R. Crumb, the underground cartoonist, has illustrated Genesis, the first book of the Bible. The words come from both the King James Version and a recent translation by Robert Alter. The pictures come from Crumb’s pen, the same sort of art pen that he’s done all of his life’s work with—all of it, no pastels, watercolours, pencil, just this pen scritching away for half a century in a fury of crosshatching and black-and-white starkness. He’s that geeky kid in the class who drew all the time with the funny-looking pen, a Rapidograph probably, and the boys wanted him to draw porn, which Robert Crumb did, publishing a lot of it in ’60s underground comics such as Zap or Despair. Crumb drew fetishy comic extravaganzas featuring geeky little males in erotic combat with big-bottomed women with massive legs. In all of it, everything was rounded, Disney-style, but with hair on the legs, nipple pops and people skulking down city sidewalks under telephone-pole skies.

God said R. Crumb should illustrate Genesis? Here they are, together on the first page of this book, Crumb drawing God as if he were a madman inventor, beard and hair down to his ankles, and the whites of his eyes showing over the tops of his irises and his hairy, thick-fingered hands grasping what looks like a combination of a circle saw and a black hole, “without form, and void”.

Actually, God appeared 40 years ago in a Crumb comic-book story called “Dirty Dog”. Back then, he was a malevolently gleeful bunny operating a television camera and saying, “Hi! I’m God! Let’s get going!” Beneath him, Dirty Dog hunches down a city street accompanied by blues lyrics—”Rather drink muddy water, Lord, sleep in a hollow log, than to be up here in New York treated like a dirty dog.” Poor DD ends up slavering over magazines in a porn store, and the bunny is long gone.

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