"Genesis"- A Destruction Myth
We're all familiar with Creation Myths. I can't imagine anyone who's made it through life without hearing at least one. Comics tell us these stories, but go one step further. They show us the reality of absurdity, of impossibility. They show us worlds built on paper from wisps of ideas and theories. But why stop there? We've watched a world rise, but how does one fall apart? This question brings us to a different kind of myth: a Destruction Myth, a myth that deconstructs the world we live in revealing something deeper, long buried beneath it. This story comes to us in Genesis, Nathan Edmondson and Alison Sampson’s new OGN from Image Comics.
The story introduces us to Adam, our listless first man, fed up with his inability to create anything that lasts or matters. Upon waking from a suicide attempt, Adam finds that he now has the ability to create anything he can imagine. With these new abilities and the encouragement of his wife, Lillian, he sets out to create Eden on earth. Before long, however, subconscious impulse toward destruction overtakes Adam’s will to create. He finds himself cast out of paradise by his own thoughts and forced into a confrontation with the forces that gave him his powers, the personified creative and destructive impulses within him.
Rendered beautifully by Sampson’s surreal style, Edmondson builds a narrative out of the destruction of our own reality. He introduces us to a conversation about humanity’s grand capacity for creation and equal propensity towards destruction. It’s a story of the ways we seem inevitably inclined to destroy our own personal Eden’s, forcing us into a the harsh wilderness of our unconscious minds. Edmondson and Sampson lead us to an abyss, asking us to peer in at a question dangling within it: When you’ve destroyed your entire world, what do you do next? Without being preachy or prescriptive, Edmondson and Sampson offer readers an answer to this question. They take them to it, but ultimately let the reader decide what they want to take away.
Genesis is a staggeringly beautiful book, both visually and thematically. At only $6.99, it'd be a shame to pass it up.
