Category Archives: Roundtables

Phooey From Me to You: Six or Seven Things I Know about Popeye

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1. Popeye is old. I don’t mean the strip is old.  Everybody knows the strip is old.  I mean Popeye himself is supposed to be a senior citizen.  He’s a grizzled old sailor, with emphasis on the old, with extra old added on.  Although his official bio now describes him as 34, according to the Segar-era strips he’s in his sixties, and his father (more on him later) is pushing 100.  That’s why Popeye is bald and missing an eye.  Because of the oldness.

2. Popeye’s mythic origin is fundamentally flawed. In his youth, Fionn mac Cumhaill, the trickster hero of Irish folklore, gained his powers by tasting the flesh of the bradan feasa, the salmon of knowledge, which contained all the knowledge in the world.  When Fionn mac Cumhaill burned his thumb cooking the salmon and automatically stuck the burned thumb in his mouth, the knowledge flowed from the salmon into Fionn.  After that, Fionn mac Cumhaill knew everything and could access any information he needed by sucking on his thumb.

Popeye, in his old age, got his incredible toughness by staying up all night below decks rubbing the head of Bernice the Wiffle Hen, a bird with the power to bestow supernatural good luck on those who touched her.  All the luck flowed out of the hen and into Popeye, rendering the hen useless to would-be gambling kings Castor Oyl and Ham Gravy and transforming Popeye into an unstoppable demigod.

Later, as everyone knows, the story was changed so that Popeye gained his strength from eating spinach.  This introduced the crucial element of consumption that gives the core myth its memetic power, but in the process the totemic animal was lost.  It’s a shame we can’t have both, the animal and the vegetable, but everyone forgets about the hen.

3. Popeye is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans. E.C. Segar drew Thimble Theatre for ten years before introducing Popeye.  It took him the length of the entire run of Calvin & Hobbes just to find his main character.  Popeye sidled in through the seedy back docks.  He was not the kind of hero you could plan for.  Who could have predicted that a cranky old sailor who looks like he smells funny—everyone in Thimble Theatre looks like he or she smells funny—would become the idol of millions, making Mickey Mouse shake in his polished red shoes and enduring for generations beyond?

If you are a writer, if you are an artist, you have to learn to open yourself to Popeye, to be ready if Popeye should happen.  But at the same time you have to know that Popeye will probably never happen.  Maybe there’s a hen you can rub.

4. Popeye is a dick. He’s a lot more heroic in the cartoons.  In the Segar strips, aside from sporadic and whimsical urges to aid the downtrodden, a.k.a. widders and orfinks what ain’t got none, Popeye devotes himself largely to being an insufferable cuss.  This is, after all, the guy who not only kicked poor Castor Oyl out of his own comic strip, but banged Castor’s sister just to show he meant business.

He’s consistently awful to Olive, of course.

Back in the day, Segar got complaints that Popeye was a bad role model for children.  He solved this problem as every similarly beset writer should: by creating a nearly identical but even more meretricious character to make Popeye look good by comparison.  Thus the strip gained Popeye’s father, Pappy, who looks exactly like Popeye with stubble.  Apparently aware that he lives in a crudely-drawn strip, Pappy sometimes disguises himself as his son by shaving so he can make time with Olive.

5. Bobby London got Popeye. None of the other legacy cartoonists really have.  They love Popeye, I’m sure.  They want to do right by Popeye, to pay just tribute to Segar’s creation, to be responsible bearers of the standard.  London, by contrast, used his run on the Popeye strip to see exactly how much he could get away with before an outraged syndicate, newspaper market, readership, and world kicked him out for the sake of common decency.  He probably made some people cry.  And that’s what Popeye is all about, Charlie Brown.

6. You can go to Sweethaven. The village built for the 1980 movie still stands.  Looks cleaner now, actually, judging from the photos.  It’s in Malta and is open to the public as a tourist attraction, complete with movie props, stage shows, and a movie theater showing clips from the film.

I like the movie.  It’s messy and mumbly and wanders all over the place, which suggests that the filmmakers got Popeye too.  The strange grimness of the musical numbers always makes me smile.  As far as superhero movies go, it’s higher on my list than Iron Man.

7. Popeye Ruined My Life. I found Thimble Theatre in the old Smithsonian Book of Newspaper Comics in my high-school library.  It was something I hadn’t seen before: a funny adventure strip, a gag strip with a story.  It had long stories, stretching for months or years, with pirates and gamblers and thieves.  I wanted to do that, and I did, and now I’ve been doing it for ten years.  Without Popeye.  All you can do is be ready.

Comic strips, unlike comic books, boast a genteel legacy.  The elegant stagework of Little Nemo, the bohemian poetry of Krazy Kat, the quiet philosophy of Peanuts, the Disneyfied poly-sci of Pogo…it’s all so very convincingly Art.  Even the rugged adventure strips are rugged in a pleasant, Brylcreemed, magazine-illustration way.  And then there’s Popeye, who cusses and fights and brags about cussing and fighting, who comes staggering up drunk from the lower decks inhabited by all those weird old Jazz Age strips with the blotchy art and spindly lettering and betting tips and Yiddish and plop takes and Nov Shmoz Ka Pop? I don’t know what kind of theater Thimble Theatre is, but Winsor McCay probably wouldn’t want to do his quick-draw act there.  Popeye hangs on, indestructible (because of the hen), the last of a tougher, smellier, funnier breed.

He also has a damn catchy theme song.

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Update by Noah: This is the first in roundtable on Popeye. You can read the whole roundtable here.

