Robert Dennis Crumb, lanky, gray-bearded and a new granddad, is the former banjo player for the Cheap Suit Serenaders and a seminal figure in popular culture for his contributions to the art form of comics. Richmond is one of just six U.S. cities Crumb is visiting to promote his latest release, The Book of Genesis, and that might’ve accounted for the huge crowd at last night's event, sponsored by the University of Richmond’s Modlin Center for the Arts. He sat down in the splendiferous and packed Carpenter Theatre for an intimate (if sometimes difficult to hear) conversation with New Yorker art editor Françoise Mouly. (By the way, if you missed last night's event, you can go to The Belvidere restaurant and see examples of Crumb's art, on display through month’s end.)

Mouly is a longtime friend (she even acknowledged taking Aline’s exercise class in the small French town where Crumb resides) and an expert in the subject who came to New York from Paris and grew up in the comics business. She founded the groundbreaking comics anthology RAW, married Art Spiegelman (of Maus fame) and now works at the New Yorker. 

Mouly punctuated the conversation with big-screen images from Crumb’s current book and his past work (including iterations of Fritz the Cat by other artists, some of which Crumb claimed he’d never seen before).

Crumb on Fritz the Cat: “I tried to kill off that character, see? He was killed by an enraged female ostrich.”

On the reaction of Janis Joplin to underground-comix showcases: “She said it was just sick and twisted, and not funny.”

About his move to France, coming around the time of the Crumb documentary: “That was all Aline’s idea. She was precognitive about all that was going to happen with that documentary. She took us to France where we could keep working.”

While Crumb has been compared to Brueghel and Goya, the extreme persepctives in some of his work have led to occasional denunciations of him as a woman-hating racist. During the time when his work was emerging into the national consciousness, he and the U.S. were simultaneously going through a tumultuous life-change.

“I have issues,” he chuckled. “All this stuff came pouring out of me, like diarrhea.” Now, as some late-life artists do, he’s turned to the Bible, even though he doesn’t believe it to be the revealed word of the Divine. His early background in the Catholic church and his reaction to that upbringing were influential in his art.

God, Jesus and the Garden of Eden appeared in other places in Crumb’s antic body of work. At first, he thought of making a parody, showing a notebook frame of serpent looking like a demonic Geico gecko, telling Eve about the apple, “So don’t eat it!” But Crumb wasn’t far into the project when he realized he didn’t need to make commentary.

Aline found a secluded cabin in the hills where her husband could work in solitude. “She’d bring me groceries on the weekends,” he said. There, like some hermit or anchorite, he made his Genesis. “I should’ve done it with a brush, now that I think of it,” he reflected. “Not pen and ink. All that cross-hatching, geez," and he wearily shook his head, “that was nuts.”

For visual clues, he didn’t go back to Medieval or Renaissance paintings but instead focused on epic biblical movies like D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance and  Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ.

Mouly presented Crumb with enraged letters from New Yorker readers reacting to an excerpt of his Genesis. Some disputed his use of certain phrases, although he was advised by a friend who knows Hebrew.

“There is no verbatim version of the Bible,” he declared. “It’s been translated so many times, there are so many ways to translate some of these words. And people kill each other over this.”

As for his somewhat traditional portrayal of God as a man, Crumb gave a you-can’t-win shrug. “Well, it says, 'He' did that and 'He' did this.”

Crumb isn’t continuing with another Bible book. “Somebody else can do Exodus and Deuteronomy and Leviticus,” he said. There may be another collaboration with Aline; there’ll be far less cross-hatching, though.

He then departed with another sprawling pratfall.