Underground comics legend R. Crumb recently unveiled his latest project: The Book of Genesis Illustrated. “(It’s about) ruling elites victimizing people in sadistic ways, which is human beings at their nastiest,” Crumb said at a press conference in Paris. The book illustrates all 50 chapters of Genesis, relying both on literary and religion scholar Robert Alter’s translation and the King James Version of the Bible. The openly agnostic Crumb illustrated the good with the explicit, prompting criticism from several groups. “If people of faith say what I’ve done is blasphemous or profane, I’d shrug my shoulders and say, ‘I just illustrated what is there,”‘ Crumb tells USA Today. He tells NPR: “The idea that people for a couple thousand years have taken this so seriously seems completely insane and crazy, totally nuts. But the human race is crazy if nothing else.”
