Category Archives: Slow-Rolling Genesis

Slow-Rolling Genesis Index

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We’ve been writing about R. Crumb’s Book of Genesis on and off here at HU for the past month. I think we’re finally done (hear that co-bloggers? Stop it!), but I thought it might be helpful to provide a convenient index of the roundtable. So here it is:
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The entire roundtable is here.

Ng Suat Tong begins the roundtable by comparing R. Crumb’s Book of Genesis to the Biblical images of other great artists.

Ken Parille, writing at his own site, defends Crumb’s Genesis.

Ng Suat Tong responds to Ken Parille’s post.

Ken Parille at his own site, talks about pastoral and presence in Crumb’s Genesis.

Alan Choate defends Crumb’s Genesis.

Ng Suat Tong replies to Alan Choate.

Alan Choate continues his defense of Crumb’s Genesis.

Ng Suat Tong responds to Alan Choate’s further comments.

Noah Berlatsky talks about Crumb, Kierkegaard, and floating bearded heads.

Caroline Small compares Crumb’s Genesis to Biblical illustrations by Howard Finster and Basil Wolverton.

Matthias Wivel discusses Crumb, Rembrandt, Breughel, and cartooning as exegesis.

In a slight detour, Noah Berlatsky discusses a Rembrandt illustration from Genesis that Matthias highlighted.

Peter Sattler argues that Crumb’s treatment of Genesis is not sufficiently literal.
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In addition to the posts, the discussion has generated a lot of comments. Besides the writers above, interesting points have been made by

Jeet Heer

Steven Grant (and also here)

EricB.

Robert Stanley Martin

Ed Sizemore

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Thanks so much to Suat for starting this, to all our other posters, and for everyone who took time to comment…and of course to read it.

Crumb’s Limited Literalism: Seeing and Not Seeing in Genesis

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Perhaps the best thing about R. Crumb’s Book of Genesis – the best thing, that is, about an adaptation that cleaves so closely to the original text – is that it repeatedly sends one back to the Bible itself. With that in mind, read the following passage, and tell me what you see:

And the waters surged most mightily over the earth, and all the high mountains under heaven were covered. . . . And all the flesh that stirs on the earth perished, the fowl and the cattle and the beasts and all swarming things that swarm upon the earth, and all humankind. All that had the quickening breath of life in its nostrils, of all that was on dry land, died. And He wiped out all existing things from the face of the earth, from humans to cattle to crawling things to the fowl of the heavens, they were wiped out from the earth. And Noah alone remained, and those with him in the ark. (Alter’s translation, 7:19-23)

What we have here is an act not just of destruction, but of un-creation. Step by step, the narration both mirrors and undoes the creative processes of Genesis 1. A separation of waters; a gathering of dry land; plants and swarms of living things; creatures that crawl and fly; cattle and wild beasts; human beings – all that was added, piece by piece, at the opening of Genesis is here subtracted, until nothing remain but chaos, the face of the deep, and one breath of life – Noah and company – hovering over the surface of the water.

The passage also enacts what it describes. The Bible’s paratactic structures and sentences seem to mimic the rising water line, the subtractive deluge. Fowl – gone. Cattle – gone. Beasts and swarming things and, lastly, human beings – gone. It sums up the destruction, in language that recalls the creation of Adam himself: “All that had the quickening breath of life in its nostrils.” And then, just for good measure, the text repeats the process, this time in reverse, from Adam and earth on up to the heavens. It is not just a moving passage; it is a passage in motion – one that guides our eyes and imaginations, both into the slowly accumulating image and outward toward other passages of the Biblical story.

Now here are the central verses, as illustrated by Crumb:

The problem here is not the drawing per se, although it does seem to me more a parody of a mass drowning than an image of real panic. The real problem resides in all that Crumb’s picture strips from the original – all that it fails to embody.

The encroaching waters. The feeling of sequence. The shifts in scale. The “visual” and textual connections to Genesis’ opening chapter. All these are missing in Crumb’s illustration. This is a failure not simply of imagination or vision. In its loss of sequence and motion and connection, it is a failure of comics. It is a failure that did not have to happen.

In previous critiques of Genesis at this site, Crumb was taken to task for a lack of theological and imaginative engagement. Others stepped forward to celebrate the work for its exegetical and psychological complexity, denying that it ever was, to quote the artist, a “literal” rendering of the Bible or a project of “straight illustration.” For me, however, the problem with Genesis is not that Crumb is too literal. The problem is that he is very often not literal enough – failing to see and capture (and thus failing to help his reader to see) all that the text is showing.

To my mind, a successful “literal” adaptation would require more than simply an accurate and inclusive representation of Genesis’ actors and actions. It would demand more than just having (as Crumb puts it) “nothing left out.” To be truly faithful to the letter of the narrative – to be fully and deeply literal – such an adaptation would pursue three objectives.

First, it would be unremitting in its attention to textual detail, reminding us of what even the best-known text actually says and shows. Second, it would be equally committed to “literally” rendering all that the text does not show, reminding us of what Genesis refuses or fails to depict. Third, it would make the reader aware of how the scripture’s isolated events, actions, and verses acquire their form and content in relation to one another and to a larger narrative whole.

This is, ultimately, a threefold commitment to seeing – to seeing what is there, what is not there, and what connects those pieces. When Crumb’s Genesis succeeds, it succeeds on these terms. And when it fails – as it frequently does – that failure stems, in my opinion, from a too-constricted vision of what a literal adaptation might be.

Let’s begin with what works. As many critics have noted, Crumb’s project gives a body – along with face, hair, and clothes – to the words of Genesis. It refuses the world of symbol and metaphor and abstraction, reclaiming the text in the name of the specific, the concrete, and the quotidian. At its best, it pulls the old text back before us and shouts, Look! Look at what this says!

At such moments, Crumb allows us to see anew some wonderful things. We are compelled to imagine exactly what a 130-year-old Adam and Eve would look like upon the birth of their third child (5:3). We are reminded that Abraham did not (contra Rembrandt) sit welcomingly with his three prophetic visitors but stood submissively behind them, standing under a tree while they sat and ate (18:8). We can see explicitly that Joseph spoke to his benighted brothers not in Hebrew, but in Egyptian – a fact that the Bible does not reveal until later in the chapter (42:23).

While they may not seem imaginative to some, these are important moments of imagining nonetheless. They cast the world into images. In one particularly powerful scene, Crumb takes what might have been either a forgettable detail or an overwrought symbol and gives it equal status within a material world. Through two gold bracelets and a nose ring, Crumb creates a surprising and touching image, while establishing a memorable connection to a later verse (24:22-3, 47-8):

Crumb makes us see the text (and what it omits or only implies). We see the selection of the items (and the cache that remains). We see their relative weight and size (and the servant as he measures them, considering the import of his gift). And we see the act – both intimate and aggressive – of placing these items onto and into the body of Rebekah, as well as her unconscious reaction when she later recalls the ceremony. These moments of embodiment and repetition demonstrate of what a fully “literal” reading can accomplish.

Nonetheless, as I claimed above, it is on these very terms and in comparison to moments such as these that much of the comic also fails. Indeed, it often falters just when a reader might need a “literal” reading most.

Consider Crumb’s God. As many have noted, Crumb’s deity is almost completely incarnated. This is a God of nostrils, footfalls, and lots of pointing fingers. Each divine action seems to be taken and shown in its most literal form. When Crumb’s Bible says that someone “walked with God” (6:9), they really walked with God – and really walked with God.

