Someone should have told Robert Crumb that it’s okay to use poetic license when adapting a text from one medium to another.

His release of The Book of Genesis Illustrated by R. Crumb late last year is the result of an aborted attempt to satirize the Bible and turns out to be, as he claims, a ‘literal interpretation’ and ‘straight illustration job’ of all 50 chapters, word for word, found in the Book of Genesis.

Crumb shifted gears and decided to take a serious approach after realizing it would be too difficult to sustain a satire on such a big project.

It was the right choice to move away from satire, but it’s hard to read through Genesis Illustrated without questioning if Crumb’s talent went to waste on this project, which is such a dramatic departure from his usual style.

One of the biggest problems with the book is that the artwork, which shows a lot of skill throughout, seems uninspired and often competes with textual narration jam-packed into every panel of the book.

Traditionally, an illustrated book will use one image per page in order to capture a tone that compliments a portion of text. Crumb’s choice to use a format more common to sequential art narratives is strange considering the amount of text he wants to include.

While he could have added panels free of text to improve the pacing, or employed more creative story-telling techniques—like those found in film and many modern graphic novels, to break up the monotony of so much text—it seems that Crumb hasn’t developed a knack for rendering longer narratives.

Also, his idea of a ‘literal interpretation’ is suspect given that he uses freeze frames taken from Hollywood biblical epics captured on a friend’s DVD player as reference for the artwork. Since when is Hollywood the standard for Biblical imagery? And where does it say that God should look like a grumpy old man with an overgrown beard, or that Adam should resemble a stocky version of Fabio?

For these reasons the chapters on Creation are the most disappointing. I’d suggest skipping this part of the book and turning to Milton’s poem if you want to experience an artist’s imagination put to better use.

To be fair things begin to pick up in terms of pacing around the time that Jacob and Essau enter the story. This is possibly because the latter chapters in Genesis, especially the Joseph story, are more suited to sequential art narrative, having their roots in a literary as opposed to oral tradition, and perhaps Crumb was more interested by the complex family dynamics found in this part of the text.

If that’s the case, it shows in the carefully nuanced renderings of the Biblical characters’ faces. Crumb is great at portraying some of the less flattering human emotions such as fear, anger, and jealousy that abound in the latter half of his book.

You can see the tensions building in Joseph, for example, as he reunites with his brothers after spending so much time in Egypt. Finally there is a sense that Crumb is actively interpreting and contributing something original to the text.

The artwork also grows on you the more you look at it. The entire book is rendered in pen and ink with countless hatch marks to create tones, giving the images a slightly antiquated look ideal for the Bible. Even the lettering is done by hand, which avoids the mechanical look of digital type.

It’s clear that Crumb put a lot of work into this project; it’s just a shame he felt he had to stick to a literal interpretation, whatever that means.