I actually saw this book in the West side El Paso B&N. So, maybe this religious text really is about miracles!
Thanks to DM for sending me this link.
A Public Service Announcement! ;)
Showing posts with label God. Show all posts
Showing posts with label God. Show all posts
Friday, October 23, 2009
Friday, June 26, 2009
More on Crumb's Genesis
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!
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!
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