But this project of embodiment only takes Crumb so far. The comic wants us to see what the bible says about God – that he walks, talks, rests, breaths, smells, and (above all) appears. But Crumb only depicts this character (as a character) in a limited number of ways – most of them scowling. Peruse the opening chapters. How many images of God are versions of this expression?

God Calling

The subtlety of Crumb’s portraiture – seen most clearly in the book’s “begotten” figures – all but disappears when we turn to Genesis’ main persona. The “creating” God (1:1), the “warning” God (2:17), the “calling” God (3:9), the “cursing” God (3:17-9), the “worrying” God (3:22), the “regretting” God (6:6) – they all look like variations on a clichéd visual theme of the stern patriarch.

I am not trying to argue, presumptively, that Crumb should have drawn God differently. Artists can use clichéd or familiar images to great artistic effect. I do believe, though, that Crumb’s professed commitment to drawing what Genesis literally said and showed should have pushed him and his pictures back towards the text.

In other words, if Crumb wanted to humanize God, then why ignore all human expression, emotion, and action that the text itself offers? Look to the panel above. The narrative, taken as translated, is an act of “calling” (3:9). And it is not just a calling out, but a calling “to Adam”: “Where are you?” These words imply many things – an invitation, an expectation, perhaps even confusion. But God’s face here and following does not show surprise or dismay, betrayal or realization. The images all exhibit a barely differentiated scowl.

How far could Crumb have taken his commitment to a literal reading? Well, we could have seen God “making skin coats” for his now cursed creation. We could have seen God not simply handing the garments to Adam and Eve (see Crumb’s version) but physically, perhaps sadly, “cloth[ing] them” (3:21). We could have seen Cain’s God expressing concern for that man’s distress, or Noah’s God feeling “regret” and “grie[f] . . . in his heart” (6:6).  Instead:

God Regrets

Now push this embodiment still further. Imagine a humanized God creating the earth, possibly extending the image Crumb develops for Adam’s creation. Moreover, imagine a God who is always talking to himself, who is talking the world into existence, and who is trying, perhaps, to create something worth talking to. But this would require a level of literalness – and literacy – that Crumb’s Genesis is just not willing to entertain.  Look, for instance, at Crumb’s God at the end of Day Six. Is that the face of someone who had just bestowed a blessing, finding all that He had made “very good” (1:28-30)?

Sadly, this graphic deficit is not unique to the deity. The problem of caricature and stereotype infects much of the book. For example, a close reader of Genesis might imagine that Jacob would possess the subtlest of expressions, reflective of a man who deceives all those who are closest to him. But beyond one powerful scene (the duping of Laban [30:25-34]), Crumb never accepts the challenge of those chapters – namely, to show a thinking man thinking, a person embodying deceit.

And it is one thing to notice that Noah looks bewildered and afraid when God informs him of His destructive plan. But that insight falls a bit flat when so many of Noah’s expressions evince the same blank-eyed wonder:

Noahs Faces

One slowly realizes that Crumb is not trying to capture the feelings in Noah’s face so much as to produce variations on a single “Noah face” (just as he gives us variations on his God-face, his wild-brother-face, his good-brother-face, his grizzled-patriarch-face, etc.). Each expression should be an adverb, modifying the often-sparse Biblical phrasing. Instead we get one proper noun after another.

In saying this, I realize that I directly counter the arguments that Matthias Wivel ably presented earlier this week. I can only say that his close reading of the Abraham chapters has helped me to appreciate the subtlety and visual progression of those pages. Indeed, Crumb’s “covenantal blessing” sequence (17:8-17) may be one of the more intriguing and interesting in the book. In the end, though, the volume does not seem able to maintain that subtlety of representation.

My examples, at this point, might seem small relative to the enormity of Crumb’s project. However, such recurrent problems of “showing” are matched by equally significant problems of “not-showing.” Allow me to unpack a few signal examples.

The binding of Isaac. In this chapter, Crumb does give us two images of deep humanity. In the first (visible here), Abraham responds to the booming voice that stays his hand and spares his son. The patriarch looks skyward, worried, stricken, almost childlike, the “cleaver” relaxing in his grip. This is an evocative image for a simple phrase: “And he said, ‘Here I am’”. With it, Crumb also recollects other uses of those words, along with the figures that accompany them. (We see Abraham in a similar posture – complete with gripping hand – at the opening of the chapter [22:2] and when Isaac first questions his father [22:7].) The second potent image comes when Crumb leaves the text entirely, showing Abraham embracing Isaac after the ordeal, the boy resting his head on his father’s chest.

But these moments of emotion are embedded in a scene that seems to keep the story and its possibilities at arm’s length. For most of the chapter, Abraham’s face is all but motionless, registering (to my eyes) no surprise or sadness or resignation. Overall, Crumb’s patriarch looks coolly determined, especially when he is preparing his son for the slaughter. And Isaac seems equally blank, often appearing more drugged than distressed.

To be sure, the sequence could reflect Crumb’s personal understanding of these characters. After all, the text tells us little of Isaac’s reaction to the sacrifice (or to his being exchanged, in the end, for a goat). And perhaps Crumb does find Abraham pathologically cold. But these visual choices make that final image of reconciliation seem more than a little unearned.

Sacrifice and Reunion

However, these panels reveal a bigger problem: they are false to the text. Crumb shows Abraham and Isaac riding back together after the binding. But the Bible doesn’t; it only mentions Abraham’s return. Isaac disappears for two chapters, reappearing as a marriageable man living in a different region (along with an apparently estranged father, who fears that his son might marry a Canaanite and thus fail to maintain God’s covenant).

This is not a reunion story, literally considered. Why then did Crumb make it so? And more importantly, why did he make so little of that choice?

Jacob’s struggle. This scene, too, is already well known: Jacob wrestles with an angel, who eventually blesses and re-names him. But of course, literally, the scripture says no such thing. It tells us that Jacob – who is alone because he keeps sending his people ahead, human shields against Esau’s possible attack – wrestles in the dark with “a man.”

The text focuses on what we don’t know. The man is unnamed; the man is unseen. And in Alter’s translation (but not Crumb’s text), Jacob’s combatant never claims to be divine: “[Y]ou have striven with God and men, and won out” (32:29). Is this figure “God” or just one of those defeated “men”? Is it an angel? Is it Esau? The script remains silently suggestive.

But Crumb’s comic speaks up, (ex)changing the text, making the assailant clearly visible in even the dimmest light, and finally endowing the figure with a placid face and saintly halo. (As the book’s endnotes indicate, Crumb is clearly invested in the divinity of this character, but not for reasons of textual fidelity.) Yes, the comic does present this figure as “a man,” but by veering away from the letter – and, hence, the ambiguity – of the text, Crumb transforms him into far too particular of a man.

Jacob and the Man

Jacob’s silence. But if the above is a literalist sin of commission, a worse sin of graphic omission occurs two chapters later. Jacob’s daughter, Dinah, has been raped, and her aggrieved brothers take revenge upon the Hivites, using the sacred act of circumcision to gain an odd tactical advantage over their enemies. When Jacob learns of the massacre and pillage, he delivers his first line of the drama. The father worries not about his sons’ potential impiety or his daughter’s violation, but about his own safety in the face of vengeful Canaanites.

Here is how Crumb depicts the chapter’s closing verses (34:30-1):

Jacob's Silence

From one “literalist” point of view, the scene plays accurately, action by action, line by line. What the images fail to depict, though, is the directness of the confrontation and, above all, Jacob’s silence in the face of his sons’ accusation – a silence that echoes his earlier reticence, when Dinah’s rape is first reported (34:5).

