Comic Arts: R. Crumb Inks the Book of Genesis

There's so much more. "And to Enoch was born Irad, and Irad begot Mehuael, and Mehuael begot Methusael, and Methusael begot Lamech. And Lamech took unto him two wives; the name of one was Adah, and the name of . . ." As the cover says, nothing is left out.

This is tough stuff, too. "The Lord saw that the wickedness of the human creature was great on the earth, and that every scheme of his heart's devising was only perpetually evil." You see a lot of white over God's irises now, and he decides to kill everybody and everything. Except for Noah, for some unexplained reason. Noah builds the ark, and after God's flood exterminates the sinners, Noah's alive with his sons and his animals to repopulate Earth.

More begots. Shem, Ham, Japheth, Gomer, Magog, Madai, Javan . . .

And more Crumb, drawing four to nine panels on most pages, and inking in the words in capital letters, comic book-style. But a primitive comic style that derives from Disney and fuzzy-animal comics, with little of the extreme cinematic angles, close-ups and diagonally split panels that artists such as Will Eisner brought to comics art in the 1940s -- techniques that live on in graphic novels and newspaper strips such as "Judge Parker." Crumb stays with a head-on, eye-level style as if he were drawing for small children. Part of his energy has always come from the ongoing joke of putting a fuzzy-animal style together with heinous perversities and despairs, a mating dance done to the music of his creepy obsessions with women built like linebackers, with his Rapidograph pen and with his style, which never changes, regardless of topic. It's as if Picasso had spent his entire career in his blue period, doing art as ritual.

Of course, we are talking about religion here in Genesis, which is a sort of ritual in itself, like Crumb's drawing.

And so, just as Genesis itself gets tiresome, so does Crumb's drawing. (If you're hoping for a bit of juiciness in the Sodom and Gomorrah sequence, you'll be disappointed.) But should we fault Crumb for this? We're not allowed to fault Genesis, are we? Anyway, the story goes on.

After Noah, and the Tower of Babel, Genesis dwells on the Hebrew heroes -- Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph and so on. There's awe, reverence and altar building, there are courage, perseverance, gratitude and sacrifice. At the same time, and in the same stories with the same heroes, there are betrayal, incest, thievery, murder, whoring, jealousy, lying, revenge, drunkenness and slavery among God's chosen people in a long slow grind of narrative that comes to seem a little like the world according to R. Crumb.

Art critic Robert Hughes talks about "Crumb's mean, grubby vision of human beings trapped in their meshes of hysterical frustration and lust." Crumb's wife, Aline, says, "Well, he is a sexist, racist, antisemitic misogynist." (As for antisemitic, Crumb flirts with big-nosed Jewish stereotypes -- the demanding female, the wily, voracious male.)

Since the '60s, Crumb has shown a world that fits his vision. There's the prankster-pederast guru, Mr. Natural, revealing the meaning of life (as I recall from long memory): "Don't mean diddy-wah-diddy." Lenore Goldberg and her Girl Commandos are nightmare feminists avenging themselves on men. Angelfood McSpade is a thick-lipped black stereotype, uptight Whiteman can find sexual satisfaction only with a yeti. Little Mr. Snoid climbs up the backs of Crumb's amazons to work out his id-rage and perversities. Chuck the Duck is hip to the sweat of one's brow; he says, "Life is mostly hard work."

Crumb himself has written: "I am constantly disgusted by reality, horrified and afraid. I cling desperately to the few things that give me some solace, that make me feel good. For me to be human is, for the most part, to hate what I am. When I suddenly realize I am one of them, I want to scream in horror."

Not unlike the God of Genesis beholding the depravity of his children, even his greatest servants. Abraham pimps his wife, Sarah, Jacob cheats his brother, Esau. How very Old Testament. Faults are very few in the heroes of the New Testament. And an angry, smiting Jehovah is transformed by the Christians into a god of love. There are times when Genesis reads like a tell-all, one of those enraged bits of revisionist history that tell us George Washington was actually a drug-addict or Emily Dickinson was into sadomasochism. Except nobody revised Jewish history to make it the way it is in Genesis. And it has remained not as a guide to transcendence into heavenly realms, but as a description of life as we see it every day in our neighborhoods and newspapers.

Genesis doesn't need an R. Crumb to provide perversity and failure. It's got enough all by itself. This is one reason that Crumb could play it straight with his art, no cloacal Snoid comedy, no gratuitous sex. Yes, there is sex -- men and women are shown discreetly coupling. But no irony, no joking around here. Just one pen-and-ink panel after another until Joseph -- he of the coat of many colors -- dies and the book ends.

How strange it all is, how ordinary. How biblical, how Crumb.