Comic God and His Sons
Finally, the day has come…
Many have always imagined the Father, God, as a masculine man with long white beard, who had tender looking feverish eyes. Robert Dennis Crumb (official website), who is “an American artist and illustrator recognized for the distinctive style of his drawings and his critical, satirical, subversive view of the American mainstream,” is no exception.
His recent The Book of Genesis that is coming out of W. W. Norton & Company depicts Mr. God as an old man, as The New York Times Book Review observes, who “appears, alongside the opening words of Genesis, spinning substance from a void that resembles a cosmic basketball in his enormous, hairy, veiny hands. He is a profoundly — almost grotesquely — human-looking deity, very much the sort of being in whose image vulgar humankind could realistically come forth. His nose has the elongation of age (and an implied proto-Jewishness), and it is dotted with deep pores. His brow is furrowed in a permanent scowl, unchanged throughout the book. (In one of the chapters about Noah, Crumb has God scowling even as he pets a goat.) He wears a long white robe and, over it, a longer white robe of billowing, gentle tresses that flow from his scalp and his face to what would presumably be his feet. However much Crumb may think of his God as a retired ex-Marine, this man-God, in his haggard grandeur, brings to mind the work of two other artists relevant both to Genesis and to Crumb: the self-portrait sketches of Leonardo, who also depicted the Creation; and the early illustrations of St. Nicholas, the God-man of the modern era, as he was conceived by the 19th-century cartoonist Thomas Nast, whose hatch-work drawing style and piercing insolence have been major influences on Crumb.”
It looks like we are making progress about talking and re-imagining holy books and the deities of religions. Hopefully, the Muslim world will reach to a point, where they can laugh at caricatures of Prophet Mohammad one day.
Another thing about personifying God as a down-to-earth man also has the effect of normalizing the sublime. That just reminds me of a news that I have recently read (here and here) about a court in Texas that used Biblical passages to justify the death sentence of a convict. I remember a great British painter, Richard Dadd, who spent his whole life in asylum after killing his father claiming to follow Osiris’ commands. Some people just don’t know what they hear and where those voices come from… And he said…
PS. The atheists in New York are launching a mega ad campaign to promote atheism and tolerance for atheists in NY. The ads that will take place in MTA and other public places which will have slogans like:
“A million New Yorkers are good without God. Are you?”
The ads are “not poking fun at religion and not being outright nasty,” said spokesman Michael De Dora Jr. The intent of the campaign is to get people talking and to support those who don’t believe in God. People “don’t need religion to be good and productive members of society,” and nonbelievers “add to cultural life of New York,” said De Dora.
And he said…