What is an artist to do? How does one show silence or inaction? With an extra panel, showing Jacob’s refusal to reply? With an image that contains both father and sons, registering the directness of the charge and the personal nature of the conflict? Might Dinah herself have been included (restoring some of the gender conflict that so interests Crumb)? I am uncertain. Regardless, the most important part of that chapter – its most human, dramatic, and “telling” act – is missing.

These are, I admit, difficult test cases. To be sure, I could have focused on far “easier” moments when Crumb’s images also fall short from a “literalist” point of view. The testing of Rebekah at the well, for instance, should be filled with activity, with Isaac’s future wife “hurrying” and “running” up and down the hill to bring enough water for ten thirsty camels. This, the text indicates, is a test of both body and spirit!  Instead, we get a pastoral set-piece, complete with cuddly critters.

Rebekah at the well

But difficult or not, I submit that any “literalist” graphic illustration of these stories must be up to the task. And an artist of Crumb’s ability – an ability that shines frequently in these pages – demands a strict accounting.

Let me turn, finally and more quickly, to the third characteristic of a strong literal adaptation: the use of imagery to evoke a text’s larger structures and patterns, to connect what is shown here to what is shown elsewhere. Suffice to say that Genesis is threaded with such patterns. As Alter and countless others have noted, the Bible is composed of recurring “story-types” and reiterative rhetorical structures, which build in power and meaning as the reader moves through the scriptures. At the levels of sentence, story, and theme, it is a book of potent repetition: repeated blessings and curses, repeated deceptions and revelations, repeated actions and inactions.

Unfortunately, Crumb’s Genesis does little to visualize these patterns. He often leaves us with a long parade of scenes when he might have used his images to construct a larger visual and narrative network.

Take the following pair of examples, both scenes of surrogate marriage and childbirth (16:3; 30:4). At the level of text, we encounter phrases and actions that make one scene “rhyme” with another, lending thematic weight to both, teasing out similarities and ultimately highlighting differences. The pictures, though, fail to take creative advantage of these rhyming opportunities – opportunities that might have allowed Crumb to emphasize patterns of progeny, the status of servants, or even the power of Biblical matriarchs:

The point here is not that pictures and words must march in lockstep. The point, rather, is to emphasize the importance of larger patterns in the literal representation of any particular scene.

Indeed, these rhymes and patterns are often central to appreciating the events at all. Recall, for example, how the “stolen blessing” scene of Jacob and Isaac (22:18-30) bookends with Jacob/Israel’s benediction over the sons of Joseph (48:8-20) – one of the final images of blessing in Genesis. The parallel structures could not be more profound. The deceptive son of the former tale is now the blind old father of the latter. In both scenes we find questions of identity, gestures of beckoning and belonging, and concerns about the rights of the firstborn – even as the stories resolve themselves quite differently.

Crumb, however, does little in his staging or composition of the scenes to dramatize those similarities. The passages may be visually adequate in their own right, but they do little to draw the narrative of Jacob to a satisfying and reflective close.

It is not that Crumb is unaware of these connections or the ways in which his pictures can, so to speak, draw upon one another over the course of chapters. In fact, my large-scale concerns about Genesis often make Crumb’s moments of visual connectedness that much more striking for me, as when he creates graphic resonance among separate scenes of despair and abandonment:

This sequence constitutes a strong literal reading on Crumb’s part. But it manifests a strength that, too frequently, does not persist.

To repeat, the ultimate problem of Crumb’s Genesis is not that it is too literal, but that it is not literal enough. I appreciate his aesthetic of embodiment; but he leaves many of these stories and characters incompletely embodied. I have no problem with the task of a “straight illustration job.” But I think that many of Crumb’s illustrations fail to make the stories fully visible.

We get a God of human stature and shape, but not a God that displays a full range of human emotions – at least as related by the text. Crumb gives us a series of types when the job calls for the representation of subtle differences. Crumb gives us a wealth of human details, but just as often fails to embed those details in the larger narrative context, both explicit and implicit. He provides long sequences of scenes, but rarely helps us to see the connections among those scenes – connections that give the scenes their literal shape.

We need help to see the Genesis stories through years of accumulated imagery. We need guidance to see what is on the page, and what isn’t. I suspect that Crumb’s still-powerful Book of Genesis will grow on me with time. But right now . . . well, I just don’t see it.

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[Peter Sattler teaches about comics and other literature at Lakeland College in Wisconsin.  He recently contributed to Mississippi’s The Comics of Chris Ware.  The first comic he bought with his own money was X-Men #112.]

Note: Watercolor image above from Peter Spier, Noah’s Ark (Doubleday, 1977).
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Update by Noah: The entire roundtable on Crumb’s Genesis is here.

Rembrandt Chatting

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Last week Matthias Wivel discussed Crumb’s Genesis in relation to the work of Rembrandt and Breughel. Matthias argued in particular that Rembrandt’s engagement with Biblical themes

is clearly more sophisticated, dedicated and emotionally complex than Crumb’s Genesis, but it is nevertheless instructive to compare the two, because of the intersection of their methods and goals.

Like Bruegel and Rembrandt, Crumb is a humanist (in the modern as opposed to the renaissance sense of the word), observant of human behavior and—as his richly varied sketchbooks demonstrate—clearly attentive to the world around him….

Matthias discusses at some length what he finds valuable in Crumb’s Genesis…and I’ve talked about my own reservations about the book elsewhere as well. In fact, I talked about them so much that I have more or less pissed everyone off, so I thought perhaps I’d give it a rest for a post. But I love that Rembrandt illustration that Matthias introduced me to in his essay, so I thought for a change I’d talk briefly about what I find so striking about the image.

In the first place, the thing that gets me initially isn’t exactly the fact that it’s attentive to the world. On the contrary, it’s the quickness of the sketch; the way you can almost see Rembrandt’s hand scribbling forms out of nothing. It’s only secondarily that Abraham’s face leaps out with its half-quizzical, half-stricken expression…that face being the only thing in the drawing (besides perhaps the angel’s right hand) which seems finished. The drawing seems to have happened so quickly that you almost wonder if Abraham is reacting to the angel’s words or to the shock of materializing. It’s as if he’s just been suddenly and surprisingly beamed onto the planet.

The angel is even sketchier than Abraham — his one wing is actually transparent, and through it we see the other, which is little more than a child’s scribble. His left hand is a misshapen paw; you get the sense that if we could see his face, it would be little more than an indistinct mass (maybe *that’s* why Abraham looks distrubed!)

Of course, we can’t actually see the angel’s face, because Rembrandt has positioned us behind his shoulder. The angel is doubly obscured; he’s half-formed with his perhaps nonexistent features in shadow. We can’t see the angel and we can’t see what Rembrandt sees in the angel. The composition, the technique, and the insistent focus on the process of creation all seem to emphasize the mystery that Abraham confronts. Because of all of that, this drawing does not seem to me to be humanist — or not solely humanist. Instead, it sets a powerfully imagined human against a perhaps even more powerfully imagined something else, which is presented as both a reality (that incongruously solid right hand) and a question.

Matthias in his essay argued that visuals are potentially more ambiguous than words, and I certainly feel here that the drawing is about its own spaces. Who made the face of Abraham? What is the face of God? Where are we in this picture, and what would we see if the angel turned towards us? And perhaps most insistently (if this is showing us the moment after the interrupted sacrifice) where is Isaac? What is he doing, what does he feel? Presumably he’s just outside the sketch, swallowed in the blankness the picture comes out of and goes into. The sacrifice is as unknowable as God himself — perhaps because, in a Christian context, the sacrifice and God are the same.

