Paris Review Interviews R. Crumb

Enjoy.

From the piece...

INTERVIEWER

Genesis is obviously a graphic novel, but the cover is like a fifties comic-book cover.

CRUMB

It’s a Classics Illustrated! I had to argue with them to let me call it “illustrated.” They wanted to call it The Book of Genesis According to R. Crumb but I preferred “illustrated by.” I wanted a humbler position. It’s an illustration job, OK? Illustration has a bad name in modern culture because for decades artists who were “mere illustrators” were considered inferior to fine artists. Being an illustrator was looked down upon. It meant you were not really a creative person, you just had the technical skills that you were lending to someone else’s ideas. It’s all bullshit though—the fine-art world, the myth of the creative genius artist.

I made the drawings nice, and the people who like that kind of thing, the aesthetics, are impressed, but the most significant thing is actually illustrating everything that’s in there. That’s the most significant contribution I made. It brings everything out. Comic books are good for that. Many of the educational experiences I’ve had about important things, I got from comic books. A Japanese artist did a comic book about his childhood growing up in militaristic Japan and about the dropping of the bomb. It’s called Gen of Hiroshima. It’s so powerful and vivid. Also Joe Sacco’s book Palestine and his book about Bosnia, or Spiegelman’s Maus, a powerful story of the Holocaust. Those are some of the strongest revelations of what happened.

INTERVIEWER

How did you get your hands on the research material for Genesis from a medieval village in Southern France?

CRUMB

Hey, come on, this is the electronic age! You can get anything, anywhere! A friend got me the DVD of The Ten Commandments and some other biblical epics and he freeze-framed them and he took hundreds of photos. I developed a great respect for Cecil B. DeMille. When you freeze-frame it and look at it closely, every detail is really interesting. You’ve got these donkeys pulling primitive carts with big urns all tied up with ropes, and I used all of that. All the statuary, the rows of the lions as you come out of the city of the pharaoh. It’s beautifully made and all the craft and attention to detail, it was really quite remarkable.

INTERVIEWER

And did you get history books about the beginnings of Christianity?

CRUMB

You have to go way back, to the beginning of Mesopotamian civilization, because the stories of Abraham and all that—that’s like 2000 b.c. It’s hard to find Mesopotamian visual imagery that goes that far back. How did people dress? Did they have doors? Did they have a door on hinges, or what? The Bible says, Lot closed the door and wouldn’t let the men come in, but what’s the door made of?