot]

It was kind of covered in the first storyline, where Jesus is portrayed as a protosocialist who wanted everyone to share their possessions so everyone would be happy.

This didn't sit well with the Church in the story, who LIKED living in palaces thank you very much, so they just edit his messages over the course of the next 2000 years to make him procaptialist and prejudiced.

[psychopathicus_rex]

This is one of the reasons that Christianity repels me - they keep denying and editing the stuff in their own damn guidebook. I mean, Jesus was a middle-eastern Hebrew, yes? A dark-skinned Jewish guy - I'm guessing he probably wasn't actually a black guy, as he's presented here, but he was far from Aryan-looking. And yet, since at LEAST the Middle Ages, people have been saying that they're doing his will when they're being racist, anti-semitic pigs. Feh. If I ever run across the dude, I'm gonna bawl him out for not taking people who are theoretically his FOLLOWERS more firmly in hand - if he actually DOES approve of all the crap that he's done, then bah phooey to him.

[stolisomancer]

Interesting story: Alexander Dumas claimed that the common image of Jesus as a brown-haired white man is actually based on Cesare Borgia.

[psychopathicus_rex]

Really? Wow. So all this time, people have been worshipping an image of one of the Borgias? Hee hee, that's AWESOME.

[cmdr_zoom]

"Just as planned."

[psychopathicus_rex]

It's an awesome spiritual conspiracy theory from beyond the grave! 'FOOLS! You weren't praying to HIM all these years, you were praying to ME - feeding me, giving me power! You wanted me to save your souls, but all this time, I've been TAKING your souls! Yes, you may have been praying TO me, but I have been preying ON you! Bwahahahaha!'

[comicoz]

Side comment on the "editing their own guidebook" comment -

The only highlight of a rather annoying weekend was a short religeous conversation with a nephew of mine who for whatever reason decided to ask me my opinion on Catholothism (however it's spelled). When we came to the Bible, I asked him a simple question that ended the conversation and left him thinking:

"If Jesus was from Jerusalem, and thus Jewish, how many old Jewish people from the homeland named Matthew, Mike, or John do you know?"

Even if the words within are completely true, as soon as you translate something, elements of untruth enter in. I do translation daily and this is a truism. You cannot translate something from one language to another without either losing or adding something and still retain any vestige of clarity. Try translating anything in Babelfish be it Shakespeare or 4Chan - it'll still come out garbled.

[psychopathicus_rex]

Oh, absolutely. I have a personal example to trot out - a few years ago, I was participating in a collaborative online story, on a board that has sadly been shut down since then. I had created a character that I was at the time (and still am, really) rather proud of - a grim German vigilante who went by the name of 'the Blade of Vengeance'. For purposes of research, I entered this into an English-to-German translation thing - may have been Babelfish - and it came out 'Das Blatt von Vengeance'. Well, I thought that sounded AWESOME, so I went ahead with the character, and used the term liberally, along with other German terms obtained through the same source. A while later, I was on here (or rather, the previous version of 'here'), and mentioned the character. Well, someone who actually SPEAKS German noticed this, and informed me that I had been misinformed - 'Das Blatt von Vengeance' actually means 'The LEAF of Vengeance', not 'the Blade'.
Now, imagine if I had never been informed of this, kept using the term, and the escapades of 'Das Blatt von Vengeance' had survived somehow, and been published. What if I became a very influential figure in my later years, and five hundred years afterwards, the Blade's adventures were still in circulation, treating my original bad German as canon? How many translations would it have gone through - perhaps the whole THING would have been translated to German, assuming that that had been my original intention, and then it'd be translated back into English for English-reading audiences, and all the while, my mixed-up internet German at the heart of it. Would the readers 500 years hence be reading about the BLADE of Vengeance, or the Leaf, or neither - or both? It's interesting to think about.

[julian]

Jesus with dreads. OK, that's kinda fun.

(Too much Ennis at once burns me out on him, but a few issues of any given thing at once I can cope with OK.)

[comicoz]

I was following this series because of here, but since it never showed up (like The Twelve and a half dozen other series I can think of), I thought it was done. To the LCS!