By Paul Carrier
Of all the contemporary artists who might take on the daunting task of illustrating the entire Book of Genesis, could any seem more unlikely than Robert Crumb?
A leader of the underground comix movement in the 1960s and 1970s, Crumb is the creator of such countercultural icons as Fritz the Cat, Devil Girl, Mr. Natural and innumerable, shall we say, libidinous women.
Admired by countless fans as a gifted artist with a unique, instantly recognizable, style, Crumb is controversial as well, and has been accused of sexism and racism over the years. Let's just say that, as a rule, his work is not likely to be found in very many school libraries. Nor should it.
Yet Crumb has now produced The Book of Genesis Illustrated, a monumental undertaking that took him several years to complete. It covers all 50 chapters and literally everything to be found in them - the creation, Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, the numbingly endless “begats,” Noah and the flood, the Tower of Babel, the fall and rise of Joseph. You name it. It's all here.
Being Crumb, the artist doesn’t shy away from the naughty bits. That’s why the book comes with two warnings on the cover, one recommending “adult supervision” for minors and the other reminding readers that there is “nothing left out.”
This may be a comic book of sorts, but it’s no sanitized abridgement.
“I didn’t want to edit it at all. I wanted every word in there,” Crumb said in an interview with National Public Radio last year. “That was part of the discipline of it was to keep every word, because if you start leaving stuff out, then you’re playing God.”
Crumb, skilled artist that he is, certainly is up to the task of illustrating most anything, including the Book of Genesis. What gave me pause when I started reading the book was not whether he did the job well - he did - but whether readers familiar with his more salacious work will readily accept this transition from the profane to the holy.
For his part, Crumb does not view Genesis as the word of God, but rather as a fascinating collection of wonderful stories - "the words of men," as he puts it in the introduction - that deserve to be told in comic-book form.
“I decided just to do a straight illustration job,” Crumb said in the 2009 NPR interview, “because the stories themselves are so strange that it doesn’t need satirizing. It doesn’t need, you know, making fun of or taking off on or anything. It just stands up on its own as a lurid, you know, comic book.”
For example, God, as drawn by Crumb, looks just like what you would expect - robed, patriarchal, angry, with flowing white hair and a long white beard. In fact, everyone in the book looks suitably "biblical." True to his word, Crumb takes no liberties, cracks no jokes and shows no disrespect.
What I found is that The Book of Genesis Illustrated, while surreal in the early going because I was preoccupied with the juxtaposition of Crumb’s notoriety and Genesis, grew on me in the chapters that followed.
By the time Abraham comes along, for example, I was so caught up in the story, and sufficiently impressed with Crumb’s skill, that his background as a self-described pornographer receded from my thoughts.
By then, the experience of reading Crumb’s take on Genesis was no longer awkward, but entirely enjoyable. Whether you view Genesis as divinely or humanly inspired, Crumb brings it to glorious life in The Book of Genesis Illustrated.