It’s possible that I’ve completely muddled what’s happening here — I’m neither a Biblical scholar nor a Rembrandt scholar, and my ignorance is sufficient that I’m not (as I indicated) even positive that this is supposed to represent the post-sacrificial moment. (Hopefully Matthias will let me know where I’ve gone astray.) But I feel like Rembrandt’s drawing is, as Matthias says, a visual exegesis — that it demands a conversation. Abraham is preparing to talk to us, as well as to his creator. It’s not a comic, so there aren’t any words, but the picture speaks.

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Update: This is part of a roundtable on Crumb’s Genesis. The whole discussion is here.

DWYCK: Word Made Inky Flesh

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Besides being a major publishing event in comics, Robert Crumb’s comics adaptation of Genesis is an interesting example of the medium’s intersection with literature and its potential to engage fundamental discourse in our culture. It offers itself as something of a lightning rod for the discussion of the suitability both of comics and one of comics’ most respected practitioners to handle such weighty material. Here at Hooded Utilitarian, the book has been hotly debated for over a month now; discussions have largely concentrated on Crumb’s specific qualities or failings, but one cannot help but feel that somewhere more fundamental questions are at stake. In the following, I will attempt to address some of these while offering my own commentary on Crumb’s work.

The book tells us a few things about the critical reception of comics: Crumb has chosen to retain the complete text of Genesis (mostly in Robert Alter’s modern American translation) and has meticulously sought to follow literally it in order to execute what he, with characteristic obfuscation and to the apparent frustration of many critics, calls a “straight illustration job”. The onus therefore is placed primarily on the images and their arrangement to carry Crumb’s contribution to biblical exegesis. But just as importantly, it is placed on the reader—and the critic—who wants to understand and appreciate this contribution seriously to consider these images, not merely to regard them as dressing for the text.

Several commentators on this blog and elsewhere evidently would have preferred a different book, one in which Crumb did not ‘just’ act as illustrator, but offered a literary reading of the text, dealing with theological questions and biblical scholarship. But this is not that book, and Crumb, not being a prose writer, scholar or theologian, was not equipped to write it in the first place. He is a cartoonist, and his five decade-long career should demonstrate that his expertise lies elsewhere, namely in his interest in people, or—if one wants to get all lofty—the human condition. Seeking literary exegesis from a book that in its very premise, ‘straight illustration’, eschews it, will necessarily mean coming up short, but that does not mean that the book does not have another kind of exegesis to offer, namely a visual one.

The fact that the textual narrative is given, forces critics to focus on that much appreciated, but chronically under-analyzed, aspect of comics: the visual. While few, I’m sure, would accept at face value Crumb’s disingenuous claim to neutrality—‘I just drew what’s there’—some seem nevertheless to be asking the wrong questions of his drawings. For reasons still under-examined, and in any case too complicated to go into here, the literary aspects of comics have been, and continue to be, subjected to much greater scrutiny than their visual counterparts in the fledgling field of comics criticism and scholarship. And when you undercut the former, as Crumb does here, it would appear that the critical demands placed upon them tend to be transferred to the latter. The preference, it seems, is for images that mean something fairly specific—‘literary images’, we might call them. Symptomatic of this attitude, critics often compliment or disparage in general terms ‘the art’ of a given comic, while critiquing ‘the story’ much more carefully. The present book has been subjected to a particularly notable short-circuit of this tendency, in which Crumb’s abilities as a draftsman have been praised, while his illustrations at the same time have been dismissed as heavy-handed, rote, and unenlightening.

This raises a number of fascinating questions about comics and cartooning. One is how we address the potential artistic autonomy of an image that simultaneously refers to a text. Another has to do with the specific characteristics of cartooning as a tradition of making images—a tradition to which Crumb clearly belongs. In a key passage of Robert Alter’s erudite and insightful review of the book, the biblical scholar and translator writes:

“Western art is of course rich in paintings that represent specific scenes from the Bible, and many of the stories in Genesis have attracted many painters. The banishment from the Garden, the binding of Isaac, the wooing of Rebekah, Joseph and Potiphar’s wife, Jacob blessing Ephraim and Manasseh: these have all been the subject of memorable and even great paintings. But all paintings isolate particular moments in the narrative for pictorial representation. They do not portray the whole tale, but only that part of the tale that has for some reason engaged them. And they do not tell, they show.”

And further,

“A visual representation of a character or an event is inevitably a specification. When we see Er as a cutthroat who gets his own throat cut, the meaning of “was evil in the eyes of the Lord” and the mechanism of “the Lord put him to death” are strongly stipulated, and other possible meanings are closed off. This foreclosure of ambiguity or of multiple meanings is intrinsic to the graphic narrative medium, and hence is pervasive in the illustrated text.”

Alter attempts to make a distinction between single images, i.e. painting, and ‘the graphic narrative medium’, i.e. comics, and further on he emphasizes that the bible unlike the novel, “does not use minute specification, but its very concision elevates ambiguity to a fine literary art”, making the problem of a comics adaptation doubly problematic. But the distinction he makes in both cases remains undefined, and ultimately is one of degree rather than kind, resulting in an absolutist statement that images ‘inevitably flatten’ the ambiguity of text. Although it presumably is not Alter’s intent, this argument ultimately asserts that language, somehow, is superior to images, in extreme consequence espousing iconoclasm.

His basic observation, that visual representation is more concrete than text, is clearly true; the mere fact that Genesis would need his translation for it to be intelligible to the English reader, while anyone would be able to recognize at least the basic forms and figures of, and to experience an emotional response to, say, the 6th-century mosaics illustrating it in San Vitale, Ravenna, bespeaks this. However, this has not prevented artists from illustrating the bible and other texts for millennia, nor has it prevented people from appreciating them without feeling hampered by their alleged ‘flattening’ of the source. Images, it would seem, have something to offer that language cannot deliver.

Where language is linear and unfolds over time, an image is much more immediate in effect, unfolding less logically. In terms of analysis, the coding of language demands a more specific kind of foreknowledge and a more logical approach than images, which—at least when mimetic—have a more immediately recognizable correlation to phenomena. Because of its more abstracted coding, language on one level is more ambiguous than images, which are forced to show their hand. However, because this coding to a large extent is symbolic, generally with no recognizable link between signifier and signified, its grasp on reality is determined more firmly. Images, while also coded, are less constricted in this respect, and therefore attain a different level of ambiguity unavailable in language. We experience this when trying to put into words something seen: how do you describe, for instance, exactly the facial expression or gesture of a person? Or how do you explain in words how an image just ‘works’, whether in terms of surface or space, color or line? These are essentially non-linguistic qualities, which makes putting them into words a difficult, inevitably inexact endeavor, which often requires great poetic skill satisfactorily to achieve, and even then it often ends up seeming to pin down and attempt to control something much less definite about the image, indeed ‘flatten’ it. This does not mean we should not try—the interplay of language and visuality is essential to us, but the problem of ekphrasis, is clearly a two-way street.

Returning to Crumb, what is interesting in this context is that he works in the tradition of cartooning, an approach to design that combines the observational with simplification and, often, exaggeration. It is more coded than more mimetic forms of image-making and is in this respect closer to text: it has, for example, developed certain types of shorthand more easily to suggest invisible phenomena or emotional states: speed-lines indicate movement, serpentines evoke smell, beads of sweat jumping off the brow of a character denote nervousness, etc., just as it has means of integrating graphically sound and language through sound effects, varied calligraphy, speech balloons, etc. Crumb makes plentiful use of this sophisticated vocabulary and in doing so situates himself in a tradition going back to the beginnings of written language, which itself evolved partly from pictograms. Hieroglyphics are the most obvious example: when we see Anubis or Hathor holding the ankh in an Egyptian mural, we are dealing essentially with the same synthesis of text and image that takes place in this modern vocabulary of cartooning.