Outside Crumb

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There’s a style of talking about the Christian God that you find in rural corners of the American South where there are Free Will Baptists and Pentecostal Holiness churches. Imbued with images and rich with metaphor, it’s also thickly oral, repetitious and rhythmic – reading transcripts of sermons aloud is like holding pebbles of words in your mouth:

I was voted in to pastor a church away down in southeast Alabama. I felt like I was drifting into a paradise opportunity to work for God, but really I was headed for the jaws of a vice on the Devil’s workbench. What I didn’t know what that the young people outvoted some of the old-time goatheads which was trying to bring in an older minister. They had future trouble up their sleeves…[they said] we are going to bring our minister to church and he is going to take the pulpit.

“When the other people at the church heard this, they were ready for a fight. One rough sinner-man came to me and said “I have a real sharp knife and I ate peas and cornbread in prison before and I can do it again. Don’t worry, no one is going to take your pulpit. My knife is sharp and I’ve been in trouble before.” So I woke up in a vice between a prospering church and a blood-shedding fight. I wanted to preserve peace, but that ain’t easy, because the Devil has got me in that vice time after time…Preachers think they got power just by preaching and that sinners will get saved. You can’t run sinners out of church. You have to run them into church and make it a soul-saving station for God.”

The Devil's Vice (click to enlarge)

Howard Finster (who wrote and drew the above) was a particularly strong example of this way of talking about God. It was common, among people of his generation, in the Pentecostal sects of his part of the south, where the Holy Spirit gets a seat at the table and the church elders speak in tongues, but even there his imagination was more vivid than most.

Click and zoom to read

His paintings, which I linked to briefly a few days ago, share the same sensibility as his sermons – a mixing up of images and metaphors from sacred and secular life, mixing that he thought was essential to his evangelical purpose.

In these places, deep in the rural South, where the nearest town of any size is hours away and the churches have had the same families in the same pews for 100 years, religion stops feeling like a choice, because culture is so saturated with faith it’s not something you believe, it’s just the way things are. “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust” isn’t just a phrase in a funeral: it describes that sense that everything in the world is made of the same stuff and that stuff is God: the trees and the fish and the people and the boards of your porch and the bricks of your church.

Howard Finster draws the psyche of that place.

It’s come up several times that asking R.Crumb to “have some imagination, damn it,” (in Genesis, at least) is somehow tied up with asking him to be more religious, or that seeing his imagination as falling short is somehow due to mistakenly looking for signs of belief. I think, though, that it does Howard Finster’s imagination a great disservice to attribute it to his faith. There are too many faithful people who don’t have it. I wish faith did automatically produce it: then we’d have more art like his.

Annotated Sketch (c. 1978 click to enlarge)

Wire Train (click to enlarge)

click to enlarge

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Cartoonist Basil Wolverton was also a believer when he began illustrating Bible stories and verses for evangelist Herbert Armstrong in the early 1950s. Wolverton had been drawing comics since 1925 and was drawing for Mad at the time he started illustrating the Bible. His cartoons influenced Crumb and other underground cartoonists – he drew grotesque, weird, exaggeratedly humourous characters that, despite his protestations about intent, were viewed as highly sexually suggestive.

Mad Cover Illustration (click to enlarge)

His Biblical illustrations, unsurprisingly, are more straightforward and serious, although the exaggerated sensibility sneaks through. In the introduction to “The Wolverton Bible,” his son Monte observes:

Wolverton’s challenge was to portray the Biblical accounts accurately without tramautizing children too much. Yet from his background in comics, he understood that children actually enjoy a certain amount of violence (how it effects them is another topic.) In this way he was a pioneer for later comic artists, beginning in the 1970s, who would bring a more realistic interpretation to graphic depictions of the Bible…he never backed down from his position that the Old Testament needed to be depicted for what it was.

(Sound familiar?) Like Finster’s, Wolverton’s approach is consistent with the declamation style practiced in his church, but Wolverton’s church was very different. Monte Wolverton describes Herbert Armstrong’s preaching style as “newscaster-like” and “devoid of churchy language.” Although essentially a one-man-show when Wolverton first became involved, Armstrong’s church, called the Worldwide Church of God, had become extremely rule-bound and institutionalized by the end of the 1960s – members who disagreed with church teaching were “disfellowshipped.” (It was not a typical fundamentalist church, however, as it did not prevent drinking, dancing or other social activities.) Wolverton himself was a jovial, congenial and funny man who loved to entertain. His drawings reflect this mixed vantage point: the serious, “newscaster-like” declamation with a great appreciation for humanity and personality.

Creation (click to enlarge)

God speaks to Noah (click to enlarge)

Lot's wife turned to salt (click to enlarge)

Victims of the Flood (click to enlarge)

It seems obvious that Wolverton’s treatment of the Bible was more influential on Crumb than Finster’s, although I have no evidence that Crumb saw these Biblical drawings before beginning his work. Crumb’s Bible strikes me as very much the literal Evangelical Bible, though, so it wouldn’t surprise me if there was genealogy through this path.

What’s more difficult to account for, for me personally, is the greater aesthetic impact I feel from the Wolverton drawings, since they are in many respects so very similar to Crumb’s. In comparison, I think much of my dissatisfaction with Genesis does in fact come from two formal elements of the comic idiom: the grid, which provides a repetitive overarching composition even when the in-panel composition is varied, and the transformation of the prose text from its familiar, “native” graphic presentation in the columnar numbered pages of the Bible, into the comics idiom of captions and balloons. Text is, for all its abstraction, also a visual medium, and the flow and sound of the text in normal prose presentation is governed by different interactions than the ones in Crumb’s comics version.

My lack of appreciation for this – my sense that more is lost than is gained – is without doubt my limitation, not Crumb’s, and in this particular matter, an issue of personal aesthetic preference. But the comparison raises questions about the impact and effect of “sequential art”: I think because most people who read comics have an affinity for these elements of the idiom, they’re often accepted unquestioningly, without critical challenges or evaluation. A “nothing left out!” illustration job is a translation of sorts – normally the prose Bible is very aural; in Crumb’s book that aurality is replaced with the visual. The oft-described effect of “making the pictures narrate” is very palpable here – Crumb is without doubt successful at that effort – but to what end? Is it really just a “translation” into the comics “language”?

