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! 
It’s meant to be confronting. Or at least, it couldn’t care less whether it’s confronting or not. I think of the Bible as one long argument with itself. And also as a record of a slowly developing understanding of its own preoccupations. As a believer, I think it got there in the end, in places, but that it should be read as a human artifact, and a kind of work in progress.
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When I saw that Robert Crumb was working on this I had exactly that thought, that he would twist the tale to suit his peculiar vision. But on reflection, I realized the tale is already perfectly twisted and needed no revision. I hope he does the entire Old Testament, people tend to forget all the juicy bits in it.
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(By the way, the first link, to the book, isn’t working.)
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Cassandra: Yes, I agree. None of what’s in this book wasn’t there when I read Genesis closely more than 30 years ago. This presentation of it will almost certainly result in a whole new wave of close readers. with any luck the believers among them will respond along your liines rather than with accusations of distortion. Incidentally, I think you’d be interested in the arguments of Savina Teubal in Sarah the Priestess (1984), which he cites at length.
Paul: Link fixed. Thanks. I hear that Crumb has said he doesn’t intend to do the whole Bible. But we can hope for a little more …
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