Despite concerted attempts to break with it over the last century, naturalistic visual representation remains the dominant paradigm. Just like the separation in high art of text and image, however, it is a fairly recent, initially Western phenomenon, originating in the early modern period. The majority of world art throughout history shares with cartooning the simplification and codification of mimetic form. Indeed, as I have argued recently, even the lofty classical ideals that underlay the empiricist-naturalist approach to art of the renaissance are concerned with basic principles very similar to those of cartooning.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Village Kermis, c. 1567, oil on panel, 114 x 164 cm., Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum

Crumb’s efforts to synthesize naturalism and simplification descend directly from the renaissance. The great paragon, and one of Crumb’s stated favorites, is the Flemish draftsman, printmaker, painter and, yes, cartoonist before the fact, Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c. 1525/30-69). When he paints a Village Kermis (c. 1567), he gives us an acutely realistic rendition, in that it evokes a specific place and time better than just about anything else from the period, but it is not strictly naturalistic. Rather, it is possessed of a broadening of form and physiognomy, and a slight and humorous, but never mocking, exaggeration of same, which capture with remarkable acuity the gesture, expression and sheer life of people in the Flemish countryside in the second half of the 16th century. And indeed at any time—the people are recognizable not merely in historical or ethnographic terms, but as human beings. Their behavior is sufficiently if not fully consonant with our own experience: shouting drunkenly across a table for your mate’s attention, ebulliently pulling the girl you’re sweet on from whatever she’s doing to dance, losing contact with your inebriated dance partner, trying to communicate something profound to a sloshed friend taken with the music… We all know it.

Bruegel might not have achieved the same level of basic recognition if he had gone with more individualized characters, not to mention straight portraits, because these would introduce information in surplus of what he wanted to communicate, making them harder to process—especially today, four-and-a-half century later. Although such representations carry their own interest, this dissonance is evident in the donor portraits inserted into so many religious and allegorical scenes of the period. Instead, Bruegel is channeling the archetypes that modern neuroscience has posited as a model for how we understand the world, with scrupulous attention to the naturalistic detail that makes the scene real to us.

Rembrandt (1606-69) is another major artist who shared these basic concerns and worked analogously, if less broadly, with distilling his observations into potent, calligraphic form. His searching, selflessly confident hand works with abbreviation to suggest the world. His work with archetypical physiognomy can be seen, for example, in his character studies, probably drawn without reference—like a true cartoonist—but retaining a lifelikeness that derives from observation.

Rembrandt, Figure Studies, c. 1635, pen and brown ink, 178 x 184 mm., Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett

His drawings were rarely preparatory of works in other media, though types similar to the ones in the cited sketch often populate his narrative drawings, many of which are biblical. In addition to his substantial production of religious paintings and prints, the bible was an inexhaustible source of human interest for Rembrandt the draftsman throughout his life. Almost 700 sheets, or roughly one third of the surviving corpus, are devoted to biblical subjects. Unrelated to any commissions, this was a sustained, personal creative endeavor. He evidently had no ambition to cover the entirety of the bible, choosing instead to focus on the passages that interested him the most, to some of which he returned again and again over the years. This extended work is clearly more sophisticated, dedicated and emotionally complex than Crumb’s Genesis, but it is nevertheless instructive to compare the two, because of the intersection of their methods and goals.

Like Bruegel and Rembrandt, Crumb is a humanist (in the modern as opposed to the renaissance sense of the word), observant of human behavior and—as his richly varied sketchbooks demonstrate—clearly attentive to the world around him. At the same time he is a comics geek, who internalized the cartoon idiom of his idols at a very young age and has largely remained faithful to it, albeit increasingly implementing his observational insights to create comics with a rich texture of life.

To be sure, there is a misanthropic strain running through his work, which has occasionally approached the nihilistic, but his immersive preoccupation with the more problematic aspects of his psyche has a healthy, almost wholesome feel about it. Plus it is rendered with a genuine curiosity and interest both in the complex psychological issues involved and the physical reality of it, almost as if he were actualizing the cliché of art as exorcism. Add to this the interest in other people, how they live and behave, which was apparently catalyzed by his collaboration with Harvey Pekar in the mid- to late 70s through the 80s, and which surges through his work of the last few decades, through his biographies of blues musicians, his more sedate autobiographical comics, and his adaptations of Philip K. Dick, Charles Bukowski, James Boswell and, yes, Genesis.

The latter is his most extended actualization of these interests to date. It is intensely preoccupied with imagining the human reality of these stories, not just in the clearly perceived material terms, but also psychologically. By sustained effort, his imagery reminds us in a way that the text could not, lest it become repetitive, of the arid environment, the dependence on livestock, the toil of the fields, of the people who populate the pages in all their individualized glory, acting within the framework of this foundational narrative. Never a mere ‘illustration job’, Crumb’s Genesis is a work of visual exegesis. While the text is the text, the drawings are his specific interpretations of the events, experiences, and emotions of Genesis, and as thus place themselves comfortably in a lineage of bible illustration dating back almost two millennia.

Jeet Heer has already sketched out the imposing physicality of Crumb’s interpretation, while Ken Parille has emphasized its lack of idealism—both important aspects of it. And Alan Choate’s sensitive essay provides a closer reading, amply demonstrating its originality, while also pointing out some of the undeniable weak points. In the following, I will therefore limit myself to a partial reading of his take on the life of Abraham, which exemplifies beautifully his subtle visual exegesis. I apologize in advance for the inevitable flattening of the visual ambiguity of Crumb’s drawings, but will do my best to render them justice.

Spanning a human lifetime, the story of Abraham offers Crumb ample opportunity to examine the growth of a person in physical, psychological and spiritual terms. We first meet him in virile adulthood, setting out with slight trepidation written on his face, after a shocking but inspirational nighttime vision (12:4). Crumb poignantly mirrors this formative experience at the start of chapter 15, when Abraham, now an aging man, once again is called by God to venture forth, humble and with an air of resignation, feeling a creeping despair at his destiny. Misery awaits in the wilderness, and the ordeal he goes through at God’s command marks his face and body. Particularly moving is his broken, watery glare as God wakes him from his fitful slumber, telling him that his seed shall be enslaved and oppressed for four hundred years. Even if Abraham’s personal state at this point renders him incapable of pondering their meaning fully, God has made him internalize his words physically (15:10-15).

Then, later, in chapter 17 we have the covenant, the details of which God lays out with care to a much more sharply focused Abraham.

Crumb zeroes in on the prostrated patriarch, conveying his thoughts through changes in his facial expression. The page narrating 17:8-17 is particularly arresting in its flickering portrayal of alternating disbelief, doubt, anger, surprise, and contemplation of the ramifications of God’s words, ending the page with an image that, in seeming contradiction of the text’s description of Abraham laughing to himself, shows him staring out at the reader, as if addressing us, not in disbelief but rather with a dawning awareness of his position in God’ plan. He puts this awareness to immediate use when pleads for Ishmael in presumed humbleness, which gives way to genuine relief when God hears him.

There is humor in this passage. Crumb seems to be expressing his own incredulity at God’s stipulations, but also manages to convey a more genuinely existential feeling of sensing your destiny. After this, Crumb’s Abraham is clearly emboldened and ends up negotiating with the Lord about the fate of Sodom, exhibiting a craftiness akin to the one he showed much earlier in his encounter with Pharaoh (12:11-20), but simultaneously aware of the risk. When it (seemingly) works, he wipes his brow in typical cartoon fashion, beads of sweat leaping from his head (18:22-33).

