God Gets Graphic

By DAVID HAJDU

October 25, 2009

THE BOOK OF GENESIS

Illustrated by R. Crumb

Unpaged. W. W. Norton & Company. $24.95

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 severity. Early in his progress on “The Book of Genesis,” Crumb was asked by Robert Hughes of Time magazine if he was drawing God to look like Mr. Natural (the burlesque cartoon shaman whom he has long employed to poke fun at pop spirituality). Crumb replied: “He has a white beard, but he actually ended up looking more like my father. He has a very masculine face.” Both paternity and masculinity are matters of dubious value to Crumb, a wonderfully unlikely candidate to breathe new life into the founding narrative of masculine privilege and paternal authority in the Judeo-Christian world.

Crumb’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. He is a profoundly — almost grotesquely — human-looking deity, very much the sort of being in whose image vulgar humankind could realistically come forth. His nose has the elongation of age (and an implied proto-Jewishness), and it is dotted with deep pores. His brow is furrowed in a permanent scowl, unchanged throughout the book. (In one of the chapters about Noah, Crumb has God scowling even as he pets a goat.) He wears a long white robe and, over it, a longer white robe of billowing, gentle tresses that flow from his scalp and his face to what would presumably be his feet. 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! Nothing left out!” brags a banner on the cover. This is scarcely the first time the Bible has been adapted to comics pages, of course. In the first decade of the comic-book business, the man who claimed to have invented the medium, M. C. Gaines, founded a whole company on a line of “Picture Stories From the Bible.” (When he died suddenly, his young son, William M. Gaines, inherited the company, and in a 20th-century case study in the enduring vagaries of primogeniture, the son discontinued the Bible strips and started publishing lurid, spicy crime and horror comics.) 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. For the most part, the idea of Bible comics was to simplify and clean up the text for children, reducing the cryptic, sometimes dark poetry of the Scripture to juvenilia.

Crumb’s is a Genesis for adults — indeed, for adults only, as one might and should expect from an artist whose importance is rooted in his ability to give vivid form to taboos of the imagination with unapologetic bluntness and extravagant explicitness. The prospect of Crumb’s doing the Bible might seem at first a stunt, an all-too-obvious mash-up of the most sacred and the most profane. When I heard about it, I thought immediately of Norman Mailer’s “Gospel According to the Son,” a fictive memoir by Jesus — and an agent’s pitch passing for a novel. Crumb’s book is serious and, for Crumb, restrained. He resists the temptation to go all-out Crumb on us and exaggerate the sordidness, the primitivism and the outright strangeness (by contemporary standards) of parts of the text. What is Genesis about, after all, but resisting temptation?

Crumb luxuriates in the carnality of Genesis without playing it for gratuitous shock or comic effect. Adam and Eve frolic about in the nude, naturally, but in playful, duly innocent, ecstasy. When Lot’s two daughters get him drunk and have sex with him — in duty to the system of primogeniture that dominates Genesis — the images are shocking, yes, but not gratuitously so; the shock is in the act, not in the portrayal. At points, Crumb withholds exactly the kind of graphic details he built a career on revealing: In an image of circumcision, he shows us two splatters of blood, rather than the actual penis being cut. Onan practices coitus interruptus turned away from us. 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. He mingles them, sometimes freely, and makes a few puzzling choices — for instance, he uses the term “handmaid,” derived from the King James, to describe the young woman whom Sarai offers up to sleep with her husband, Abram, after Sarai is unable to conceive, rather than Alter’s term, “slave girl,” which evokes the woman’s subservient status. These are not major liabilities, however, and I leave it to Bible experts to parse them all. (I took only one class in the seminary before abandoning my youthful aspiration to the Anglican priesthood.)

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. Many of the illustrations, then, constitute revisions of the text to some degree, and not mere amplifications. When Abram decides to offer Sarai to the king of Egypt, Crumb shows us Sarai at first baffled — in the grammar of comics, a question mark appears in a thought balloon beside her — and, in the next panel, distraught, a tear trickling down her cheek. The Scripture gives no hint of her feelings. Here and throughout the book, Crumb seems to be making a point to flesh out the female characters in an apparent effort to offset the relentless male orientation of the text. In the introduction, he explains that he treated the work as “a straight illustration job.” Yet his task was hardly straightforward.

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, a fearless anarchist and proud cynic, clearly believes in other things, and to hold those beliefs — they are kinds of beliefs, too — is his prerogative. Crumb, brilliantly, shows us the man in God, but not the God in man.

David Hajdu’s books include “The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America” and “Heroes and Villains: Essays on Music, Movies, Comics, and Culture,” which was published earlier this month.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/25/books/review/Hajdu-t.html?nl=books&emc=booksupdateema3