In The Beginning Was the Word … Now Come the Drawings
By Malcolm Jones


    For the better part of the Christian era in Western civilization, illustrating scenes from the Bible was not a job for artists. It was the job. As late as the Renaissance, Michelangelo, Leonardo, and their wannabes spent their days illustrating ceilings and altarpieces, painting frescoes, and chiseling images of Moses, David, and Madonna and child out of every scrap of available marble. But as the church lost some of its hold on the Western imagination, artists felt free to look elsewhere for inspiration. Now and then an artist would undertake a religious theme (Chagall, Rouault), but excepting the English painter Stanley Spencer or outsider artist Howard Finster, it’s hard to think of a major modern artist who’s spent much time on holy ground. It’s even harder to think of an artist who could significantly alter our perceptions of the events, previously illustrated or not, in the Bible. But then, who could have foreseen that R. Crumb would tackle the Book of Genesis? Yes, this is the man a publisher has entrusted with the task of illustrating the first book of the Bible. Unlikely as it might seem, this was trust well repaid. Without a trace of irony, and certainly no mockery, Crumb delivers a literal—one might even say traditional—rendition of the events in the Judeo-Christian account of Creation and its aftermath. Frame by frame, comic-book fashion, The Book of Genesis shows a white-bearded, patriarchal God creating the heavens and the earth and all that walk upon it. We see Adam and Eve exiled from the Garden of Eden. We observe the first murder, as Cain kills his brother, and then Noah and the Flood, the travails of Abraham—every verse of every chapter carefully rendered, right through to the story of Joseph and the Israelite migration to Egypt.

In the text, it’s UNCLEAR