An encouraging religious item of note for all Vermonters: This important spiritual news takes the form of cartoonist R.Crumb’s version of the book of Genesis. Crumb’s website says he has finished the Genesis project including the introduction, back sleeve commentary and a map for the beginning of the 201 page book. Soon to go into production and planned release this Fall. A world without R.Crumb’s Genesis would be depressing and dangerous.

The acclaimed satirist revealed that he had finished the project, which his UK publisher is predicting will “provoke the religious right”. Four years in the making, Crumb worked from the King James Bible and Robert Alters’ translation to reinterpret the Book of Genesis, from the Creation via Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden to Noah boarding his ark.

Back in 2005 in an interview,Crumb, a hero of underground comics, talked about the difficulties of drawing God for the book. “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. God came to me in this dream, only for a split second, but I saw very clearly what he looked like. And I thought, OK, there it is, I’ve got God,” he told interviewer Robert Hughes, Time’s art critic. “He has a white beard but he actually ended up looking more like my father. He has a very masculine face like my father.” He had considered, he said, drawing God as a black woman. “But if you actually read the Old Testament he’s just an old, cranky Jewish patriarch.”

http://www.guardian.co.uk/book…

http://www.crumbproducts.com/