A Christian architect called Adam becomes frustrated with his faith and his job and decides to kill himself - but his suicidal jump off a building doesn’t kill him. Instead he awakens in a hospital bed, practically healed except for a scar. And then he discovers he has powers to mould the world according to his imagination and will - for better or worse.
Genesis is quite a banal rumination on the act of creation. Through Adam, Nathan Edmondson talks about how artists can create anything and everything in their heads and with their hands but sometimes things don’t go how you want and you wind up with something that isn’t what you pictured. The solution is not to give up and to keep going until you’ve got it just right.
There’s a lot of Christian themes in the story from the title, to the main character’s name, and his first act of creation is to multiply bread. He meets a couple of peculiar characters he immediately assumes are angels or demons. Edmondson leans so heavily on the Christian angle though it’s not really about Adam being the Second Coming or anything - maybe it’s a commentary on the egotism of artists, or underlining the idea that an artist is essentially a god once they begin creating their own world.
I liked Alison Sampson’s trippy art-style, warping the everyday to show Adam’s power to twist reality with his mind. It’s very cool-looking though the colours could’ve used some work - for such a fantastical story, the colouring was very muted and dull.
Adam’s story isn’t very compelling and the overall message of artistic creation is uninspired, saying nothing that isn’t obvious to most creative people already. At the length of a double-size single issue comic, it doesn’t give itself a lot of room to explore, but even if it did I’m not sure Edmondson had anything left to say - he seemed to have run out of ideas before the end.
It’s message is laudable and presented in an arty way but I wouldn’t say Genesis is anything special.
Genesis
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