The Comics Journal #301 by Gary Groth

The Comics Journal #301 Reviews

• 
  Sverre

  == A massive volume of R Crumb and countercultural graphic art history ==
  
  I bought this massive volume of 622 pages solely for one reason: The R Crumb interview and numerous reviews of his ‘Book of Genesis Illustrated’ which together comprise one third of this ‘Comics Journal 301’ collection of graphic arts miscellanea.
  
  This is a treasure of information for those who are interested in Crumb’s adaptation of Genesis. I enjoyed the interview. Crumb comes across as the sincere light-hearted &/ light-headed former hippie which he still is, or is it simply that he is so relieved that his four year ordeal of producing the two hundred pages for ‘Genesis’ is behind him? So much of his past work can be characterized as topically cynical, sarcastic, scatterbrained, depressing, deviant and shocking that it seemed almost impossible to imagine him sticking to the serious and sacred ethos of a biblical narrative. But he surprised most of his fans—and probably even himself and his supportive wife Aline—by sticking literally to the script and depicting the highlights and low lives of the whole cast of characters, especially the Almighty Himself. In the interview Crumb reveals how he had to make some compromises both textually and visually when faced with quandaries which would tax the sensibility of most logicians. The outcome can be regarded as a victory for the modern genre of sequential graphic expression.
  
  The book’s reviews of Crumb’s illustrated Genesis are mixed, as they have been by critics and commentators on the whole. The most long-winded, by Rick Marschall, a Christian of considerable scholarly renown who declares himself to be unequivocally a fundamentalist, evangelical and Pentecostalist, is devastating on so many fronts: the theological, the cultural, the artistic, the historical, the ethical, etc. He states “I don’t believe there can be a full assessment of Crumb’s book without an acknowledgement that he castrated nearly everything that has made The Book of Genesis a vital story for 6,000 years.” Other reviewers range from the overwhelmingly ecstatic about ‘Genesis’ for its art. Some would have liked a more energetic, suspenseful and emotive product which would have been less slavish in its artistic interpretations of the biblical text. I found the divergence of opinion fascinating.
  
  The rest of the book contains other art and articles of interest to fans of the comic art medium including seventy colored pages of the adventures of Gerald McBoing Boing by Bill Hurtz, Frank Smith and others. The book concludes with an introspective section on Crumb entitled ‘Three Questions Answered About Robert Crumb’ in which Tom Crippen tackles Crumb’s most politically and racially incorrect material, the influence of the drug 60s and 70s psychedelic culture on his work and whether he could have survived as the controversial artist he was had he lived during the premodern era. This book has lots of material for those interested in Crumb and the history of cartooning, comic book art and the counter culture.
  
• 
  Dominick

  Almost too much of a good thing. Seriously, a 600+ page magazine? Nevertheless, it was meaty and diverse, with interesting/insightful items (the Crumb coverage--except for Kenneth Smith's entirely typical maundering--the Sacco piece, the Sim piece etc.) far outweighing the ones that seemed a bit half-baked (e.g. the manga piece). Also, the Gerald McBoing-Boing comics reprints were interesting to see, though they hardly qualify as top-tier classics. Well worth the investment for anyone seriously interested in comics.
• 
  Sridhar Reddy

  Tim Krieder's piece on the legacies of Dave Sim and "Cerebus the Aardvark" is one of the finest works of literary criticism I've read in a long while. On one end academic and verbose, and the other end adolescent and casual, it's a fine blend of practicality and theoretical postulations. A fine read, worth the price of the volume alone. The articles on Crumb and the State of Comics are universally excellent as well.