Genesis Illustrated

Henry Allen: R. Crumb, the underground cartoonist, has illustrated Genesis, the first book of the Bible.

It starts out with brass-band grandeur: the Creation. "When God began to create heaven and earth . . ." Not just something out of nothing, but everything out of nothing.

"And God said, 'Let there be light.' "

The words come from both the King James Version and a recent translation by Robert Alter. The pictures come from Crumb's pen, the same sort of art pen that he's done all of his life's work with — all of it, no pastels, watercolors, pencil, just this pen scritching away for half a century in a fury of crosshatching and black-and-white starkness. He's that geeky kid in the class who drew all the time with the funny-looking pen, a Rapidograph, probably, and the boys wanted him to draw porn, which Robert Crumb did, publishing a lot of it in '60s underground comics such as Zap or Despair.