I think it may be — while Finster in particular can stand up against the more elite Biblical art that Suat drew on in his comparison and Wolverton’s approach is at least highly representative of his particular individual reading, Crumb’s is much less an individual reading than either. His very successful effort to humanize the Biblical characters resulted in a dehumanization of the experience overall. This perhaps shows us Alter’s error: it is not the concretization of images that marks the limit of the comics form at this moment in history, but instead the lack of imagination regarding the ways in which illustration can be fully literary without being tied relentlessly to sequence, grid, and narrative. Some experimental cartoonists are working to imagine new notions, but the far-more-common reliance on sequence to capture the spirit of literature – well, it only “captures” it, like a wild animal kept in a tiny cage.

Howard Finster described himself like this: “To do art like them fellas do in the books, it would take months. I’m a cartoonist. I don’t fool with details like that.” Without those details, an imagination like Finster’s makes all the difference.

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Images and quotations in this post are taken from: “Howard Finster, Man of Visions: the Life and Work of a Self-Taught Artist” by J.F. Turner (Knopf, 1989) and “The Wolverton Bible: The Old Testament and Book of Revelation through the Pen of Basil Wolverton,” Monte Wolverton, compiler (Fantagraphics, 2009).

R. Crumb vs. Kierkegaard — Battle of the Floating Heads!

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Langlois’ formulation is the denial of time: an idea of history not as something past, things having happened and remembered, but something entirely now, aggregated all together, present – meaning both presence and in the present tense. — Caroline Small

There was once a man; he had learned as a child that beautiful tale of how God tried Abraham, how he withstood the test, kept his faith and for the second time received a son against every expectation. When he became older he read the same story with even greater admiration, for life had divdied what had been united in the child’s pious simplicity. The older he became the more often his thoughts turned to that tale, his enthusiasm became stronger and stronger, and yet less and less could he understand it. Finally it put everything else out of his mind; his soul had but one wish, actually to see Abraham, and one longing, to have been witness to those events. — Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling

R. Crumb’s illustrated Book of Genesis does precisely what Caroline Small and Kierkegaard ask of art and of faith. In Crumb’s literal reading, with its physicality, and its playful touches of cartoonishness, the Bible is transformed from a fusty, inaccessible monument to boredom and bewildering begats into “something new,” a text that makes the familiar alien, or, at least, more familiar. In giving flesh to the Biblical narrative, Crumb allows us to do what Kierkegaard, tragically lacking the technology of sequential pictograms, could not. We can “actually…see Abraham” drawn before us, and watch the flickers of agony, hope, love, and relief flow across his comfortingly craggy patriarchal visage, as if he were Patrick Stewart reacting with satisfying aplomb to the Romulan menace.

Moreover, Crumb penetrates to a truth that Caro and Kierkegaard fail, each in their own way, to understand. Making something new is best done, not through imaginative engagement, but through rote drudgery. Clichés are our deepest selves; to present them with minimal comment or inquiry is therefore the artist’s highest calling.

Pesky floating bearded heads — didn’t I spray for those?

You can tell I am remembering because I am pointing to my head!

You can tell I am listening because I am cupping my ear!

Why do we see God as a bearded patriarch? Crumb cunningly investigates and undermines this image through his steadfast refusal to investigate or undermine it. Deftly deploying the poverty of his visual imagination as well as a deep spiritual engagement, Crumb shows us a God daring in His vacuousness; a children’s book deity who pantomimes and points in case the kiddies can’t parse the text, yet who thoughtfully problematizes His own superficiality not through any actual ideas or initiative, but rather through the very fact of being in a big honking coffee table book by R. Crumb.

Crumb’s insistence on transcribing every word of Genesis without bowdlerization or omission again makes history new by bringing into focus many aspects of the narrative previously glossed over by Christian and secular readers alike. For example, Crumb shows us that women in the past had nipples. He also demonstrates that Adam had a penis, even if nobody else in particular did, (Update: Robert in comments points out that at least one other person in the book has a penis too.) and that when people are anxious, little sweat drops fly off of them.

And, of course, he provides visual referents for the begats.

Another artist, less versed in the transcendentally validating power of banality, might have attempted to visually integrate the passage’s obsessions with patriarchy, seed, age, and death. One can imagine Chris Ware, for example, creating a single intricate image of lineage, or Johnny Ryan (channelling the younger Crumb) treating the text as an opportunity to create an extended daisy chain of sentient semen. Far better Crumb’s vision — a series of small disconnected drawings of more or less random scenes of life, recalling a light television montage that gets up on its hind legs to say, “Humanity! How heartwarming!” Time passes, life passes, Crumb draws, and the strings swell. Crumb has commented in interviews on the strangeness of the Biblical narrative; what better way to emphasize that strangeness than to turn it into a drab sentimental parable?

Ng Suat Tong started this Genesis discussion off by comparing Crumb’s visuals to the efforts of great artists of the past. Of course, it is not really cricket to put Crumb next to artists like Blake since Crumb draws lots of pictures on a page, thus obviously quantitatively overwhelming painters who only drew one at a time. Similarly, it seems unfair to place Crumb beside mere authors since mathematically: pictures + words> words. Still, I think it’s worth looking at this passage by Kierkegaard to show exactly what Biblical exegesis has been missing up to this moment.

