EDEN's END Tells the Story of First Superman Adaman
Written by Morrison, Sharp's artwork and lettering by Roger Langridge start Eden's End with the dawn of mankind. Readers discover that the alien scientist Ha-Shatan and his pupil Lilitu conducted multiple tests leading to homo sapiens. When Ha-Shatan's tests come back negative, Lilitu suggests a more straight-forward method. Living among the early humans, she seduces their leader Adaman with an apple that will equip him with wisdom and authority beyond human reach. Adaman starts as the first hero and monarch, a "Superman" who creates a huge empire run on energy created on his own hands. Notwithstanding all this, Adaman starts to despise the alien "gods" upsetting his peaceful life and chooses to utilize his great power to fight war on Heaven.
Given the title Eden's End, the typical narrative above shouldn't be shocking. Morrison and Sharp create their own creation narrative by referencing a great variety of world religion and mythology. Ha-Shatan and Lilitu are probably stand-ins for Satan and Lilith, but Morrison's allegories are broad enough to include many interpretations influenced by Judaism, Islam, the old Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh, and even the "reptilian men's conspiracy theories," David Icke popularized. These sources taken together offer a science-fiction narrative that is equally a reflection on the act of creation as a barbarian superhero origin story.
EDEN's END presents a Sci-Fi/Fantasy View on Creation.
For Morrison and Sharp, the entire project seems to be commentary on the very act of creation itself as they entwine several traditional myths with the birth of human consciousness. Eden's End makes a direct comparison between the moment homo sapiens started sharing stories and the moment they acquired existential awareness. This then reminds me of traditional portrayals of Promethean fire, the biblical fruit from the Tree of Knowledge, and the huluppu tree of the goddess Inanna/Ishtar from the Epic of Gilgamesh. "That's the trouble with stories, you see, and with fire," Ha-Shatan says to his apprentice Lilitu following her successful seduction of Adaman. "Once launched, they get so readily out of control." Of course, knowledge's strength is only information's equivalent. thus, if not means of passing knowledge from one person to the next, what are stories? It is a huge power, hence one accompanied by enormous responsibility.
Although the fifteen pages of Eden's End offer an amazing array of ideas and thoughts, the comic also offers an interesting challenge when considering the work as a story in and of itself. Eden's End is meant more as a pitch displaying the potential of a bigger story than necessary as a whole narrative, according to the artists' own admission. Thus, the briefness of Eden's End leaves the emotional content relatively cold since the characters come off more like pieces on a chess board than fully-fleshed out beings with arcs.
The alien "Gods" of EDEN's END are who?
Still, it's amazing how much Morrison and Sharp can portray in the abbreviated version of Eden's End. Two professionals at the height of their trade, looking for various approaches to show the audience their story ideas, finally produce this comic. Grant Morrison and Liam Sharp have devised their own intriguing origin of humanity in Eden's End: a meditation on language, storytelling, and the very act of creation itself by blending several creation stories over time into a science-fiction superhero fable.
Now available from Xanaduum is Eden's End #1.
Sharp's striking images help much of the comic's simplified narrative approach to work.
Sharp's artwork is the pinnacle of the painted barbarian worlds created by Frank Frazetta and Richard Corben, bursting with enough sex and brutality to make even the most explicit Game of Thrones episode blush visible. Sharp compresses a lot of narrative into each page using even the most minute of elements, as the square-shaped "album cover" design illustrates. One such element is Adaman's robes being red, blue, and yellow; these three basic, or "primitive," hues were once thought to be the source of all others. It's also a deft homage to the color of Superman's suit, once more stressing how several mythologies combining here into the ultimate creation tale have fashioned Eden's End.
Beginning at the start of 2022, Grant Morrison started a Substack newsletter where they have continued to run brief Comics and other projects alongside annotations on their past work. Morrison is currently using the platform to introduce their newest comics work with their Green Lantern partner Liam Sharp: a series of fifteen-page stories Morrison has termed "Hollywood pitch comics," in a densely-compressed format of square-shaped pages roughly the size of a 12' LP record. Eden's End, a sci-fi/fantasy fable concerning the beginnings of humanity itself, is the first episode of the series, Xanaduum Presents.
