Robert Crumb, founder of the alternative comics movement and long-time scourge of the establishment, has gone for the Big One. The hypocritical world he has satirised so mercilessly in his scathing, drug-induced tableaux since the 1960s has perplexed him so utterly that he has gone right back to the beginning in search, perhaps, of truer understanding. Crumb’s new book, The Book of Genesis Illustrated by R. Crumb, is exactly as it says on its lurid cover: a Biblical account of the creation of mankind.

Only here is the surprise: it is told absolutely straight. The text is mostly taken from the King James Bible and the drawings, among the most meticulous of Crumb’s rambunctious career as an illustrator, are, considering the subject, restrained. There is sex and violence – Crumb and the Bible have common interest in the subjects – but they are toned down. The cover sports a parental advisory warning (“Adult supervision recommended for minors”), but then the first book of the Bible is no wholesome fairytale. This is a faithful and, dare one say it, respectful account; warts and all, but no gratuitous blemishes.

In his only European press conference to promote the book at Paris’s Pompidou Centre earlier this week, the near-reclusive Crumb found himself in the unusual position of being more extreme with his words than with his drawings. He was asked by an earnest journalist if drawing the book had given him a “glimmer of God”, and he was quick to set the record straight: “It had the opposite effect on me,” he said. “I saw what a primitive, backward morality I had to deal with. It was a good way of exorcising the power of the Bible.”

This was more like it: bad boy slams Good Book. But why did he do it in the first place? This is the question that resounds among Crumb aficionados, accustomed as they are to his grotesque, sexually charged and politically incorrect fables that challenge even the most liberal of sensibilities, but not quite ready for religious epiphany. What on earth could have turned Crumb’s attention towards God?

His replies to this question were not entirely convincing. An “agent guy” had offered him a lot of money, he said; he had an interest in the ancient myths of civilisation; he was wandering around the British Museum and was taken by the Assyrian and Babylonian reliefs. Well, yes, fairly good reasons, all of them. But to take on the whole of Genesis? Every word, frame-by-frame? It took him four years.

“It nearly killed me,” he said. “It ruined my health, I am in recovery.” Crumb, 66, tall and frail in a quirkily fitting suit and sandals (but no sword), said he began to regret taking on the task after he had completed just 30 pages. Asked if he planned to do any follow-up, he replied: “I am completely sick of the Bible. I began to hate it as I worked on it. I’ve had my fill. The idea that millions of people have taken it so seriously – it is totally nuts. The human race is crazy.”

We are not dealing with a convert, then. But where did the zeal come from? Surely, something more powerful motivated him? A hint came when he was asked why he had decided to draw God in traditional style, with long hair, flowing beard and plenty of attitude: “I had a very powerful dream in the year 2000 when I saw God, and that’s what He looked like.”

The press pounced. What kind of vision was it? “The type of image you could only look at for a split-second.” What kind of dream? Did it have a narrative? Was there a revelation? “All of that.” For once, Crumb’s cards were close to his chest.

Perhaps Crumb’s evanescent God told him to play a more responsible role in community affairs. After all those years of anarchic hell-raising, Crumb admitted he had voted for the first time in his life, for Barack Obama, in last year’s election. “I perceived him as a fundamentally decent, impeccable person. Ninety-nine per cent of them are scoundrels. I thought it was worth voting for him.”

These days Crumb lives with his family in the south of France, having become disillusioned with several aspects of the American way of life – and even there he has shown improbable signs of public-spiritedness, designing a poster to protest against the building of a new supermarket. “They don’t understand what they will lose. But I was resented. They hated me for it. They want all that modern shit.”

Perhaps his search for transcendent values is related to a sense of existential crisis: long regarded as an outsider, Crumb is beginning to be taken seriously in the fine art world, a fact he finds both lucrative and ridiculous at the same time. “They are trying to embrace me, but [my work] seems out of place on a wall. It is not painting, it is not decoration.”

But art, he said, was currently “way out there in the twilight zone. It is bankrupt, and they have to put something on their walls. So they are taking comics seriously. But the danger is that comics will get pretentious.” He said he was offered £3m for a work by a collector recently. Why not? “Cy Twombly can get $5m for a scribble he did in 10 minutes! But [the collector] lost his shit in the economic collapse, so the deal fell through.”

The most comic event of the press conference was its end, as Crumb kept preparing to leave, while a couple of hundred (mostly French) cultural journalists pounded him with questions. Crumb was relatively gracious, but puzzled by the fuss. “People are still killing each other over the precise meaning of this text. I mean we are all here for this f**king BIBLE! I had no idea it was going to stir up so much talk and attention.”

‘The Book of Genesis Illustrated by R. Crumb’ is published by Jonathan Cape on October 19

peter.aspden@ft.com
More columns at www.ft.com/aspden