All 50 chapters are present and correct, and, apart from some discreet nudity when there's begetting to be done, there's nothing to disqualify this from being sold in the staidest Christian bookstore. The text, heavily reliant on a recent translation by Robert Alter, reads like the King James partially revised, in haste, by a primary school teacher. Crumb is a non-believer but frowns on the liberties taken by some other graphic adapters of the scriptures. "This is a straight illustration job," he states, "with no intent to ridicule or make visual jokes." Intentional humour is indeed scarce, although the bit in Chapter 28 where God and the messengers of Abraham float down a heavenly ramp has a Teletubbyish daftness that made me smile.

If the book does not intend to ridicule, what exactly is its intent? Hard to imagine. Crumb's lack of religious fervour means the images lack the weird mystery that suffuses the visions of, say, William Blake or David Tibet. But, with his gifts for satire and grotesque playfulness locked away, Crumb merely manages to depict the soap-opera antics of primitive Israelites in a manner that neither illuminates nor nuances them. His drawing style here - unexaggerated, painstakingly cross-hatched - is the same as he's used for other "serious" works in the past, such as his adaptations of Boswell's journals, Kafka's life story, Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis, or the biographies of various American blues singers he adores. The difference is that there's no one, in the narrative of Genesis, through whom Crumb can vicariously live.

Of course there is some fine artwork. In a project encompassing one and a half thousand panels, there ought to be. The evocation of human wickedness that precedes God's decision to flood the world has a nauseous pall of Bosnian war crimes about it. Noah's construction of the ark is masterfully handled. The genealogy pages swarm with tiny yet distinctly characterful portraits of semitic faces. Abram's haunted sleep when the Lord tells him his seed will be scattered for 400 years is powerfully imbued with preternatural dread. Too much of the book, however, differs too little in conception from the many other graphic Old Testament stories that have been produced by inferior artists. In his foreword, Crumb thanks a pal for supplying him with source material in the form of "hundreds of photos from Hollywood biblical epics". Contempt for the mainstream entertainment industry used to be one of Crumb's strongest instincts, so it's sad to think of him earnestly studying kitsch Hollywood movies for inspiration.