Comic books don’t always like to talk about religion in a direct way. Even in the DC universe, where God explicitly exists and where there are characters who are literal angels, God is rarely talked about and never intervenes, even when villains are trying to undo Creation. It was thus surprising to me when I discovered that DC has had its own creation imagery for forty years. It’s possible that I’m the only one who didn’t know this, but it was mentioned in a recent review of Infinite Crisis 4, so I did a little research, appealed to Yahoo! Answers, and found my answer.
Green Lantern (vol. 4) 40, published in 1965, tells the story of Krona, a being who wanted to learn the secret of creation and, in so doing, released entropy into the universe. Krona builds a machine that lets him peer back to the creation of the universe, and sees a giant hand clutching a cluster of stars. The issue was drawn by Gil Kane, and Kane’s “hand of creation” motif was repeated when the story was expanded upon in later issues dealing with Green Lantern and the Guardians of the Universe.
George Pérez reused the image of cosmic hands in Crisis on Infinite Earths. Pérez, it seems, has become the go-to guy in the DC universe whenever creation needs to be redone or undone. JLA/Avengers tells another story of Krona in which he fuses the DC and Marvel universes, illustrated by Pérez as a pair of hands forcing two Earths together:
The current series Infinite Crisis features a villain whose plot involves playing God by recreating the world in his own vision. Pérez again draws a pair of hands, this time creating and destroying hundreds of alternate versions of Earth, trying to craft the perfect one:
The imagery hasn’t always been used in every DC story that shows the creation or destruction of the universe. Zero Hour, for exampe, did not depict the hand/s of creation, but its use in the crisis and the new crisis, I think solidifies the imagery as the official depiction of Creation in DC comics. Now, clearly the concept of a Godly hand bringing life did not originate with Gil Kane in Green Lantern, and I’m sure an art historian could draw it back long before the Sistine Chapel, but its use in the DC shows that, even though evolution is a proven fact on DC Earth, God still had a hand in it all.