The book of Genesis
THE BOOK OF GENESIS
Illustrated by R. Crumb
It is not in praise of the Creator that R. Crumb portrays him - in the splash page that begins his much-anticipated adaptation of Genesis in comic-book form - as Crumb sees his own father. He grew up in helpless terror of Charles Crumb Sr., a former Marine Corps master sergeant who lorded over his family with icy severityCrumb’s God appears, alongside the opening words of Genesis, spinning substance from a void that resembles a cosmic basketball in his enormous, hairy, veiny hands. In one of the chapters about Noah, Crumb has God scowling even as he pets a goat.
However much Crumb may think of his God as a retired ex-Marine, this man-God, in his haggard grandeur, brings to mind the work of two other artists relevant both to Genesis and to Crumb: the self-portrait sketches of Leonardo, who also depicted the Creation; and the early illustrations of St. Nicholas, the God-man of the modern era, as he was conceived by the 19th-century cartoonist Thomas Nast, whose hatch-work drawing style and piercing insolence have been major influences on Crumb.
Working almost exclusively on this mammoth project for five years, Crumb has rendered the entirety of Genesis in comics panels. “The first book of the Bible graphically depicted! The Catholic Church, which once opposed comics vigorously and, for a time in the 1940s, sponsored public burnings of comics at parochial schools, recognized the form’s appeal to young people and took to publishing its own comics adapted mostly from the New Testament. Crumb’s book is serious and, for Crumb, restrained.
Crumb luxuriates in the carnality of Genesis without playing it for gratuitous shock or comic effect. This book, I believe, is the first thing by Crumb ever published without a single image of flying sperm or a sharp blade approaching male genitalia.
For text sources, Crumb used Robert Alter’s masterly English translation of Genesis, first published in 1996, as well as the King James Version and other sources.
Doing a comic book, rather than a book of text with spot illustrations, Crumb had to provide a drawing for every short passage - often six or more pieces of art per page - frequently with little indication in the language of what, exactly, to show.
For all its narrative potency and raw beauty, Crumb’s “Book of Genesis” is missing something that just does not interest its illustrator: a sense of the sacred. What Genesis demonstrates in dramatic terms are beliefs in an orderly universe and the godlike nature of man. Crumb, brilliantly, shows us the man in God, but not the God in man. You could find the book here.
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