![]() I’ve done my share of explicit sexual drawings, as anybody who knows my work can certainly attest. "I didn’t want to show sex organs, cause then the thing becomes X-rated and it limits the sales. The clothing and sets in the book were based on stills from classic Hollywood movies, as "there's not a lot of documentation about how people dressed and lived in ancient Mesopotamia." Reviewers have called the style "humanizing", with a "human-looking deity" with "enormous, hairy, veiny hands" unlike much later Christian art, which Europeanized the characters from the Old and New Testaments, the characters in Crumb's book are "plac squarely in the Middle East - and populat with distinctly Semitic-looking people". Style Drawing ĭrawn in his signature scratchy, obsessively crosshatched drawing style, Crumb avoided doing a satirical or psychedelic take on the work, as would have been expected. Holed up in a shepherd's hut in the south of France (where he and his family live), his wife Aline would bring him baskets of food. The book took over four years for Crumb to finish. The publisher wanted to title the book The Book of Genesis According to Robert Crumb, but Crumb insisted on changing "According to" to "Illustrated by". Norton & Company on October 19, 2009, in book form-the book was never serialized prior to being published. In critical circles, it has drawn fire over whether and how literal the illustration job is, or should be. The book has been controversial, particularly for the explicit illustrations of sexual intercourse described in the text itself. The book's cover contains the warning, "Adult Supervision Recommended for Minors". In his introduction to the book, Crumb writes he has "faithfully reproduced every word of the original text," each word hand-lettered. Crumb "resist the temptation to go all-out Crumb on us and exaggerate the sordidness, the primitivism and the outright strangeness" found in the Bible-the depictions of sex are explicit, but not gratuitous. Given Crumb's past body of work, and his professed rejection of religion, many assumed when the book was announced that it would be a satire or otherwise profane or subversive send-up, and were surprised or disappointed to find it "straight-faced". It reached #1 the New York Times graphic novel bestseller list and on the Christian books list at. The Book of Genesis (2009) is a comic book illustrated by American cartoonist Robert Crumb that purports to be a faithful, literal illustration of the Book of Genesis. And I thought, ok, there it is, I’ve got God.ĪllBusiness reports that foreign rights to the book have been bought by Jonathan Cape in the UK, and reports elsewhere that additional foreign rights have been purchased by “publishers in Germany, France, the Netherlands, Italy and Brazil.Cover to the first edition of The Book of Genesis Illustrated by Robert Crumb from W. ![]() God came to me in this dream, only for a split second, but I saw very clearly what he looked like. My problem was, how am I going to draw God? Should I just draw him as a light in the sky that has dialogue balloons coming out from it? Then I had this dream. He has a very masculine face like my father. He has a white beard but he actually ended up looking more like my father. In a 2005 public interview with Robert Hughes at the New York Public Library, partially transcribed at Time‘s website, Crumb briefly discussed the challenges of drawing the character of God: ![]() Todd Hignite’s book In the Studio, published by Yale University Press, also featured sketches relating to the project, which are available via the publisher’s website. The only visible image from the work in progress is available as part of a photo-comic produced by Phoebe Gloeckner in 2005 for Indy Magazine, edited by Bill Kartalopoulos, the author of this website. It’s been an tremendous undertaking, and a commitment which has taken him four years to complete. He’s on page 190 and has about 14 pages left, with the cover, introduction and various small pages related his agreement with Norton Publishers. This winter Robert hopes to complete the Genesis project. The most recent update on the website, dated “Winter 2008,” reads: The Comic Book College Weeklies blog carries corroborating commentary from Denis Kitchen, who acted as the book’s agent, that The Book of Genesis According to R. I had the privilege of seeing some of the pages in France two years ago, and the scope of the work has haunted me ever since.” Weighing in for the Beat’s end-of-year industry feature, Abrams Executive Editor Charlie Kochman predicts that the “biggest story in comics in 2009” will be “the long-awaited publication of Robert Crumb’s Book of Genesis, an adaptation of the Bible story, which Norton will be publishing in Fall 2009.
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