![]() ![]() In Crumb’s depiction, the Sodomite mob’s confrontation with Lot seethes with hostile, barely repressed lust. The human events of Genesis, though frequently tumultuous, sometimes permit image-making that recalls Crumb’s better known work: Adam joyously jumping Eve in the Garden of Eden, Noah drunk and naked in his tent, Pharoah’s lustful wife, scorned and shrieking after Joseph. Crumb’s aged Abraham, submerging grief into duty, is rigidly stoic as he prepares to sacrifice his only son. More august Biblical figures project recognizable human motivations, even in the book’s most heightened circumstances. Crumb invests this cast of thousands with cultivated observation of both physiognomy and character, and his characters, even when only briefly glimpsed, resonate authentically as flawed strugglers. His Biblical people are frequently scruffy, sometimes surly, sometimes shabby, and the book’s genealogical accounts teem with countless invented faces in a variety of attitudes. The world of Crumb’s Genesis is a modest one of herds and huts, in which both sustenance and status are measured in hard-won material dimensions.Ĭharacters literally proliferate within Crumb’s well-realized environments. He generally avoids outsized panels and oblique points of view, hallmarks of burlesque and melodrama, to keep this story as grounded as possible in basic human terms. But compositionally-and therefore dramatically-Crumb keeps his images fairly neutral, even deadpan. This largest self-contained piece of work by Crumb to date showcases his virtuoso ability to incorporate densely crosshatched detail into functionally narrative cartoon drawing. Throughout, Crumb’s fine but unfussy pen drawings stand alongside their prose source, revealing his choices without obscuring their origins. As the book progresses to dwell more minutely on events in the lives of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph, the text’s increasingly episodic narrative pace permits a fuller deployment of Crumb’s traditional storytelling techniques. His discontinuous panels sometimes highlight the text’s elisions and staccato rhythms, but embroider dry recitations of names and places with vivid details of setting and character. Dutifully suppressing his own narrative voice, Crumb matches the book’s peculiar cadences with carefully drawn cartoon visualizations. Crumb suggests in his introduction and endnotes that these point to Genesis’s own sources, incompletely edited to conceal evidence of an earlier, displaced matriarchy. And yet, the original prose often presents narrative discontinuities, lists, redundancies, and ambiguities, particularly in its earlier chapters. Genesis details a clear narrative arc: God’s creation of the world and its inhabitants, humankind’s subsequent offenses and exile, and the covenant God establishes with a chosen lineage over succeeding centuries. If the Biblical Genesis is not sacred to Robert Crumb as divine writing (and, he confesses in his introduction, it isn’t), its text remains functionally sacred as source material for an auteur who has chosen, for this project, to produce his adaptation as a self-described “straight illustration job.” This literalist strategy is distinct from most approaches to adaptation, including Crumb’s own less extensive, earlier treatments of works by Kafka, Krafft-Ebing, Boswell, and Sartre. Massaging together various translations, Crumb’s elaborately hand-drawn and hand-lettered adaptation incorporates every single word of its prose source. ![]() The book’s quick pitch suggests a blasphemous bestseller, guaranteed to supply throaty laughs to its secular readers-if it doesn’t inspire violent protests among the faithful.īut since Crumb first announced this project in 2005, he has repeatedly insisted that his treatment of Genesis would be respectful and literal. There is no more notoriously recalcitrant American cartoonist, and one can truly say that the source text is bigger than Jesus. ![]() Crumb, iconic as comics’ greatest iconoclast, has, at 65, taken on the Word of God. Indeed, The Book of Genesis Illustrated is a bookstore-ready graphic novel debut with a killer high concept: Countercultural antihero R. ![]() But this fascinating project, though vastly different from Crumb’s best-known work in tenor and form, is impelled by many of the same confrontational strategies and ethical preoccupations that mark his singular career: one that has-until now-resisted the fast-drying conventions of the graphic novel format. Robert Crumb’s new, long-form comics adaptation of the Book of Genesis may be more immediately accessible to casual graphic novel readers than to devotees of the celebrated cartoonist’s satirical, psychedelic, sexual, and endlessly self-excavating short-form comics of the past forty-two years. By: Bill Kartalopoulos | October 13, 2009 ![]()
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