Author/Editor: Jason Quinn
Publisher: Kalyani Navyug
Rating: WORTHY!
Ably illustrated by Naresh Kumar.
Colorist: Vijay Sharma
Co-Editor: Sourav Dutta
Design: Era Chawla
Lettering Bhavnath Chaudhary
DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review. The chance to read a new book is reward aplenty!
This is a graphic novel which takes the fictional Bible story of creation and illustrates it. Together, the writer and illustrator take a very loose approach to the Biblical text, inserting their own interpretations liberally, so I was left completely in the dark about what their motives and beliefs truly were in creating this work. The result isn't bad. It's quite fine if you're entertained by this kind of simplistic and shallow mythology, but there was nothing new here, or engrossing. Aside from, as I said, some loose interpretation, it's pretty much the same story you can read in the first nine chapters of the Biblical book of Genesis.
Obviously Earth (indeed, the universe) isn't 6,000 years old, nor were all living things created in the space of six days. Anyone who believes that is at best ignorant or delusional and at worst, thoroughly dishonest. What the purpose of this creation story was, when it was first written down his highly debatable, but it's what happens when you let scientifically ignorant people take power, and make the rules.
A lot is missing from this story because it's already absent from the original Bible text. Since it's reporting only what the Bible already reported (although creatively enhanced in parts!), we have no idea why there was a creation. We're told only that there was. We don't get to learn how there was light, and day, and night before there were stars. Things like that.
I found it intriguing that the art, which isn't bad at all, depicts only modern organisms being created and later, boarding the ark. There are no dinosaurs in sight, no mammalian megafauna, no primitive reptiles, no amphibians. No insects! No ancient foliage.
The story doesn't try to explain anything, merely reporting it, so despite illustrations of Noah's ark, we don't get to learn how he fitted all those millions of pairs of organisms into the relatively tiny ark. We don't learn how he managed to build the ark so huge to begin with, and have it stay in one piece on a raging ocean! We don't find out how the animals all arrived there, or how the specialized food for them was collected and stored. Nor do we learn where he got that thirty foot elephant depicted on the cover (note the ark was only 45 feet high, so that elephant is truly huge!
We do learn that Adam and Eve where white! That rather surprised me. I'm not one of those people who believes they were black per se, but I don't honestly think they were quite as WASP as they're portrayed here, with pale skin, straight blonde or brown hair, and blue eyes! The weird part about that, is that the illustrator is from India, a nation known for gorgeously rich brown tones and not at all for whiteness of skin or blueness of eyes (not since the Brits got kicked out, anyway!). There's some really interesting psychology going on there!
That wasn't anywhere near as surprising as the fact that Satan is now revealed to be a lizard man reminsicent of Doctor Curt Connors in The Amazing Spider-Man, complete with arms and legs, and a long, serpentine tail. This is pure nonsense, because the Bible makes no mention whatsoever of the serpent being anything other than a serpent - a snake - and it offers support for this fact in the very verses in Genesis where this is discussed.
I found it amusing that the fruit is depicted as an apple, too. The Bible says no such thing. It speaks only of fruit. The apple is not native to the Middle east. No one knows what the fruit in the myth was intended to be - if indeed it was meant literally at all.
The writer seems not to know that cherub is the singular, the plural being 'cherubim', so 'cherubims' is nonsensical, but these are what keep Adam and Eve out of the garden. I guess their god wasn't much for forgiveness and turning the other cheek, huh? Obviously that comes later in God 2.0.
The weird thing about all of this is that when Cain kills Abel, he's 'thrown out'. I don't get what he's thrown out of since the whole family was already expelled from Eden. How can he be kicked out of 'out'?! And if he is the only person in the world other than his mom and dad, why does he need a mark to protect him from others?! None of this makes any sense, but it's all laid out here in colorful detail. The story of Cain and Abel is actually laid out over rather many pages because it's - how shall I put it? - dramatically augmented? Yeah, that's it.
Noah's flood story is sad, because he has this boat, and when people beg him for a ride, he refuses them all. Again, where is the forgiveness? Where's the turning o' the cheek? Not here, to be sure.
I'm going to recommend this graphic novel because it highlights in wonderful color how silly the whole creation/flood story truly is.