A fitting payoff to the pedagogical gesturing of the preceding conversation, this is typical of Crumb’s synthesis of subtle expression and cartoon breadth. To some, this might be off-putting in much the same way as his choice of a consolidated visual archetype—the white-bearded patriarch—for God, instead of something more original. But Crumb is working in a tradition of biblical illustration that predates modernist notions of originality and the concomitant, almost pathological fear of cliché. The old masters had no compunction about stating the obvious when necessary, having God point at his subjects when giving them instructions, or having the latter point to the sky when invoking His name. These are tried and tested conventions for conveying vital information—for storytelling—that may be used to enhance the power or resonance of an artwork, just as well as they might diminish it.

Rembrandt, Abraham Dismissing Hagar and Ishmael, c. 1642-43, pen and brown ink, brown wash, 184 x 23.5 mm., London, British Museum

Rembrandt provides an illuminating example. His c. 1642-43 rendition of Abraham Dismissing Hagar and Ishmael employs a number of such loaded shortcuts: the patriarch placing his hand on young Ishmael’s head in blessing, Hagar drying her eye, the instigating Sarah peeking from behind the door in the background. And yet, this does not undercut the emotional charge of the scene—the tender, trembling weight of the hand on the boy’s head, itself turned from the viewer in emphasis of the child’s youthful impeccability. He is dressed for the road ahead, perhaps grasping only vaguely its ominous significance. And at the center is Abraham, clearly torn.

Of course, such things are subjective and our tolerance of expressive gesture surely varies. To my mind, Crumb’s resort to cliché is a problem especially when accompanied by lack of imagination: Suat has already pointed out, for example, how his slightly ironic depiction of the Garden of Eden as a sort of rustic Disneyland would have been better served by a more evocative interpretation (plus Crumb kind of sucks at drawing animals).

And the portrayal of Hagar also has its problems, especially in the instances where the use of cartoon shorthand clashes with a subtler approach: the thick, gelatinous tears sliding down her cheeks, for example, disrupt Crumb’s attentive work with body language and framing in an otherwise effective sequence; though it may not carry the resonance of Rembrandt’s depiction, his version of Abraham’s dismissal is nevertheless quietly powerful.

Crumb’s rendition of the scene in chapter 22 of Abraham’s sacrifice has understandably been the object of special scrutiny. Comparison with one of Rembrandt’s versions, his 1655 etching, elucidates how comics offer a different set of possibilities to single illustration.

Rembrandt, The Sacrifice of Abraham, 1655, etching, 156 x 130 mm.

Working for public consumption here, Rembrandt is less abbreviated than in his drawings, but he still works with distillation, condensing the whole story into one situation, unifying the figures into a Trinity: Abraham’s profane and sacred love are embodied in his right and left hand, respectively—one carefully but firmly shielding the eyes of his son, who is propped rather harshly against his knee, the other resolutely wielding the knife (it should be noted that it is contested whether Rembrandt deliberately designed the composition with the print process’ reversal in mind). The angel’s intervention releases softly the hardened despair written in Abraham’s face, drawing a beginning tremble.

Though not a Rembrandt, Crumb brings his own affecting interpretation to this story of faith and love, narrating sequentially the emotional and spiritual trial of Abraham. The punctuation of his three responses, “Here I am”, given by Alter’s translation (22: 1, 7, 11) and organized by Crumb at one to a page, takes us through his transformation from old-age contentment and confidence through the threat of loss of faith to spiritual tremor when it is upheld.

While the portrayal of Isaac is erratic—his youthful enthusiasm as they leave the servants is touching, his teardrop when being tied unnecessary—the inner turmoil experienced by Abraham is sensitively handled: the doubt creeping in as his son calls him, making him stop and ponder, is empathetically observed, as is the resigned guile in the following panel. With this in mind, the rage clearly gripping him in the last panel of the same page seems in part a way for him of tempering and controlling his doubt.

Lastly, the expression on his face as he hugs his son after God’s intervention is rich in conflicted emotion, while strong in faith. God’s words about how his seed shall bless all the nations of the earth recalls the earlier scene of misery in chapter 15, emphasizing the growth of Abraham’s insight and the resolution of his covenant.

With the story of Abraham, Crumb thus provides an involved interpretation of man’s relationship with God and his negotiation of the sacred and profane in himself. Crumb draws from the text profane implications of self-interest and -awareness, highlighting the issue, central to Judeo-Christian theology, of personal agency in the interaction with God. Crumb’s Abraham retains a dominantly profane position through most of this narrative of power and responsibility, but the shock he experiences at the sacrifice, and especially that moment of insight at its end, he ends up acknowledging, if perhaps not exactly embracing, the transience of these concerns and the meaning of faith.

Crumb gives lends all this further context through his very different accounts of the other such constellations in Genesis: Noah’s frank, almost innocent trust in his course of action, Isaac’s softer, more placid acquiescence, Jacob’s self-awareness and determination, Joseph’s troubling inspiration and his increasing control of it, etc. The result is a wonderfully rich response to the text.

Crumb’s visualization of Genesis actualizes a set of potentialities in the text that points our reading of it in certain directions. Ultimately, this has less to do with its form than it is a condition of all interpretations: Kierkegaard’s multiple retellings of Abraham’s sacrifice in Fear and Trembling, previously cited here by Noah (B.), also spin their source, emphasizing and making more concrete certain aspects, thereby opening us to new ways of understanding it.

From an art historical point of view, Crumb’s treatment is interesting in that it self-consciously and unabashedly employs a visual vernacular—cartooning—for a purpose to which it has only rarely been used in the modern era, as well as a form—comics—which has only recently started embracing this kind of material, and being transformed by doing so. Although this is all part of a revolution in the medium to which he himself helped laying the foundation, the work inscribes itself in a tradition much older than that, finding the new in the old. Crumb’s Genesis is, to paraphrase Chris Ware’s oft-quoted line, an attempt to express human complexity with the tools of jokes, but like his younger colleague he is simultaneously recalling that this might have been its purpose all along. Emblematic of comics’ current state of evolutionary flux, it is a compelling demonstration of some of the central issues with which cartoonists are increasingly dealing these days, surely with fascinating developments to come. A masterful piece of cartoon exegesis, it makes inky flesh of the bible’s word that encourage us to return to the source with new questions.

The image at the top is: Rembrandt, Abraham Conversing with the Angel, c. 1636-37, pen and brown ink, 108 x 114 mm., formerly London, private collection.

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Update: The whole Genesis roundtable is here.

Outside Crumb

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There’s a style of talking about the Christian God that you find in rural corners of the American South where there are Free Will Baptists and Pentecostal Holiness churches. Imbued with images and rich with metaphor, it’s also thickly oral, repetitious and rhythmic – reading transcripts of sermons aloud is like holding pebbles of words in your mouth:

I was voted in to pastor a church away down in southeast Alabama. I felt like I was drifting into a paradise opportunity to work for God, but really I was headed for the jaws of a vice on the Devil’s workbench. What I didn’t know what that the young people outvoted some of the old-time goatheads which was trying to bring in an older minister. They had future trouble up their sleeves…[they said] we are going to bring our minister to church and he is going to take the pulpit.

