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| Hearsay: |
Well, duh. Should be a fun couple weeks watching the stones fly between glass houses. The NYT piece has a gallery of images, none of which are sexually graphic. But the Telegraph piece has a good illo that will put you off getting jiggy for a while.
Mr. Crumb is known almost as much for his bawdy underground comix featuring characters like Fritz the Cat and Mr. Natural as he is for “Crumb,” the 1994 documentary about him. But he has been driven less by his sexual impulses in recent years and more by the 45 minutes he spends in seated meditation every morning in the medieval town house he shares with his wife, Aline (they became grandparents this month), in the south of France.
One day 15 years ago, for no reason he can remember, Mr. Crumb decided he wanted to read the myths of ancient Sumer. Eventually he found a scholarly work that said some of the myths were similar to the stories in Genesis. He read Genesis closely, and the idea of illustrating it clicked. He told a literary agent friend that if he could fetch a big enough advance, he’d do it. W. W. Norton & Company came through with $200,000, which seemed enough; Mr. Crumb thought he could bang out the project in a year or two. It took four.
As unlikely as it may seem, Mr. Crumb has become something of a Bible scholar. In a telephone interview from France, he bristled at a description of his book by his British publisher as “scandalous satire.” “I had no intention to scandalize the Bible,” he said. “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.”
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October 19th, 2009 at 9:12 am
Well if you actually read the bible it is scandalous. Nothing to be done about that. It was written at a time when there was no ratings system. Most people were illiterate. But then someone came up with the bright idea of reading it aloud (a few hundred years bce) to everyone and nothing has been the same since.
October 19th, 2009 at 7:27 pm
It’s unclear to me what the scandal is. That Genesis is illustrated? That the illustrations themselves are somehow unseemly? (No evidence of that in the NYT selection.)
It’s also worth noting Crumb is a remarkably good artist. Robert Hughes once called him “the Brueghel of the second half of the 20th Century”. He was right.
October 19th, 2009 at 9:43 pm
Possible Christian objections to Robert Crumb’s illustrated Book of Genesis:
a) The illustrator is a skeptic. He isn’t a believer.
b) Cartoon illustrations could lower popular reverence for the holy book.
c) Illustrations make the sexual depravity and violence in the text more obvious.
d) Unaware of the sex and violence in Genesis, some Christians find the graphic images shocking.
I wonder if we’ll ever see a cartoon version of the Koran.
October 19th, 2009 at 11:10 pm
Is this out? Have these critics even seen this? The religious right is so quick to criticize based on a assumption that it’s a wonder why anything they say is newsworthy.
October 20th, 2009 at 1:01 am
“Cartoon illustrations could lower popular reverence for the holy book.”
Franklin, I think this is a big part of it, though it’s worth noting that the Bible (unlike the Koran) has a history of being illustrated in cartoon form. I can’t remember which group put these out but remember seeing these when I was a kid. (Possibily you saw them, too; they were printed in thin booklets in the version I remember.) It’s also worth noting that the New Testament was illustrated by a cartoonist: Chester Brown. He did a very good job. But he’s Canadian and his work has therefore been relegated to relative obscurity. (Maybe a Canadian would have a better chance, ergo, of tackling the Koran, if it ever came to that.)
re: Crumb’s skepticism — yes, I suppose that’s a major factor, too, though I’m not entirely sure a subtle thinker like Crumb could be categorized so easily. In the quotes at the NYT image-and-text thingie, Crumb at one point comments on how the conventional depictions of Sodom (again, already handled cartoon-style in decades past) usually miss the point. Something offends God. Crumb wants to find out what this is. Is this curiousity on Crumb’s part driven purely by skepticism?
October 20th, 2009 at 2:17 am
Nothing to be done about that. It was written at a time when there was no ratings system. The illustrator is a skeptic. Crumb’s ‘Genesis,’ A Sexy Breasts-And-Knuckles Affair [see link above]
October 20th, 2009 at 7:50 am
His artwork is wonderful. His rendition seems literal, which is probably what they don’t like. (lets hide all the depravity, PG it for the masses). I like it.
November 11th, 2009 at 1:38 pm
I am a Christian and though I wasn’t excited about Crumb drawing the bible (do to this previous works), I can’t say he did a “blasphemous” thing, just naive. I had looked it over and was not overly shocked, because I already knew the story. However, I was shocked that Mike Judge thought it was “inappropriate” though those words have been in the Bible for 2,000 years. Christianity is about God’s “rescue plan for mankind”; a rescue plan from mankind’s true nature – sex, rape, incest, all the things Crumb displayed. How can God rescue us from this if we are not allowed to talk about it? Mankind is disgusting. I’m disgusting. Only through the Love and mercy of God can I not be disgusting. I hope that those of you reading Crumb’s book will realize he just a man with an opinion, but the text he illustrated has helped millions overcome man’s depraved lifestyle.
November 12th, 2009 at 7:55 am
“Mankind is disgusting.”
Speak for yourself and leave the species out of it, Christopher. Although guilty of sex (which, if you think it’s disgusting, you haven’t seen me in action), rape and incest aren’t on my agenda, or on most people’s.
Although our digestive tracks and sinus cavities are bound to fill up with things we wouldn’t want to eat, our noble urges depend in no way on the mythology you’re pushing. As for Crumb’s book, it’s subversive in the same way the first English Bible was subversive: it subjects the foundational myths, anew, to “vulgar” criticism.
As for a “rescue plan for mankind,” that’s rather how a growing number unbelievers regards contemporary atheism. Our rescue plan has the benefit of being non-exclusionary, and of unfolding in real time.