Liana Finck turns her keen eye to none other than the Old Testament, reimagining the story of Genesis with God as a woman, Abraham as a resident of New York City, and Rebekah as a robot. In Finck's retelling, the millennia-old stories of Adam and Eve, Abraham and Isaac, and Jacob and Esau haunt the pages like familiar but partially forgotten nursery rhymes.
Liana Finck presents us with a female God who is anything but supremely perfect ... Visually, she’s just plain silly, if also adorable in a totally unawesome kind of way ... In other words, Finck’s God is an artist, which is to say a being plagued with self-doubts. More significantly, she’s a female artist, which means she’s infinitely more plagued by self-doubts ... Let There Be Light is smart and smarting and sometimes a revelation, though not exactly of the theological variety. And if her earlier chapters, showcasing God, outshine the others, the fault isn’t entirely Finck’s. In having God gradually withdraw from the action, she’s being true to Genesis ... It’s a wonderful cartoonist who, with all the sad-funny playfulness of her art, imagines that it is on earth as it is in heaven.
[A] wry, satirical take on the book of Genesis ... This is no straight adaptation ... In her signature loose, scrawly style, occasionally broken up by more finely detailed crosshatched scenes, Finck uses the familiar stories in Genesis to consider how religion has shaped cultural expectations, as well as who has gotten left out of the stories ... Rather than someone to be feared, in Finck’s hands, God becomes someone to relate to, someone who strives, fails, gets angry, loves, and feels like she needs to hide. Somehow both reverent and irreverent, this will please philosophical readers with sharp senses of humor.
An irreverent yet profound retelling of the Book of Genesis ... Cohesive and moving ... Finck leans into biblical idiosyncrasies while taking humanity quite seriously ... Finck’s exploration offers much light in both senses: levity and illumination.