It was early morning. Abraham rose in good time, had the asses saddled and left his tent, taking Isaac with him, but Sarah watched them from the window as they went down the valley until she could see them no more. They rode in silence for three days; on the morning of the fourth Abraham still said not a word, but raised his eyes and saw afar the mountain in Moriah. He left the lads behind and went on alone up the mountain with Isaac beside him. But Abraham said to himself” “I won’t conceal from Isaac where this way is leading him.” He stood still, laid his hand on Isaac’s head to give him his blessing, and Isaac bent down to receive it. And Abraham’s expression was fatherly, his gaze gentle, his speech encouraging. But Isaac could not understand him, his soul could not be uplifted; he clung to Abraham’s knees, pleaded at his feet, begged for his young life, for his fair promise; he called to mind the joy in Abraham’s house, reminded him of the sorrow and loneliness. Then Abraham lifted the boy up and walked with him, taking him by the hand, and his words were full of comfort and exhortation. But Isaac could not understand him. Then he turned away from Isaac for a moment, but when Isaac saw his face for a second time it was changed, his gaze was wild, his mien one of horror. He caught Isaac by the chest, threw him to the ground and said: “Foolish boy,, do you believe I am your father? I am an idolater. Do you believe this is God’s command? No, it is my own desire.” Then Isaac trembled and in his anguish cried” “God in heaven have mercy on me, God of Abraham have mercy on me; if I have no father on earth, then be Thou my father!” But below his breath Abraham said to himself: “Lord in heaven I thank Thee; it is after all better that he believe I am a monster than that he lose faith in Thee.”

Kierkegaard uses the story as the occasion for an inquiry into faith and love between God and man, father and son. He does this by treating the story as his own; it is a coat that he can put on, adjust, take in or let out. For him, reverence involves dispensing with reverence; to understand the story of Abraham as it is, he has to defile it with his own imagination.

Crumb, on the other hand, treats the story as an inquiry into the story. It is his job to clothe the text, not to have the text clothe him. You can see him doing his best to provide a striking garment; Abraham looks grimly determined here, sweatily panicked there, movingly relieved in the center panel of the second page (perhaps the strongest single image in the book, despite the yep-there-it-is-again light from heaven.) But this is gilding, not defilement. Kierkegaard fucks with Genesis and ends up begatting a new creation; Crumb puts a few ribbons of varying construction in the text’s hair and sends it on its way.

And, surely, this is the great contribution of comics to Biblical criticism and to art. Without much of a tradition of accomplishment, sequential pictographs are perfectly situated for the aesthetic task of the future — namely to rehash what has gone before as doggedly and unimaginatively as possible. Perhaps Caro was wrong after all; the best way to deny time is not to recast the past as present, but the present as past. Nothing has happened, no one has spoken, neither God nor our ancestors have taught us anything, and so the most lackluster retread deserves the most heartfelt hosannahs. If defilement is reverence, then reverence is the truest defilement —both of the Bible and of art, which are cast together, through the power of Crumb’s genius, out of the flawed garden of giving a shit and into the absolute purity of irrelevance.

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For a less gratuitously mean-spirited take on R. Crumb’s Genesis, I’d urge folks to read the heartfelt and thoughtful defenses by Alan Choate andKen Parille. The entire ongoing back and forth about Genesis on this blog can be found here.

A Response to Alan Choate’s Defense of R. Crumb’s Genesis

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Once again, Alan, thanks for taking the time to write your essay and fully articulate the pleasures of Crumb’s adaptation.I have a number of minor disagreements about which I won’t go into much detail since it would merely be a reiteration of my previous discussions with Ken and yourself. In this particular response, my disagreements have less to do with Crumb’s Genesis than with our differing approaches to the comic and comics criticism in general.

There is, for instance, the flawed understanding that the “tendency of modern biblical scholarship to pull apart narrative threads has been disintegrative to the religious sense of the Bible as a unified, divinely inspired whole.” I’m afraid that quite the opposite is the case and no person (of a serious intent) who has read a good commentary would tell you otherwise. Just as scholarship enriches the experience of any dense literary text, so too does it refine our understanding of the Bible and Genesis. The best commentaries provide the context which you lament as being lost to modern readers: historical setting, social mores, linguistic complexities and turns of phrase. The “remoteness” of this text, which is well hidden by many modern translations, is precisely what scholarship brings forth and elucidates.  The “detective work” which Crumb engages in has been done many times over and with far greater ability. But I doubt if this is the real area of disagreement between us. More likely, you find this journey of discovery exceptionally fruitful, while I for the most part do not, if only because I have already experienced it.

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In Defense of Crumb’s Genesis

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It is rare to see an adaptation come under attack from followers of the original for being too faithful. Dramatizers regularly compress and invent for what they hope will be the strongest statement in another medium, then defend their interpretation as being in the spirit, if not the letter, of the source. The devotees’ essential reply is that the failure to respect detail, or honor the letter, lost the spirit, leaving some creature that had no right to go out under the same name. Did the adapters think they knew better than the writer?

That secular attachment is a pale, fleeting image of what the Bible can mean for readers, yet here we have seen some furious attacks on a groundbreakingly faithful treatment. People with long relationships to the original are insisting that the Book of Genesis demanded an interpretive, even editorializing approach. According to one critic, the Bible is right there if anybody wants to read it. R. Crumb’s The Book of Genesis Illustrated needed to reshape and select its material. The artist should have pushed his opinions in front, even lampooned it because that’s what he does, and instead gave us a boring, stodgy, completely unnecessary work that never, ever should have been made. (Though why is the mirror-universe review so easy to write: “Had Crumb been able to restrain his clowning urges, he might have learned a ‘“not-so-” secret’ that we who know the Bible have known for years of watching these acts go by: nothing could have been more shocking than a straight adaptation.”)