“When the other people at the church heard this, they were ready for a fight. One rough sinner-man came to me and said “I have a real sharp knife and I ate peas and cornbread in prison before and I can do it again. Don’t worry, no one is going to take your pulpit. My knife is sharp and I’ve been in trouble before.” So I woke up in a vice between a prospering church and a blood-shedding fight. I wanted to preserve peace, but that ain’t easy, because the Devil has got me in that vice time after time…Preachers think they got power just by preaching and that sinners will get saved. You can’t run sinners out of church. You have to run them into church and make it a soul-saving station for God.”

The Devil's Vice (click to enlarge)

Howard Finster (who wrote and drew the above) was a particularly strong example of this way of talking about God. It was common, among people of his generation, in the Pentecostal sects of his part of the south, where the Holy Spirit gets a seat at the table and the church elders speak in tongues, but even there his imagination was more vivid than most.

Click and zoom to read

His paintings, which I linked to briefly a few days ago, share the same sensibility as his sermons – a mixing up of images and metaphors from sacred and secular life, mixing that he thought was essential to his evangelical purpose.

In these places, deep in the rural South, where the nearest town of any size is hours away and the churches have had the same families in the same pews for 100 years, religion stops feeling like a choice, because culture is so saturated with faith it’s not something you believe, it’s just the way things are. “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust” isn’t just a phrase in a funeral: it describes that sense that everything in the world is made of the same stuff and that stuff is God: the trees and the fish and the people and the boards of your porch and the bricks of your church.

Howard Finster draws the psyche of that place.

It’s come up several times that asking R.Crumb to “have some imagination, damn it,” (in Genesis, at least) is somehow tied up with asking him to be more religious, or that seeing his imagination as falling short is somehow due to mistakenly looking for signs of belief. I think, though, that it does Howard Finster’s imagination a great disservice to attribute it to his faith. There are too many faithful people who don’t have it. I wish faith did automatically produce it: then we’d have more art like his.

Annotated Sketch (c. 1978 click to enlarge)

Wire Train (click to enlarge)

click to enlarge

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Cartoonist Basil Wolverton was also a believer when he began illustrating Bible stories and verses for evangelist Herbert Armstrong in the early 1950s. Wolverton had been drawing comics since 1925 and was drawing for Mad at the time he started illustrating the Bible. His cartoons influenced Crumb and other underground cartoonists – he drew grotesque, weird, exaggeratedly humourous characters that, despite his protestations about intent, were viewed as highly sexually suggestive.

Mad Cover Illustration (click to enlarge)

His Biblical illustrations, unsurprisingly, are more straightforward and serious, although the exaggerated sensibility sneaks through. In the introduction to “The Wolverton Bible,” his son Monte observes:

Wolverton’s challenge was to portray the Biblical accounts accurately without tramautizing children too much. Yet from his background in comics, he understood that children actually enjoy a certain amount of violence (how it effects them is another topic.) In this way he was a pioneer for later comic artists, beginning in the 1970s, who would bring a more realistic interpretation to graphic depictions of the Bible…he never backed down from his position that the Old Testament needed to be depicted for what it was.

(Sound familiar?) Like Finster’s, Wolverton’s approach is consistent with the declamation style practiced in his church, but Wolverton’s church was very different. Monte Wolverton describes Herbert Armstrong’s preaching style as “newscaster-like” and “devoid of churchy language.” Although essentially a one-man-show when Wolverton first became involved, Armstrong’s church, called the Worldwide Church of God, had become extremely rule-bound and institutionalized by the end of the 1960s – members who disagreed with church teaching were “disfellowshipped.” (It was not a typical fundamentalist church, however, as it did not prevent drinking, dancing or other social activities.) Wolverton himself was a jovial, congenial and funny man who loved to entertain. His drawings reflect this mixed vantage point: the serious, “newscaster-like” declamation with a great appreciation for humanity and personality.

Creation (click to enlarge)

God speaks to Noah (click to enlarge)

Lot's wife turned to salt (click to enlarge)

Victims of the Flood (click to enlarge)

It seems obvious that Wolverton’s treatment of the Bible was more influential on Crumb than Finster’s, although I have no evidence that Crumb saw these Biblical drawings before beginning his work. Crumb’s Bible strikes me as very much the literal Evangelical Bible, though, so it wouldn’t surprise me if there was genealogy through this path.

What’s more difficult to account for, for me personally, is the greater aesthetic impact I feel from the Wolverton drawings, since they are in many respects so very similar to Crumb’s. In comparison, I think much of my dissatisfaction with Genesis does in fact come from two formal elements of the comic idiom: the grid, which provides a repetitive overarching composition even when the in-panel composition is varied, and the transformation of the prose text from its familiar, “native” graphic presentation in the columnar numbered pages of the Bible, into the comics idiom of captions and balloons. Text is, for all its abstraction, also a visual medium, and the flow and sound of the text in normal prose presentation is governed by different interactions than the ones in Crumb’s comics version.

My lack of appreciation for this – my sense that more is lost than is gained – is without doubt my limitation, not Crumb’s, and in this particular matter, an issue of personal aesthetic preference. But the comparison raises questions about the impact and effect of “sequential art”: I think because most people who read comics have an affinity for these elements of the idiom, they’re often accepted unquestioningly, without critical challenges or evaluation. A “nothing left out!” illustration job is a translation of sorts – normally the prose Bible is very aural; in Crumb’s book that aurality is replaced with the visual. The oft-described effect of “making the pictures narrate” is very palpable here – Crumb is without doubt successful at that effort – but to what end? Is it really just a “translation” into the comics “language”?

I think it may be — while Finster in particular can stand up against the more elite Biblical art that Suat drew on in his comparison and Wolverton’s approach is at least highly representative of his particular individual reading, Crumb’s is much less an individual reading than either. His very successful effort to humanize the Biblical characters resulted in a dehumanization of the experience overall. This perhaps shows us Alter’s error: it is not the concretization of images that marks the limit of the comics form at this moment in history, but instead the lack of imagination regarding the ways in which illustration can be fully literary without being tied relentlessly to sequence, grid, and narrative. Some experimental cartoonists are working to imagine new notions, but the far-more-common reliance on sequence to capture the spirit of literature – well, it only “captures” it, like a wild animal kept in a tiny cage.

Howard Finster described himself like this: “To do art like them fellas do in the books, it would take months. I’m a cartoonist. I don’t fool with details like that.” Without those details, an imagination like Finster’s makes all the difference.

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Images and quotations in this post are taken from: “Howard Finster, Man of Visions: the Life and Work of a Self-Taught Artist” by J.F. Turner (Knopf, 1989) and “The Wolverton Bible: The Old Testament and Book of Revelation through the Pen of Basil Wolverton,” Monte Wolverton, compiler (Fantagraphics, 2009).

R. Crumb vs. Kierkegaard — Battle of the Floating Heads!

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Langlois’ formulation is the denial of time: an idea of history not as something past, things having happened and remembered, but something entirely now, aggregated all together, present – meaning both presence and in the present tense. — Caroline Small

There was once a man; he had learned as a child that beautiful tale of how God tried Abraham, how he withstood the test, kept his faith and for the second time received a son against every expectation. When he became older he read the same story with even greater admiration, for life had divdied what had been united in the child’s pious simplicity. The older he became the more often his thoughts turned to that tale, his enthusiasm became stronger and stronger, and yet less and less could he understand it. Finally it put everything else out of his mind; his soul had but one wish, actually to see Abraham, and one longing, to have been witness to those events. — Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling

R. Crumb’s illustrated Book of Genesis does precisely what Caroline Small and Kierkegaard ask of art and of faith. In Crumb’s literal reading, with its physicality, and its playful touches of cartoonishness, the Bible is transformed from a fusty, inaccessible monument to boredom and bewildering begats into “something new,” a text that makes the familiar alien, or, at least, more familiar. In giving flesh to the Biblical narrative, Crumb allows us to do what Kierkegaard, tragically lacking the technology of sequential pictograms, could not. We can “actually…see Abraham” drawn before us, and watch the flickers of agony, hope, love, and relief flow across his comfortingly craggy patriarchal visage, as if he were Patrick Stewart reacting with satisfying aplomb to the Romulan menace.

