Still, the Bible? That's a stretch, especially for an artist such as Crumb, who has been accused of trafficking in racist and sexist stereotypes. Certainly, he's licentious, dirty even, his comics littered with big-boned women, busty and curvaceous, dominated by smaller, less-powerful men. But that's the beauty of "The Book of Genesis Illustrated," how perfectly Crumb's style fits the material, which is a narrative (or a set of narratives) about human passion, after all. This is rough stuff, full of lust and jealousy, in which Jacob steals his brother's birthright, and later, his sons kill a town full of men to avenge the defiling of their sister, Dinah. God is here, but he is mercurial, pitiless, willing to wipe out creation with a flood to purge the world of wickedness, yet somehow powerless to stop wickedness from reemerging once the Earth repopulates. Sodom and Gomorrah, Abraham's near-sacrifice of Isaac, even Jacob wrestling with the angel: The point of these episodes is awe, in the most terrifying sense of the word -- awe at a universe that defies our reason and in which we must continually make adjustments to survive
