Creation Story Retold by Comics

As author Scott McCloud writes in his graphic novel Understanding Comics, different comic artists use varying degrees realism and cartoonish abstraction to relate to audiences. When artists make an image more abstract, they are not so much “eliminating details as we are focusing on specific details.” 

Two comics I looked at used varying levels of abstraction to retell the story of creation. As we try to mold ourselves into this creation story as we read it, how do different comic artists try to use the written word and sequential drawings, and this interplay between the abstract and realistic, to build a cohesive world for us to dive into?

In the first page of Testament Vol. 2: West of Eden, the beginning lines are not Genesis’s famous, “In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth.” Instead, you see colorful and graphically “realistic” and detailed drawings of three gods from different cosmologies.  Most of these gods would mostly likely be unfamiliar to the typical Judeo-Christian reader; you see Atum from Egyptian myths, Ishtar who after research on my part, was the East Semitic and Babylonian goddess of fertility, love, and war. You also see a destructive bull-creature named Moloch, who I also found was an ancient Ammonite god. The first words you see are “Every god has a creation story” in curved, casual- looking script. 

Already from this first page, this retelling of Adam and Eve reaches far outside its typical depiction. These gods influence the retelling of the Adam and Eve story; halfway through the chapter, how the woman was created was changed due to these multiple gods, including others like Krishna and Elijah. The near-future characters of a male computer technician and his female lover influence this past story, creating a fluidity of myth within this detailed drawings. Instead of relaying on highly abstract drawings, this comic artist uses more detailed and colored drawings to ground this highly abstract story in a more “realistic” and concrete setting, attempting to make it believable yet also timeless. By doing so, it aims to say that history repeats itself. The story takes place in the near future and the biblical past in interchanging intervals to show that these stories exist in the present, the future; religious stories change, evolve, and so do societies at large.

In the Manga Bible, the Creation story is also retold, but is geared towards a more Judeo-Christian, orthodox audience than the previous example. It uses text and quotes directly from Biblical text, and in that regard, uses more accepted and even “realistic” text. Some parts of the book’s text has been heard time and time again, which most likely prompts the opening line “Okay, let’s do this again.” And then it begins with the first verse in Genesis. And it’s not a sarcastic note I hear in the graphic novel’s first line, but the timelessness of telling these stories. This novel does mix up the text, and it features Moses telling the story to a group of children and eager followers. In a way, are we, the readers, the children? As danger brews in the story, are we echoing the biblical voices awaiting the words of the famous prophet? The abstract, cartoonish black and white drawings do give us a sense, as Scott McCloud writes, of reader identification.

Both of these stories reshape and comment on Adam and Eve by manipulating the text of the story and then use drawings to enhance their respective themes. But I argue in these examples, both novels pick one element to really abstract and then use the other remain more "realistic" and consistent and rooted in the cosmology. Testament Vol. 2 gave us realistic and more detailed colorful world so we could observe this near-future and biblical past in a sense of tangible reality. Manga Bible wanted to gear its book to a younger audience, and therefore made it easy to relate to based on its use of cartoons, while keeping a realistic (relatively speaking) and stricter interpretation of the text to tell of the bible’s ubiquity in time, but not necessarily across religions. Like any medium, graphic novels employ different means of texts and pictures to retell a story. I argue that in these two examples, they use contrasting amounts of abstraction in their text and pictures to demonstrate the push-and-pull of the abstract and familiar elements of humanity found in the Christian Creation story.