Given the deaf ears turned to it in these discussions- the point is denied until corrected, then was never at issue and isn’t important anyway- the pioneering nature of a comprehensive illumination bears repeating up front. As Crumb told Comic Art Magazine at the outset of the job,

“I’m going to be doing all fifty chapters of Genesis, including every word. Straight from the original- I’m not leaving out anything… you’ve got to do an extremely close reading. It’s really interesting and full of surprises, what is actually in there when you read it closely. And, you know, believers tend to gloss over the stuff that makes them uncomfortable or that they don’t get. But it’s in there, you know, so it’s going to be illustrated, so…”

But such a believer is not the serious student of theology, who wrestles with these problems until they grant him understanding. Crumb prepared for heat from religious fundamentalists, who claim the Bible as literally true history, instruction, prediction, and absolutely present a major cultural force that would be foolish to ignore (“If I’m going to be doing this and don’t want some Christian fanatics to kill me, I’ve got to say ‘Look, it’s all in there, I didn’t change a single word, it’s in your holy book…’ so we’ll see if they want to kill me or not,”) but this left his flank open to condescension from those who are dedicated to exploring its deeper meanings. Another commenter:

“Part of the problem I had… [was] the overly literal interpretation and complete lack of insight about the actual ideas underlying Genesis. Virtually all scholars, rabbis, clergy etc. in the modern day, even those with more fundamentalist leanings, use the bible as a starting point to interpret the metaphors and stories and apply them to the modern day… Yet I would suspect that very few, if any, clergy believe in the stories as literal, historical facts.

“Thus, the depictions of God as an old man, the creation story, etc… represent a very childish understanding of Genesis. That would be fine if this were a children’s book, but the problem is that by presenting the entirety of the dense text… no child will be able to penetrate this book either.”

We can all understand how a treatment could cling to the letter, lose the spirit, and end up flat. From Ng Suat Tong’s essay, posted here on July 14, a reader might get the impression that Crumb has given us a soulless, mechanical transcription that recycles Sunday-school figures (a white beard, a cuddly Garden of Eden) and only superficially engages the work it was based on. It’s easy to take Suat’s accusations of a lack of intellectual and spiritual involvement in Genesis in a still essentially worldly sense, and a genially agnostic member of the public might see no harm in letting the religious and literary meanings blend. But his fault-finding refers to a lack of dedicated application in a religious framework that none of us should wish to see confused with the “soft” intellectual and spiritual experience of a great book.

(I gave a detailed response to his points in the comments thread for his essay, which was collected here.)

The overriding problem is his persistent call for Crumb to do something with his adaptation that he’s not trying to do. Suat’s characteristic complaint is that Crumb fails to explicitly incorporate centuries of Biblical scholarship, for which the evident rejoinder is that these were not books he chose to adapt. As just one example,

“In response to Genesis 3:15… we get a somewhat cursorily drawn snake wriggling away. It is common knowledge that Christians look upon these verses as the protoevangelium (for example, some church fathers saw the ‘woman’ here as the virgin Mary and the ‘seed’ as representing  the church and/or Christ in particular) while Jewish commentators sometimes view the ‘seed’ as a metaphor for humankind. There is little evidence of a response to these or any other interpretations here.“

These objections are so consistent they have an emergent property as a fairly clear request for a comic that would travel through Genesis (if it got out of Eden) with a chemistry of text and symbolic imagery, discussing the interpretations of the ages. Perhaps some cartoonist out there is looking for a project. A highly routine style of Biblical adaptation that tricks out the narrative with new scenes and dialogue could also work in some scholarship (again, we can hear the response: “Crumb’s is the latest in a long line of reworkings of the Bible,”) but this was not his project either. As he told The Paris Review,

“In all the comic-book versions I was able to find, they just made up dialogue, pages of it that are not in the Bible. I was reading this one thing and I thought- did I miss this? And I went back and checked against the text and it’s not in there. And they claim to be honoring the word of God, and that the Bible is a sacred text… the most significant thing is actually illustrating everything that’s in there. That’s the most significant contribution I made. It brings everything out.”

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Alan Choate on R. Crumb’s Genesis, Part 1

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Alan Choate left a long series of comments on Suat’s discussion of R. Crumb’s Genesis. Alan is actually going to post some additional thoughts on the blog here next week, so in preparation for that I thought I’d move his initial discussion into a post where it would be more easy to access.

The discussion of Genesis has turned into a kind of slow motion roundtable, so I thought I’d put it under one rubric. You can read all of Suat’s discussions and Alan’s (and maybe others if they pitch in!) Under the header Slow-Rolling Genesis.

So here are Alan Choate’s original comments.
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Hi, Suat. I want to answer your review at some length because I have a lot of problems with it. I see numerous errors, a casual reading of the book, and some shaky assumptions supporting the whole thing. You make a number of dismissive remarks in the review and the comments that strike me as haughty, unfair, and wildly off-base. The biggest problem is that you’re falling readily into a basic error for a critic: refusing to assess a work on its own terms.

I should add immediately that I have an indirect entanglement with this (as they say.) You mention my suggestion “…made in all seriousness” in the comments to Heer’s post that Robert Alter, in his review for the New Republic, “would feel threatened (the words used are ‘nervousness’ and ‘professional jealousy’) by Crumb’s awful biblical scholarship,“ calling it ”laughable if not symptomatic of a deranged comics provincialism.“ It’s not right for me to get after you for saying things I find arrogant without apologizing for that. ”Professional jealousy“ was way too strong, and I take it back.

What I said was that Alter seemed nervous about the use of his translation- he spoke of his ”entanglement“ in the project, and the man’s job is choosing words- and may have nursed what I did call a professional jealousy between one exegete and another. I found Alter gracious and full of biblical insights, saw that he made a good effort to engage Crumb, but my reason for saying that was that he treated the adaptation as a failure because it couldn’t be regarded as definitive. I thought he was basically telling us why we should still read the Bible (preferably with his notes), and didn’t seem to grasp that Crumb was suggesting possible interpretations in much the same way he did, though his commentary did have the advantage of being able to list several at once. I‘d never say ”Crumb’s awful biblical scholarship“ was threatening to him, rather the rampant popularity that defenders of the canon ascribe to comics, and the notion that youngsters who read it might assume they’d read Genesis itself because the comic book has every word.

