The Book of Genesis Illustrated by R. Crumb
by R. Crumb

When legendary artist R. Crumb discovered the Bible to be “a text so great and so strange that it lends itself readily to graphic depictions,” he decided to do a literal interpretation using the text word for word in a version primarily assembled from the translations of Robert Alter and the King James bible with all it's harrowing, tragic, and even juicy stories. Crumb’s Book of Genesis reintroduces us to the bountiful tree lined garden of Adam and Eve, the massive ark of Noah with beasts of every kind, the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah destroyed by brimstone and fire that rained from the heavens, and the Egypt of the Pharaoh, where Joseph’s embalmed body is carried in a coffin, in a scene as elegiac as any in Genesis. Using clues from the text and peeling away the theological and scholarly interpretation that have often obscured the Bible’s most dramatic stories, Crumb fleshes out a parade of Biblical originals.