Crumb's Genesis and Comparisons, Briefly

The fundamental achievement of Crumb’s Genesis for me is that it avoids something that’s central to so many illustrated versions of the bible or representations of biblical scenes: Crumb rarely idealizes his subject matter. He is not creating an inspirational text, a magical text, or a sympathetic mythology -- nor is he mocking the bible. The wonder of Crumb’s Genesis is not the unknowable wonder of God’s ways but of people’s actions as the bible recounts them. If there is reverence in Crumb’s work, it’s for the flesh, for the materiality, both ugly and beautiful (though more often ugly), of biblical characters and the things they do. Crumb’s Genesis, then, despite its use of visual source material from biblical film epics and other religious ‘propaganda’ (even comic books) is in a different genre than these previous adaptations. In an interesting and substantial post, Ng Suat Tong compares Crumb to another tradition of biblical art by invoking Michelangelo, Blake, and others, arguing that, if we look at images from these artists side-by-side, we’ll agree that Crumb gets the worst of it.

Blake and Crumb can make for a valid comparison, but it helps to keep alert to many key differences. For instance, Blake is a mythologizer who uses biblical and non-christian mystical works to create his own counter-metaphysics; he was not an illustrator of the bible in the way that Crumb is here. Crumb is, as he says, treating Genesis as a “straight illustration job.” Very differently from Blake (who created a vast religious system, complete with numerous characters and a poetically realized anti-dogma), Crumb acts as a “straight man” to the bible. He’s not putting in "any jokes," he tells us, for that’s not the straight man’s job (for biblical “jokes,” see Blake’s “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell”); rather he is bringing out and interpreting the carnality, power, beauty, and worldly absurdities that he sees as already present: the bible delivers it own dark comedy and tragedy. I feel a greater sympathy with Crumb’s strategy than I do with, say, Michelangelo’s. In its refusal to idealize, Crumb’s seems more ‘real’ to me. The thickness and gritty texture of Crumb’s line and character designs (thick legs, thick lips, thick fingers) tell a truth about the Book of Genesis obscured by more reverential approaches. (It's almost as if the medium of cartooning is better than painting for this text . . .)

And Crumb's God often looks a lot like Blake's -- it all depends which image you select. Suat uses perhaps the most famous: Blake's The Ancient of Days. But I have selected a detail from his God Judging Adam:

Followed by Crumb's:

They look very similar to me: Intense, stern, white-robed patriarchal males with long flowing white hair and beards, sporting furrowed brows of disapproval as they point and chastise their creations. Equally powerful images by two great cartoonists.

Also, Michelangelo and Blake are not illustrating the same thing in the images Suat uses; I think the figure in Blake's Ancient of Days is his god-like character Urizen, who, in Blake's mythos, represents values often opposed to that of the Christian god; in fact, Urizen embodies some 'satanic' attributes, at least as Blake sees them. These artists have different beliefs and each one’s version of god is really an image of a very different character, though they are close enough visually to make a valid comparison.

On a thread at ComicsComics Noah Berlatsky asks Tim Hodler: “Do you feel that Crumb’s Genesis can in fact stand next to Blake?” I would answer yes, but you have to be clear about the grounds of the comparison. And as the above images show, Blake and Crumb -- at times -- have a similar coarseness to their work that connects them and their methods as it distances them from Michelangelo. But as a mythologist, Blake’s work, like Michelangelo’s, is often more idealized and lyrical than Crumb’s. Perhaps coarsely put, Blake is metaphysical and Crumb is physical; but even this doesn't prevent them from participating in a related tradition of religious iconography.