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Crumb Genesis
Post #1328 • April 13, 2009, 8:33 AM
The famously subversive US cartoonist Robert Crumb has announced the completion of his long-awaited take on the Book of Genesis.
The acclaimed satirist revealed on his personal website that he had finished the project, which is out this autumn, and which his UK publisher is predicting will "provoke the religious right". Four years in the making, Crumb worked from the King James Bible and Robert Alter's translation to reinterpret the Book of Genesis, from the Creation via Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden to Noah boarding his ark.
Amazon has a release date of October 19. A bit of Googling turns up this 2005 conversation with Robert Hughes at the New York Public Library, reported by Andrew Arnold for Time:
CRUMB: I was fooling around with Adam and Eve one day. Doodling about Adam and Eve. At first I did this satirical take off on Adam and Eve lots of jokey asides and Jewish slang because they're Jewish right? God is Jewish.
HUGHES: Now you're going to get it for anti-Semitism.
CRUMB: Finally I got over fooling around and I realized I just had to tell it straight.
HUGHES: Is God going to look like Mr. Natural?
CRUMB: Nah. He has a white beard but he actually ended up looking more like my father. He has a very masculine face like my father. My problem was, how am I going to draw God? Should I just draw him as a light in the sky that has dialogue balloons coming out from it? Then I had this dream. God came to me in this dream, only for a split second, but I saw very clearly what he looked like. And I thought, ok, there it is, I've got God.
HUGHES: And what did she look like?
CRUMB: I went through that whole thing too; maybe I'll draw God as a black woman. But if you actually read the Old Testament he's just an old, cranky Jewish patriarch. It's a lot of fun doing Genesis, actually. It's very visual. It's lurid. Full of all kinds of crazy, weird things that will really surprise people.