There’s breaking news in Todd Hignite’s In the Studio: Visits with Contemporary Cartoonists (Yale University Press, 320 pages, $29.95, ISBN 978-0300110166). The news appears in the first chapter, dedicated to Robert Crumb (does anyone call him “R .” anymore?) and concerns Crumb’s forthcoming comic book version of Book of Genesis, to be published by Norton.

Hignite’s interview took place June 28th, 2005 at Crumb’s studio in a village in rural Southeastern France (the name of the village is buried in the book but generally Crumb doesn’t like journalists to publicize it). Crumb announces to interviewer Hignite that he plans to do a literal version of the book, and Hignite reprints some sketches of the volume, the world’s first look at Crumb’s Genesis.

At that time, Crumb had only done the first four pages of the book (!), and was still breaking it down. But he predicted that drawing the Book of Genesis would take years, and that he intended to do a literal version, not clean it up for modern readers. For example, Genesis repeats itself by offering two different versions of the Creation story, so Crumb will dutifully follow suit. As he talks about the Bible, Crumb sounds like a thoughtful scholar weighing this or that influence on elements of Genesis, not the trend-setting cartoonist of the late 1960s who showed nuns chopping off penises.

I’d heard through the grapevine that Crumb had gone into seclusion to finish Genesis, and it is a now well known fact that Crumb doesn’t like giving interviews (the last formal interview he did was way back in 1999 for the L. A. Weekly, and appears at the end of my anthology, Robert Crumb: Conversations), but the next thing I know he is all over NPR and the British newspapers publicizing his new book, The Sweeter Side of R. Crumb in conjunction with his wife Aline’s new book, Need More Love: A Graphic Memoir, both from M Q Publications. Now comes this important and enjoyable book, which also contains interviews with Art Spiegelman, Chris Ware, Gary Panter, Charles Burns, Daniel Clowes, Seth, Ivan Brunetti, and Jaime Hernandez. The physical book itself honors the artists and their art, coming on thick glossy paper filled with gorgeous illustrations, not only of the work of the artists themselves but of the copious illustrators and the “detritus” of the culture who influenced them.

Todd Hignite is the editor of the high quality, beautifully designed journal Comic Art, which takes the world of comic strips seriously and spans all eras of the art form. Be it the Mexican poster art of Ernesto Cabral, the history and influence of Kerry Drake, of the brief benighted career of underground cartoonist Rory Hayes, Comic Art treats them as if they were all major contributions to the culture, not disreputable crude throwaway artifacts. If it weren’t for the copious and delightful illustrations you’d think you were reading The Journal of American Literature. Some of the interviews printed in In the Studio first appeared in Comic Art. Every single one of them is fascinating (though I’d like to particularly recommend Burns and Spigelman for special attention because they are also, like Crumb, long students of the comic book). Though Hignite doesn’t spur his cartoonists to go into too much detail about their creative process, despite the book’s title, his interviews nevertheless offer expansive background on the comics and art that influenced them.

In his interview, Crumb doesn’t go into much detail as to why he is pursing Genesis, but Crumb did admit in his Coffee Table Book that he believes in everything, be it UFOs or Big Foot, and an interest in the first book of the Bible may be a return to his Catholic roots, which caused him much fretfulness when he was a kid debating ethical situations with his brother and friends.

The interview is very interesting in pointing out a key difference between Crumb and other cartoonists, especially those drawn to superhero stories. Friends of his are superhero fans and not as much into the humor comics that he liked as a kid. “It’s almost a different kid of nervous system that dictates it, a neurological difference. The kind of kids who liked superheroes wanted to be superheroes or emulate that, see themselves in that role or something. Some kind of Boy Scout thing.” Superhero buffs are much more prevalent than the funny animal fans, and so even within the outsider status of comic book fandom Crumb is doubly an outsider. The superhero fans are probably much more extroverted, while the funny animal fans are perhaps more introverted and yet paradoxically more literary as well as more attuned to comic book heritage. Crumb’s appreciation for the intricacies of Carl Barks’s Donald Duck comics shows an awareness of beauty within disposable art, and Crumb’s appreciation of it is itself kind of beautiful.

Though Crumb can repeat himself in his interviews and comics, Hignite manages that most remarkable thing, getting the venerable artist to speak eloquently with fresh ideas and observations.

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