I am honestly not bothered by being called a ”deranged provincial“- feel free to look at me that way- and I hope it will be apparent that my issue is with other things you’ve said. According to you, Crumb did not ”read closely and with an intent to understand,“ his adaptation was ”stripped of emotional and mental investment,“ it suffered from ”artistic lassitude“, ”awful biblical scholarship,“ and an ”almost anti-intellectual approach“. You even pull ”half-digested pabulum“ out of the Comics Journal grab-bag. (Could it also be pernicious, odious, fatuous, and supererogatory?) ”Those with a serious interest in the original text and the rich tradition of biblical illustration“ can only find the book a ”well-crafted curiosity,“ and it ”might be of greatest use to readers whose minds are in a more formative state.“

This is strong stuff. I want to examine it by looking at the same parts you do and I’ll try to build into an overall assessment of your approach. I hope to also answer not just your review but a certain strain of commentary I’ve seen about the book.

The creation and fall of man are ”the two most famous chapters in Genesis… these factors will make the ascertainment of the extent of Crumb’s achievements in The Book of Genesis that much easier.“

This convenience is significant. My unscholarly sense is that visual adaptations of Genesis tend to fall back on the Garden of Eden and the Flood, with the second rank including the Tower of Babel (one famous image), Sodom and Gomorrah (fiery rain and pillar of salt), the sacrifice of Isaac, and Jacob’s ladder. Creations have been done but seem a bit vague for most artists; I think I should be able to call a famous Cain and Abel to mind, but can’t. Much of Genesis, as with the rest of the Old Testament or Hebrew Bible, is unfamiliar in visual art or dramatization, and parts may never have been depicted. (Anybody can scrape up examples with an image search, but let’s play fair; you know what I mean.) Jesus and Mary have been the stars of Western art, and the Hebrew Bible is recalled in a sprinkling of highlights.

A comprehensive visual dramatization of Genesis is unprecedented. This is a major part of this project’s reason for being. As Crumb says, “they gloss over it. When you’re a kid, they don’t inform you that Lot has sex with his daughters. Or that Judah slept with his daughter-in-law. Those parts are just glossed over. In illustrating everything and every word, everything is brought equally to the surface. The stories about incest have the same importance as the more famous stories of Noah and the Flood or the Tower of Babel or Adam and Eve or whatever. I think that’s the most significant thing about making a comic book out of Genesis. Everything is illuminated.”

There are other virtues to the adaptation, which will hopefully emerge in my examination and will be discussed as I wrap up. But the glaring obviousness of this one makes me wonder how seriously you’re taking this when you say things like ”there seems little point in retreading ground your artistic betters have fully exploited half a millennium ago.“

Your choice to focus on the Garden of Eden is itself interesting, since it’s highly atypical. It is the only part shorn of costume, tools, man-made structures, and any human culture at all. The characters are ideal ”types“. Visually, the rest of the book is astonishing in its quotidian detail, and one can find new delights on any page even after multiple readings, but the relentlessly straight-on layouts and total commitment to a credible milieu for the patriarchs create a rigorous visual style that could be considered as much a demand on the audience as classic art-house cinema. You can dismiss it as boring (for devil’s advocacy, here’s Johnny Ryan), but there’s also a seriousness to it.

By contrast, the Garden of Eden scenes are playful and fanciful. You point out this lightness, comparing the moment when Adam and Eve cuddle next to God and the woodland creatures to Disney. And you’re not wrong. (Though this is right before a startling tonal and narrative shift when it to a different version of man’s creation, this one primal and stark, right on the same page- a bold feature that I’ve never seen in an adaptation.) But your handling suggests that the tone of these parts is consistent with the rest of the book. You even point to the Adam and Eve scenes to answer Ken Parille’s description of the book’s aesthetic, without any hint of their difference:

”Crumb’s illustrations assume a sort of perfection of human form and behavior as far as Adam and Eve are concerned. I presume that this is one example of the “beautiful” materiality of The Book of Genesis which Ken mentions in the excerpt above. There is certainly a degree of exaggeration and a filtering through the artist’s eye but this is not a particularly earthy version of Eden… There is very little of that grimy commonness which we see in the Gospel adaptations of Pasolini or Chester Brown.“

You write of Crumb’s drawing of the creation of Adam,

“His solution was not an uncommon one during the Italian Renaissance, here made fresh by showing the stages in this act, in particular the breath of life given to Adam (the word “breathed” or “blew” here suggesting the intimacy of a kiss). Crumb’s adaptation is also notable for showing Adam in his clay-like state, a reminder of the Egyptian (see The Hymn of Khnum and Hekat) and Mesopotamian (see Enki & Ninmah, and Bel) myths which carry the same motif.

“As articulated in his short commentary found at the end of The Book of Genesis, Crumb is particularly interested in these ancient tales of creation and periodically inserts them while neglecting to emphasize the many internal consistencies, dilemmas and word plays in the Biblical narrative. Thus, for example, the “dirt of the ground” is linked to pagan tradition and not to a play on the words “man” (adam) and “ground” (adama) where “man is related to the ‘ground’ by his very constitution (Genesis 3:19), making him perfectly suited for the task of working the ‘ground,’ which is required for cultivation…his origins also become his destiny” (Kenneth A. Matthews).“

Where do you see a pagan tradition being inserted? The text specifies that God blows life’s breath into the man’s nostrils. Adam’s constitution from the ground is vividly illustrated. It could be reminiscent of Mesopotamian or Egyptian motifs but Crumb never mentions this in his notes, and the Bible does say “the Lord formed the man from the dirt of the ground.” It’s not clear what suggests to you that the artist is unaware of the link between man and ground or his destiny to work it, or what kind of signal you were hoping Crumb would send.

