From Cuneiform to Comic: Redrawing Sarah in R. Crumb’s The Book of Genesis Illustrated

Abstract

This article studies Robert Crumb’s The Book of Genesis Illustrated ( 2009 ), an unabridged graphic novel of the first book of the Hebrew Bible that rankled critics anticipating that Crumb would invest the book’s ancient narratives with new, subversive meanings. For these detractors, Crumb’s Genesis Illustrated lacks the transgressive, rebellious qualities of his earlier comics. Contrary to this view, this essay uses Crumb’s storytelling involving Sarah to demonstrate how Crumb noticeably subverts Genesis’s androcentrism by adopting a feminist hermeneutics of suspicion that reveals a waning matriarchal priestess tradition implicit in the text and helps explain the confounding wife-sister and barren-mother motifs in Sarah’s story.