Thanks to colleague and friend
DM, I've procured a copy of
The New Yorker with a substantial
preview of R. Crumb's adaptation of Genesis. It is an impressive work, and the excerpt certainly compels me to want to purchase the complete text once it is available.
The art is unmistakably typical crumb. Adam could be one of his healthier male figures plucked straight from
Haight-
Ashbury; Eve is young, cute, sometimes gap-toothed, and round in all Crumb's favorite places. God looks like, well, a
stereotypical version of god -- white,
long beard, robe --- but considering the look of Crumb's early character of Mr. Natural, it is hard not to consider some sort of kinship between the two.
The best part about Crumb's style matched with this text is how his loose hatching, a sort of stylized
stippling, works to make Adam and Eve look both beautiful, and, at times, a little dirty, almost depraved, as if the accumulation of rough, small hashes to fill out their features foreshadows their eventual fall from
pristine ignorance.
The second-best part, of course, is thinking about this text in relation to the rest of Crumb's life, career, and legacy. He's critiqued Genesis as a
propaganda text aimed at
suppressing matriarchy. Is he intentionally playing Genesis off of his earlier work, much of which -- whether it is meant as self-critique or not -- many folks still find particularly offensive to women and
misogynistic? Is he seeking to show maturity or redemption for creating texts that he might now regret? Will this text be appropriated into religion-based classrooms across the country? Perhaps that's the biggest and most enjoyable question to ponder. Will the man responsible for Devil Girl and page upon page of explicit sex fantasies in which women are debased to
metonymic devices find this latest text meeting with the approval of nuns?
Now, to know that question's answer in advance -- for
that I'd eat of the Tree of Knowledge!
Best American Comics 2009: Another great contribution to the series but not as much that grabbed me as in years past. Will anything ever top "Turtle, Keep it Steady!" from 2008? Lots of standard figures in there: Clowes, Crumb, Spiegelman, Ware. A set of interesting comics as meditations on art are sprinkled throughout the pages. If the series runs long enough, one will probably be able to read Berlin and Shortcomings in their entirety without every buying those two texts on their own.
Ball Peen Hammer: Adam Rapp and George O'Connor's tale of an disease-ridden apocalyptica where people earn sway with power figures by killing live or bagging already-dead children is a swing and a miss for me, but unfortunately not for anyone under 15 who appears in this book. The text seems too condensed, too rushed, like there are scenes missing that really ought to be in there. Rarely do I say that a comics story might have been best represented via traditional print text ( I sort of see it as blasphemy, frankly), but I get the feeling this would work better as a YA novel or film script than it does as a graphic novel.
The Book of Genesis Illustrated by R. Crumb: I'm only..... Well, shit, the book doesn't have page numbers, but I'm less than halfway through and am enjoying it thoroughly so far.