But you miss the way Crumb does emphasize Adam’s name and connection to the ground after these three panels. You’re not much impressed with the high-volume dressing down Crumb has God give Adam and Eve: “The entirety of God’s judgments from Genesis 3:14 to 19 are depicted without comment or analysis. The artist’s hand here is as distant as a machine-operated drafting tool.” But surely you noticed God’s jabbing finger. He does it a lot in that scene. The action through the Creation has been led by what God does with his hands- always with open palms, arranging things, introducing people to each other and their habitat. The only time until now that he pointed was to identify the forbidden tree. The only other pointing was Adam’s, naming the animals. Now God points at him: “To Adam he said… Cursed be the ground because of you!… By the sweat of your brow you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground, for from there you were taken! For DUST you are, and to DUST you shall return!” (Crumb’s emphasis.)

It’s easy to miss, but until now Adam has been “the man.” This is where he is named- named earth, or dust. Crumb has associated pointing with forbidding, punishment, and naming. For the expulsion from the Garden, God sends “him”- not “them“- “forth to till the ground from which he had been taken,” and Adam is shown carrying a tool. They’re in new, uncomfortable clothes, distressed, and getting ready for a life of work. On the next page we meet Cain, “a tiller of the soil”- who is constantly shown flushed and sweating. Crumb is recalling God’s line that “by the sweat of your brow you shall eat bread.” Cain’s offering to God is “from the fruit of the soil”- unspecific, but Crumb shows it as a basket of grain. (Jacob is also shown pounding down what might be grain or flour with his mother- is Crumb using Esau’s skill in hunting to set up a parallel?) The meaning of all this would take us into Biblical analysis, but Crumb has helped guide us to these issues.

“The stated “literalness” of Crumb’s adaptation as well as its generally bland imagery will lull many readers into the false impression that Genesis intends a deep consideration of centuries old biblical scholarship. It doesn’t, an important point which I will address in more detail later.“

It gives me the impression that he intended to consider the Bible. I don’t see how later scholarship is suggested, and surely Crumb wasn’t surprised to read these lines on the inside front cover: ”Using clues from the text and peeling away the theological and scholarly interpretations that have often obscured the Bible’s most dramatic stories, Crumb fleshes out a parade of biblical originals.“ This is an important point which I will address in more detail later.

I pointed out some interesting things in Crumb’s depiction of God in the comments section over at Blogflumer, and defended it as the kind of subtle commentary and exploration of the text that people are claiming he doesn’t make. To address some of your points here:

You claim that this line in Crumb’s notes: “after closely reading the beginning of the Creation, I suddenly imagined an ancient man standing on the shore of a sea, and gazing out at the horizon, and seeing only water meeting the sky”- is “an explication of his choice to so portray the Almighty.” It’s not. Crumb’s “ancient man” is not God, but to a man of ancient times trying to figure out his world. Crumb is describing the Hebrew vision of the universe (diagrammed here) and speculating about how they might have come up with it.

You say “one glaring problem” with Crumb’s traditional image of God is that “it conjures up all kinds of unflattering comparisons to his artistic forebears.” But I don’t find the examples you cite so unflattering; painters generally seem a bit uneasy with God the Father, which probably reflects a sense that the Almighty is not really like that, and the need to use the figure to tell the story.

“It also conveys an all too facile understanding of Adam being made in the “image of God” (imago dei), whether this is rooted in the theories and debates surrounding the terms “likeness” and “image” (e.g. in the writings of Irenaeus and Thomas Aquinas), the existential and relational readings of Karl Barth or the functional readings which altogether dispense with the idea that the “image” must consist of non-corporeal features [I think you mean “corporeal”] (i.e. the “image of god” as seen in man’s dominion over the earth and animals). This is but one indication that Crumb’s journey through Genesis was more personal and instinctive than cerebral.“

I must confess I didn’t reread my Irenaeus, Aquinas, or Barth for this, but could it be that their efforts to expand the meaning of “image” and “likeness” had more to do with a desire to reconcile their own idea of God with an ancient text than it did with determining the original meaning of the words? Whether or not you agree with Crumb’s references to the description of God walking in the Garden or sitting under the Terebinths of Mamre, or his assessment that “the God of Genesis is severe and patriarchal… he’s older than the oldest patriarch,” are they evidence of a “personal and instinctive” rather than cerebral approach?

You see his patriarchal vision of God as influenced by “the capricious Mesopotamian gods the artist is so enamored of” (lovely wording), but there’s nothing in his statement to suggest that, although the view that the Hebrew’s God had its roots in such figures is that of historians and Robert Alter. (Many Christians don’t have a problem with the notion that humanity had an evolving idea of God.)

However, there is a sense in which his choice is personal, as he’s said this God resembles his father and came to him in a dream. (From the Paris Review: “He was warning me about something… about some destructive force that was getting stronger… he was enlisting me to be one of the people to protect this reality from that force. When I was trying to figure out how to draw God I remembered that image, which I could only look at for a split second, it was painful to look at this face, it was so severe and anguished… I tried to [give him that face in Genesis]. It doesn’t quite capture it. That was my reference point. All the way through I would go back and rework the face, I kept whiting it out and redoing it, to try and get it right.” This actually resembles the last appearance of God in the book, to Jacob in a dream- see if you agree.) But can you reconcile that with your claim that Crumb had no emotional investment?

Finally, can we admit that Crumb could plausibly have had an interest in using this figure, with his unusual physical presence that I’ve described elsewhere, to startle us and make us consider our own concept of God, and what the concept, and the idea of having encounters with him, might have meant for these people at the time? Or is “deconstructive” a credit we only give to dystopian superhero comics?

