While reading this book, I thought what would happen if you gave it to someone with no knowledge of the Bible and had them read it as a secular piece? What would they say about the plot, the story, the characters, the god?
With the Bible I've gotten to the point that I just don't plain care. It also helps that I'm not a religious person or overly familiar with the Bible. I know the main stories but not the details. So it helps that Crumb chooses to scour through the lines of Genesis and depict many of the details that may be lost to readers.
In an interview with Allen Salkin (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/18/arts/design/18salk.html?ref=design), Crumb comments on a number of things about his Genesis. I found Crumb's thoughts on his work to be infinitely more interesting and revealing than a good chunk of his book. But I'm interested in the pre-production and production aspects of things, so I find it fascinating when creators talk of their process and the reasoning behind their choices. (I begged to my animation instructor and he let me borrow his copy of Dream Worlds: Production Design for Animation by Hans Bacher. God damn this book strikes me down in awe.)
Right off the bat, he says, “I was intrigued by the challenge of exposing everything in there by illustrating it. The text is so significant in our culture, to bring everything out was a significant enough purpose for doing it.”
Before I was focused more on how he presented the content rather than what he presented. How it looked and delivered rather than what it was trying to say. There have been more than a few times in his book where I thought some things just didn't make sense. Also some parts that read like a cheap drama (Genesis is full of men pretending to be their wives' brothers, standing idly as their beautiful "sisters" are taken by kings, then enjoying the riches they receive in compensation as divine intervention reveals to the kings that they were on the verge of committing adultery; men being absolute dicks; women being petty and jealous; and ugly people). Crumb talks to Noah, who he shows as in constant shock at God's decision to suddenly kill the world. When I read this portion, I was thinking how clueless Noah looked. Now that I know he's supposed to be in shock, things make more sense. And it does. Noah was the one good man left in the world according to God. I would think a good man would be concerned for the well-being of other men even if they are bad people according to God. A good man wouldn't condone genocide. Unless of course it was his god doing it. And after the flood, when Noah offers a burnt sacrifice to God, God smells it and is moved to declare that never will he commit genocide again. For Crumb, this "doesn’t quite add up somehow." Yet he chose to be true to the scene rather than manipulating the narrative to show the reader his misgivings.
Another aspect I talked about before was how ugly Crumb's people are. And Crumb himself actually says in his interview with Salkin that he's "not very good at drawing attractive women actually." While I'm sure there are people who find his women attractive, I think he's spot on in this assessment of his own work. And I think we can see from his depiction of Genesis and from his responses in the interview that Crumb is an honest man. He delivers the book in a low key, humble way, something I interpreted as playing it safe. I still kind of do, for the repetition in the artwork is mind-numbing. The short section on composition in Bacher's Dream Worlds alone blows away everything in Crumb's Genesis. After reading Crumb's commentary on The Book of Genesis, I realize that he's trying to present Genesis to readers in a fashion for them to interpret themselves.
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