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.