R Crumb, The Book of Genesis Illustrated (Jonathan Cape 2009)
On the dust-jacket flap (yes, I read it in hardback, it was a Christmas present) we’re told that Crumb originally intended to do a ‘take-off of Adam and Eve’, but found himself so fascinated by the thing itself that the project transformed into this – a comic version of the whole book of Genesis, ‘NOTHING LEFT OUT!’ Being a bit slow on the uptake, I was still expecting that somehow this would be a crude and raunchy telling, a version for the irreligious.
Nup! It’s a straight graphic-novelisation. Admittedly, Crumb doesn’t shy away from the text’s abundant sex, violence and general skullduggery, but he doesn’t linger on it or portray it in lascivious detail. In fact, he has a couple of pages of lucid notes up the back proposing explanations for some of the more puzzlingly lurid behaviour of Abraham and Isaac, some of them drawing on feminist biblical scholarship (yes, that’s right, the creator of Fritz the Cat reads and refers his readers to feminist biblical scholarship).
My elder son, who is shamefully ill-informed about the foundational Judaeo-Christian texts, read the first few pages, and for the first time was full of questions about matters Biblical. I imagine some religious people might find the book a bit confronting, but if they were honest they would probably admit to finding it confronting even without Crumb’s contribution.
Me fail? I fly! 