You write,

“Crumb’s almost anti-intellectual approach to Genesis continues to pose difficulties throughout the rest of these two chapters.

“While few would question the rigor with which the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is drawn, it remains at best only a fruit bearing tree. One might view the central image of the tree of life (many branched, filled with knots and ramrod straight) as a representation of the masculine ideal and the tree of knowledge in the background as the curvaceous and deadly feminine, but there is little beyond this to recommend it.”

Let’s look at the illustration more closely. It’s arresting. The tree of life centrally and powerfully dominates the composition, with a “ramrod straight” trunk, as you say, until it reaches a mass of exposed branches, each vivid and separately delineated- so clear, in fact, because they are bare of foliage. The leaves only appear around the outer edge, like a brush. This is such an unrealistic effect that it’s obviously deliberate.

So why do you think Crumb did it? To me, the image suggests a genealogical table. By contrast, the tree of knowledge of good and evil squats in the corner, visible but less differentiated from the dark woods. It’s low, undulating and twisty, with a negligible trunk and branches that cover one another before they’re cloaked with a huge mass of leaves. What might that say about “knowledge of good and evil”? We don’t have to treat this like an English class, but surely he wants to make us consider the issue. Is “only a fruit-bearing tree” fair? (You suggest it’s a contrast of masculine and feminine, but that might be a mistake to see in an artist who’s stated his intention to bring out the buried evidence of a matriarchy that lived on equal footing with the patriarchy [shown in his repeated drawings of Adam & Eve standing together with God behind them]- although I agree the trunk for the tree of life is phallic.)

Another interesting feature is that only the tree of knowledge of good and evil has fruit. Like so many details, this is founded in the text. God commands Adam, “From every fruit of the garden you may surely eat. But from the tree of knowledge, good and evil, you shall not…” There is no prohibition against eating from the tree of life. There is also no reference to its having fruit. God says, “Now that the human has become like one of us, knowing good and evil, he may reach out and take as well from the tree of life and live forever.”

A less attentive artist would simply have drawn the tree of life with fruit, but Crumb has addressed a textual problem. If God didn’t want them to eat from the tree of life, why didn’t he forbid it? Why did he tell them they could eat from every fruit in the garden but that of the tree of knowledge? Another telling detail is that the tree of knowledge is quite low, with fruit that’s easy to grab. But whatever the humans might take from the tree of life, they’d have a hard time, because the branches are so far off the ground. God never prohibits them from eating from the tree of life, although he fears it after they take from the tree of knowledge. Did it not occur to him because they wouldn’t have been able to?

His answer doesn’t quite solve the problem, is not the only possible one, and may just address a meaningless oversight of the writers. But Crumb caught it and attempted to make a coherent story the story from the words (something you repeatedly claim he doesn’t do.) The reader can accept or reject this explanation as he pleases; after all, every word is right there, and I think that’s important to Crumb’s method of exegesis. (It’s not the clamping down on possibilities Alter describes.) Crumb offers a possible answer while calling attention to the problem- I’d never noticed it.

Back to you: “What we don’t find in these illustrations is any evidence of the speculative richness the idea of the tree of knowledge has evoked through the ages; be they the ideas concerning sexual awareness proposed by Ibn Ezra, the capacity for moral discrimination, the granting of paramount knowledge or the bestowal of a divine wisdom.”

But Crumb did not set out to address the speculations of Ibn Ezra and the ages, he set out to explore the original text. You appear determined not to perceive this.

“All that we find in The Book of Genesis is a personal mythology influenced in sections by the somewhat discredited theories of Savina Teubal (which I should add is still preferable to the alternative of unthinking transcription…“

I could have done with less Teubal myself, but I think I’m showing how Crumb’s work is hardly “unthinking transcription”. “Personal mythology” is wildly inappropriate given Crumb’s minute fidelity to the text.

“In much the same vein, the encounter with the serpent in Genesis chapter 3 is reduced to a flaccid conversation with a walking reptile. Adam is absent throughout this version of events, though the presence of the plural form of “you” in 3:1-5 suggests he is with Eve but not deceived like she is.“

I’m no expert, and certainly the kind of beginner you concede might like the book, but couldn’t the serpent’s plural address refer to God’s having given them a command that applies to them both? (“Though God said you shall not eat from any tree of the garden-”) I can easily imagine a conversation with a lone Eve where he addresses her this way. If Adam was present, why does God tell him, “Because you listened to the voice of your wife and ate from the tree…” If he was there to hear the serpent, wouldn’t he have been listening to his voice? Likewise, he defends himself by saying “the woman gave me from the tree”, and the story describes her giving it rather than his taking it from the tree. In any case, it all starts with “The serpent said to the woman…” There are many suggestions that Adam is not present, and we’d need a Hebrew scholar to settle the one that might.

“Crumb sticks to his vow of straight illustration, refusing to explore the reasons for Adam’s acquiescence despite his absence from the serpent’s exchange with Eve in this account.”

True, he could have shown Eve caressing and tempting him, although that would have been more in line with later portrayals. Instead the panel is as direct as the line. What I like about it is that the ease with which Adam breaks the prohibition (“Oh, OK”) leaves Adam looking rather childlike, which I think is appropriate. It’s like two kids in the backyard; you run to answer the phone and when you get back they’re playing with a broken bottle.

Robert Crumb’s The Book of Genesis: A Reply to Alan Choate

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This is a reply to some of Alan Choate’s comments on my original article on The Book of Genesis (see comments 52 to 58). Rest assured, this won’t disrupt the regular programming on HU.

Firstly, Alan, thanks for putting all these thoughts down. Given their length, you might have been better served by a proper blog entry rebutting my article but we’ll have to make do with what we have. My first instinct was to let your comments stand as a useful antidote to the ambivalence or sheer negativity you detect in my article. But allow me to take on a few of them if in haste:

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