Moreover, Crumb penetrates to a truth that Caro and Kierkegaard fail, each in their own way, to understand. Making something new is best done, not through imaginative engagement, but through rote drudgery. Clichés are our deepest selves; to present them with minimal comment or inquiry is therefore the artist’s highest calling.

Pesky floating bearded heads — didn’t I spray for those?

You can tell I am remembering because I am pointing to my head!

You can tell I am listening because I am cupping my ear!

Why do we see God as a bearded patriarch? Crumb cunningly investigates and undermines this image through his steadfast refusal to investigate or undermine it. Deftly deploying the poverty of his visual imagination as well as a deep spiritual engagement, Crumb shows us a God daring in His vacuousness; a children’s book deity who pantomimes and points in case the kiddies can’t parse the text, yet who thoughtfully problematizes His own superficiality not through any actual ideas or initiative, but rather through the very fact of being in a big honking coffee table book by R. Crumb.

Crumb’s insistence on transcribing every word of Genesis without bowdlerization or omission again makes history new by bringing into focus many aspects of the narrative previously glossed over by Christian and secular readers alike. For example, Crumb shows us that women in the past had nipples. He also demonstrates that Adam had a penis, even if nobody else in particular did, (Update: Robert in comments points out that at least one other person in the book has a penis too.) and that when people are anxious, little sweat drops fly off of them.

And, of course, he provides visual referents for the begats.

Another artist, less versed in the transcendentally validating power of banality, might have attempted to visually integrate the passage’s obsessions with patriarchy, seed, age, and death. One can imagine Chris Ware, for example, creating a single intricate image of lineage, or Johnny Ryan (channelling the younger Crumb) treating the text as an opportunity to create an extended daisy chain of sentient semen. Far better Crumb’s vision — a series of small disconnected drawings of more or less random scenes of life, recalling a light television montage that gets up on its hind legs to say, “Humanity! How heartwarming!” Time passes, life passes, Crumb draws, and the strings swell. Crumb has commented in interviews on the strangeness of the Biblical narrative; what better way to emphasize that strangeness than to turn it into a drab sentimental parable?

Ng Suat Tong started this Genesis discussion off by comparing Crumb’s visuals to the efforts of great artists of the past. Of course, it is not really cricket to put Crumb next to artists like Blake since Crumb draws lots of pictures on a page, thus obviously quantitatively overwhelming painters who only drew one at a time. Similarly, it seems unfair to place Crumb beside mere authors since mathematically: pictures + words> words. Still, I think it’s worth looking at this passage by Kierkegaard to show exactly what Biblical exegesis has been missing up to this moment.

It was early morning. Abraham rose in good time, had the asses saddled and left his tent, taking Isaac with him, but Sarah watched them from the window as they went down the valley until she could see them no more. They rode in silence for three days; on the morning of the fourth Abraham still said not a word, but raised his eyes and saw afar the mountain in Moriah. He left the lads behind and went on alone up the mountain with Isaac beside him. But Abraham said to himself” “I won’t conceal from Isaac where this way is leading him.” He stood still, laid his hand on Isaac’s head to give him his blessing, and Isaac bent down to receive it. And Abraham’s expression was fatherly, his gaze gentle, his speech encouraging. But Isaac could not understand him, his soul could not be uplifted; he clung to Abraham’s knees, pleaded at his feet, begged for his young life, for his fair promise; he called to mind the joy in Abraham’s house, reminded him of the sorrow and loneliness. Then Abraham lifted the boy up and walked with him, taking him by the hand, and his words were full of comfort and exhortation. But Isaac could not understand him. Then he turned away from Isaac for a moment, but when Isaac saw his face for a second time it was changed, his gaze was wild, his mien one of horror. He caught Isaac by the chest, threw him to the ground and said: “Foolish boy,, do you believe I am your father? I am an idolater. Do you believe this is God’s command? No, it is my own desire.” Then Isaac trembled and in his anguish cried” “God in heaven have mercy on me, God of Abraham have mercy on me; if I have no father on earth, then be Thou my father!” But below his breath Abraham said to himself: “Lord in heaven I thank Thee; it is after all better that he believe I am a monster than that he lose faith in Thee.”

Kierkegaard uses the story as the occasion for an inquiry into faith and love between God and man, father and son. He does this by treating the story as his own; it is a coat that he can put on, adjust, take in or let out. For him, reverence involves dispensing with reverence; to understand the story of Abraham as it is, he has to defile it with his own imagination.

Crumb, on the other hand, treats the story as an inquiry into the story. It is his job to clothe the text, not to have the text clothe him. You can see him doing his best to provide a striking garment; Abraham looks grimly determined here, sweatily panicked there, movingly relieved in the center panel of the second page (perhaps the strongest single image in the book, despite the yep-there-it-is-again light from heaven.) But this is gilding, not defilement. Kierkegaard fucks with Genesis and ends up begatting a new creation; Crumb puts a few ribbons of varying construction in the text’s hair and sends it on its way.

And, surely, this is the great contribution of comics to Biblical criticism and to art. Without much of a tradition of accomplishment, sequential pictographs are perfectly situated for the aesthetic task of the future — namely to rehash what has gone before as doggedly and unimaginatively as possible. Perhaps Caro was wrong after all; the best way to deny time is not to recast the past as present, but the present as past. Nothing has happened, no one has spoken, neither God nor our ancestors have taught us anything, and so the most lackluster retread deserves the most heartfelt hosannahs. If defilement is reverence, then reverence is the truest defilement —both of the Bible and of art, which are cast together, through the power of Crumb’s genius, out of the flawed garden of giving a shit and into the absolute purity of irrelevance.

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For a less gratuitously mean-spirited take on R. Crumb’s Genesis, I’d urge folks to read the heartfelt and thoughtful defenses by Alan Choate andKen Parille. The entire ongoing back and forth about Genesis on this blog can be found here.

A Response to Alan Choate’s Defense of R. Crumb’s Genesis

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Once again, Alan, thanks for taking the time to write your essay and fully articulate the pleasures of Crumb’s adaptation.I have a number of minor disagreements about which I won’t go into much detail since it would merely be a reiteration of my previous discussions with Ken and yourself. In this particular response, my disagreements have less to do with Crumb’s Genesis than with our differing approaches to the comic and comics criticism in general.

There is, for instance, the flawed understanding that the “tendency of modern biblical scholarship to pull apart narrative threads has been disintegrative to the religious sense of the Bible as a unified, divinely inspired whole.” I’m afraid that quite the opposite is the case and no person (of a serious intent) who has read a good commentary would tell you otherwise. Just as scholarship enriches the experience of any dense literary text, so too does it refine our understanding of the Bible and Genesis. The best commentaries provide the context which you lament as being lost to modern readers: historical setting, social mores, linguistic complexities and turns of phrase. The “remoteness” of this text, which is well hidden by many modern translations, is precisely what scholarship brings forth and elucidates.  The “detective work” which Crumb engages in has been done many times over and with far greater ability. But I doubt if this is the real area of disagreement between us. More likely, you find this journey of discovery exceptionally fruitful, while I for the most part do not, if only because I have already experienced it.

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