Suddenly, everybody is reading the Bible, and not only to themselves. The Bible Experience started the trend a few years ago. TBE is a set of CDs—publisher Zondervan calls it a “dramatic audio Bible”—that features Denzel Washington, Samuel L. Jackson, and Cuba Gooding Jr., among hundreds more, performing the Christian Scriptures.

Don’t spend much time in a car? More recently, David Plotz, the editor of the online magazine Slate, blogged his thoughts as he worked his way through every jot and tittle of the Old and New Testaments. Last year, Jana Riess, a journalist and editor of religion books, began tweeting the Good Book—compressing each of the Bible’s 1,189 chapters into a 140-character summary, and posting them on Twitter. (From Exodus: “Israel: ‘Remind us again why we didn’t just die in Egypt?’ G faces PR fiasco; issues 40-year desert sentence to all whiners.”)

The technological bent of these projects suggests that the Bible continues to pervade whatever culture it meets, in whatever format becomes available: Riess’s Twitter posts, except for being more entertaining, are not so different from those tiny but complete novelty Bibles that come with a magnifying glass.

However, the Bible does not pervade our culture—not the way it used to. Hand even many churchgoers the King James Version and ask them to find Second Corinthians, and they’re likely to be in trouble. Despite our increasing unfamiliarity with its content, the Bible is constantly being punted between righty and lefty ideologues, atheists and believers, creationists and those who understand Genesis (for starts) as didactic fiction. What we think the Bible says is not half as important to us as what we judge others to think it says.

So estranged have we become from the Bible that Slate’s Plotz, in flacking the book that came from his blog last year, felt compelled to assure an interviewer that “there are...on every page practically…legal principles and moral principles which endure.… Twenty-two hundred years ago or whenever it was written down…people were thinking in profound and sophisticated ways about issues we think about today.”

There is no technological accommodation, at any rate, in R. Crumb’s The Book of Genesis. It is distinctly old-school, an underground comic-book version of the first book of the Bible—from creation to Joseph of the Technicolor Dreamcoat. Crumb founded Zap Comix, home of the priapic Fritz the Cat and the counterculture icon Mr. Natural, in Haight-Ashbery in the late 1960s. His grotesquely deranged cartoon skits depicting incestuous orgies or racist parody were once available only in the Stygian back racks of comic-book stores. They were majorly but somehow merrily transgressive, and insanely funny; you walked away trembling with shame and self-alienation. Now that his panels are shown in galleries and art museums, I can’t imagine the caliber of laughs they get—maybe none.

The news, which broke more than four years ago, that Crumb was inking Genesis spurred hot anticipation. Underground comic fans lusted for new controversial work (Crumb retreated to a small village in France almost two decades ago, and mostly appears nowadays as a bemused husband and father in his occasional cartoons for the New Yorker). Committed Christians, to the degree that they paid attention, feared the worst.

Crumb’s Genesis is remarkable chiefly for the fact that it offends so few, perhaps because it is nothing more than what was promised. Crumb’s pen-and-ink drawings hew closely to the text, which he includes in its entirety, without chapter or verse numbers. He worked in his familiar underground idiom: white starbursts around the head communicate mind-blowing surprise, the thousand-yard stare stands for fear. Every woman is a Crumb goddess: buxom, thick-thighed, breasts and hips barely contained by clothes. The men sprout impossibly dense beards and roiling eyebrows.

The overall effect is one of unctuous realism with a few Cecil B. DeMille touches thrown in, especially when the scene turns to some tribal satrap’s throne room. Crumb doesn’t attempt epic sweep. His style delivers intimate feeling and quiet drama that perfectly suits the material. At times, as in the story of Hagar’s lonely exile from Abraham’s household, it’s every bit as affecting but more profound than the work of second-generation adult graphic novelists like Chris Ware or Daniel Clowes, who specialize in bleak despair.

Sex is depicted graphically, but not gratuitously. The closest thing to a vintage Crumb moment comes when Lot’s daughters get the old man drunk and lay with him—which is precisely what the Bible says happened, and Crumb’s drawing is no more than your mind’s eye is bidden to see by Genesis 19. As Evangelical Bible scholar Ben Witherington wrote on Beliefnet: “the Bible is hardly a G or PG book—it tells it like it is, even when it comes to all our human fallenness.”

The stamp of human failure is imprinted on everyone in Crumb’s book. Examining the drawings alone, you’d be hard pressed to tell the good guys from the bad; all appear equally flawed. Lot is by turns worried, crazed, confused. He’s a pathetic dope when seduced by wine and his daughters. Yet Crumb never prods us to find Lot guilty of anything but selfishness and being a little slow on the uptake, which is mostly what brings the Israelites to grief with God. To be human—to have a physical self—is to sin, Crumb implies. Nor does sin seem to have wasting effects: Lot’s daughters are as hale and hippy after their incest as before.

Not that Crumb is without opinions. He adopts a pet theory to explain the disjointed morality of some passages in Genesis, like Abraham’s inexplicable (to us) decision to pimp his wife Sarah to Pharaoh. In his commentary, which includes “Comments and Observations on the Chapters,” Crumb champions the work of the feminist Bible scholar Savina Teubal, who, according to Crumb, drew from ancient tablets the notion of “sacred marriage, in which any powerful man who wanted to be given a position of leadership had to be ‘invited’ into the bedchamber of the high priestess.”

That’s an interesting take. What’s more interesting, however, is watching Crumb, whose life’s work is filled with hypersexualized giantesses and dominant women, have his imagination sparked by a matriarchal strain in the Bible. We all bring our own obsessions to reading this ur-text of our civilization, and the Bible is commodious enough to house them all.