Genesis: The Word According to R. Crumb

(From L. to R.): Hammer Museum / AP; Pierre Verdy / AFP / Getty

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Few Biblical scholars would have made R. Crumb — the counterculture cartoonist famous for creating Fritz the Cat — their no. 1 choice for reinterpreting the first book of the Pentateuch. And few among Crumb's cult following would have elected that he spend four of his creative years drawing pictures to go with Sarah Palin's favorite bedside reading. Yet the weird, obsessive, oversexed artist's pictorial interpretation of Genesis, which came out Oct. 19, has shot up best-seller lists: as of this writing, it's no. 1 on the New York Times graphic novel bestseller list and on Amazon.com's Christian books list, which is something of an acheivement.

Who's buying it? There's pent-up demand among his core fans (his last book came out five years ago), but his editor at W.W. Norton, Robert Weil, thinks this book is reaching beyond Crumb's base. One sign he's right is that it's not just selling in comic book stores. Bookscan reported sales in regular bookstores increased the second week. Amazon says most of its buyers are coming from the West Coast, which is not as surprising as the cautious promotion the book got on religious blogs. (See 10 surprising facts about the world's oldest Bible.)

It's not as if Crumb is the first to adapt the Bible in this way. There have long been comic-book versions of the Bible for children. Penthouse once serialized a graphic version of Genesis, which formed the basis for the book Bible: Eden, by Scott Hampton and Keith Giffen. There's a Manga Bible and one illustrated by renowned Mad magazine cartoonists Basil Wolverton. But perhaps because of the strange alchemy of the pairing, Crumb's Genesis has attracted more mainstream media attention than most graphic novels or reissued books of the Bible normally do, with an excerpt in the New Yorker and reviews in many daily papers and weekly magazines. The official religious press took little notice, although it did get a gushy review in the Jewish Daily Forward.

Crumb's manuscript is — for a man who has said he doesn't believe Genesis is God's word — oddly reminiscent of those produced by monks before printing presses: a faithful, verse for verse copy, painstakingly rendered. He hardly needed to change a thing; Genesis offers a smorgasbord of the kind of behavior Crumb is given to portraying: the persistent, colorful, depressing failure of humans to not give in to their baser desires. It's sufficiently literal that cultural conservatives could hardly be offended, but it has more than enough supernatural events, betrayals and epic storylines to satisfy the comic book reader. (See the top 10 religion stories of 2008.)

Norton, in emphasizing the literary and artistic nature of the book — there's an accompanying art exhibition in Los Angeles' Hammer Museum — has been promoting it more like an intriguing new rendition of Beowulf than a sacred text. (Perhaps shortsightedly, they did not market the book to Christian bookstores; neither big Bible publishers Zondervan and Thomas Nelson nor the American Bible Society had heard of the volume when contacted.) There's a little synergy at work too: Crumb mostly uses the well-regarded translation by UC Berkeley Professor Robert Alter, another Norton author.

Finally there's the cover. It may not be a great way to judge a book, but it's not a bad way to move one. It shows a picture of a grim Adam and a buxom Eve (apparently using an early version of that double-stick tape J.Lo deploys to keep her dress in place), plus a Charlton Heston-y God. "The First Book of the Bible Graphically Depicted!" it proclaims. "Nothing Left Out!" plus "Adult Suprvision Recommended for Minors." That's catnip to at least one section of society. "I have a feeling," says Weil, "this book could do a lot for Bible literacy among teenage boys."

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