Robert Crumb's Book of Genesis

Boogie-woogie boys and girls, it’s time to grab your boogie-woogie coats of many colors and get your boogie-woogie sandals to take our boogie-woogie lambs to town, Beersheba to Haran, Sodom to the Sea, it’s going to be a boogiedown against the boogieman with an angel swinging on every hair of your golden boogie heads, we are going to read–the Bible? ?

Robert Crumb‘s latest and greatest project, finished after four years of research and A highly secretive undertaking at the drafting board, boogies its way from the bookshelf to the bedside with so much soul-shaking get-down you’d think Albert Ammons was trying to put you to sleep with the blues to back your prayers. Fusing elements from nearly fifty years of comic illustration, ranging from the LSD-frazzled, aphorism-spouting toon-yogi Mr. Natural to collaborations with Charles Bukowski and a illustrated life of Charlie Patton, Crumb seems to have been readying himself for the project of biblical yield the whole time.

Best known for his illustration of Big Brother and the Holding Company‘s Cheap Thrills, Crumb became renowned in the late-60s for his style of hyper-hallucinogenic naturalism. His toonsy characters living on the rougher, darker edge of the hippie movement, became a counter within the counterculture. Mr. Natural, a kind of freak Maharishi Mahesh, was the product of bad acid that had left Crumb “fuzzy” for months. This sex-crazed, grandfatherly guru, became an early channel for troping critiques of a sex-crazed, drug-fueled movement through a paternal figurre–in a way returning to Mr. Natural for the new work, Crumb’s long-bearded deity in the Book of Genesis is sex-crazed and grandfatherly but–unlike Mr. Natural–very angry.

Crumb said that he considered drawing God in the Book of Genesis as a black woman–a Kali from his blues comics days–until he began to research the Bible and had to trace out the way redaction was deployed to strengthen the power of the patriarchs. Recuperating the suppressed role of women and priestesses in the Bible consequently became central to the project.

Crumb has repeated that his illustration of the Bible is not satire. And, if it is scandalous, it is no more scandalous than the original text. With an “adult supervision recommended” warning on the book’s cover, his illustration follows the Robert Alter‘s translation verbatim, giving juicy graphics to the ancient poetry.

Whether it’s Lot and his daughters, or Adam and Eve frolicking in a prelapsarian sex-fest, Crumb’s project focuses attention back on its women–full-bodied, powerful priestesses of the earth that had been edited out of the Bible, almost erased from history, but evident in small cues which Crumb brings into the foreground.

Another recuperative upshot of the project brings the biblical mythos of the blues into view–Noah’s flood looks a lot like Crumb’s rendering of Charlie Patton‘s “High Water Everywhere,” his Jacob wrestling the angel a lot like his Robert Johnson meeting the dark celestial being at “The Crossroads,” his curse upon Cain like the voodoo curse upon his Jelly Roll Morton.

Sex, deluges, angels and curses aside, Crumb’s Book of Genesis brings the blues into the Bible–or the blues out of the Bible–with an emphasis on the wayward nature of its characters, coming and going, arising and disappearing, gaining and losing, all on account of their words. Joseph, like Ledbetter before the warden, has to deliver his own freedom with verbal delivery. And broken into frames, with each line from the first book of the Bible given its own illustration, the reader is compelled to read these verbal deliveries more slowly, like poetry.

The book’s greatest weakness is, perhaps, that it is very idiosyncratically Crumb. This is his Genesis, and the reader is deprived of the ability to read the book without noticing its illustrator. In some ways, this makes reading his Bible for biblical quality more difficult. In other ways, it leaves me wishing he had illustrated the entire thing! A final cross-reference that might extend this book beyond its covers is Crumb’s illustration of the “Religious Experience of Philip K. Dick.” In 1974, Dick spent several months in Fullerton, CA, believing that the spirit of Elijah had entered him, revealing to him that he was not living in Fullerton, CA, but in Jerusalem in the time of Apostles, and that the illusion of Fullerton had been fabricated by the Romans as a means of mental control. Through a hyper-attention to Christian symbols and the shape of letters in Greek words, Dick could be transported to “reality.” The words became images offering celestial travel. Crumb’s images of the Bible’s words are perhaps ready to do the same.