The Book of Genesis Illustrated
R. Crumb, writer-artist
Adapted from Genesis: Translation and Commentary and The Five Books of Moses by Robert Alter
W.W. Norton, 2009
224 pages, hardcover
$24.95
Buy it from Amazon.com

Captivating, illuminating, at times laugh-out-loud funny, and almost belief-beggaringly gorgeous, R. Crumb's ambitious adaptation of the Bible's first and foundational book hit pretty much every note I wanted to hear from such a project.

For starters, as a showcase of Crumb's drawing chops--masterful even in his old(er) age--it's tough to top. I'm aware of the criticism that it could have been subtitled Beards on Parade, and I reject that criticism, or rather I invert it: the beard parades were among the best parts! And they're perhaps the most emblematic sections of the entire book, in that they boil Crumb's project down to its essence. Genesis' long multigenerational tale of the patriarchs of the Israelites and their large extended families necessarily includes a lot of hirsute dudes in Cecil B. DeMillian garb, and at times even substitutes litanies of their names for any actual story or plot. So what you get during the long lists of sons or what the back cover jocularly refers to as "The 'Begots'" is a bit like folding one of Crumb's sketchbooks into a comic. As the generations rattle by, Crumb draws scene after one-panel scene depicting some family activity at random: A mother nurses and laughs as her other son runs past playing; another mother breaks up a fight between two kids; people dance and drink at a party. At other times he'll simply insert postage-stamp panel portraits of each person, inventing them out of whole cloth, and the act of reading becomes a master class in how many variations of the human face can be captured by one artist. In each case, through Crumb's attention to detail, mastery of crosshatching and stippling, and rock-solid carved-from-clay character construction, an entire life, and the world that surronds it, is suggested in the space of a panel.

And that's pretty much what made the whole book so very appealing to me--another litany, that of the keenly observed and impeccably depicted moments that take the musty, revised, translated, censored, edited, politically motivated, at times inspired, frequently batshit bizarre text of the world's most important religious document and make it something fun to read. Gimli-like Abraham, never looking his (not-firstborn, not only!) son Isaac in the eye as he leads the lad to the slaughter. The denizens of Sodom, portrayed not as a bunch of mincing homos, but rather as a predatory pack of grinning good-time assholes. The destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, portrayed in a stand-out layout of three widescreen panels that arrange contorted bodies and black and white spaces in a manner suggestive of an un-abstract David B. The close-up on Lot's face as he begs God to let him hide out in a nearby town rather than force him to take a dangerous journey even further away from the soon-to-be-destroyed cities, his wild eyes matching the desperation in his repeated assertion that "it's such a little place!" The moving, teary-eyed embraces during the rapprochements of sundered brothers Jacob & Esau (a development I'd entirely forgotten about) and, later, Joseph & his eleven brothers. Esau dancing up a storm. The random brutality with which Crumb depicts "the wickedness of the human creature" that inspired God to flood the Earth. Shem, Ham, and Japheth drawn as Shemp, Larry, and Moe. The hoary cliche of God as a white-robed, white-bearded, white-haired old man put to graphic use as his flowing locks and whiskers become an elemental thing, echoing the radiance of the sun or the force of the rain and wind. The easy physical intimacy of Adam & Eve and Isaac & Rebekah romping, or Isaac & Rebekah cuddling on their wedding night. The sexiness of Tamar dressing up as a temple harlot, or Rachel presenting her handmaid Bilhah to Jacob, or "that scene" with Onan and Tamar. Reinforcing Joseph's ruse that he doesn't recognize his brothers by presenting his speech to them in hieroglyphics and then using a translator to relate them. The "do what now?" looks in the eyes of everyone who must get circumsized. The shocked sideways glance Eve shoots Adam as he throws her under the bus. The serpent as an anthropomorphized He-Man villain, until God curses him to crawl on his belly.

I am not a believer, and thus I appreciated the rough edges of the original text that a project like this brings out--the repeated pimping out of people's wives to save their own skin; the polygamy and incest (Where's your traditional marriage now, Moses?); God's nutso caprice throughout the entire enterprise; the frequent brutality and deception employed by God's chosen ones; the complete absence of monotheism as a concept, complete with gods mating with human and producing superhero hybrids; and so on. So if you're the kind of person who insists that a comic of this nature must reveal the pure-dee lunacy of using these stories as the basis for the self-developed narrative of mainstream Western religious tradition, let alone as a basis for a moral code, let alone as the literal history of the world that way way way too people mentally carry with them when they enter the voting booth, you'll make out fine.

But at the same time, the material is treated dead-on and respectfully, like "a straight illustration job" as Crumb puts it in his introduction. No cheap shots, no ironic image/text juxtapositions, no playing up the ugliness or contradictions. Rather you have a sympathetic treatment of these characters as people. Reading it, I got a taste of the solace evangelicals draw from these stories, and the entire cottage industry of "see, the people of the Bible are just like you!" sermons and books and so on that draw on them, if only to fit everything into a "so just believe in the God of the Trinity Broadcasting Network and everything's fine" mold after the fact. That part's absent, and instead you have a lively, living look at ancient stories that still retain their power to surprise, delight, enrage, and entertain. It's a hugely successful comic.

Posted by Sean T. Collins at 12:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)