Every day throughout the month of December, Attentiondeficitdisorderly will spotlight one of the best comics of 2010 — or in this case, a comic from 2009 I did not read until 2010. Today’s comic is The Book of Genesis Illustrated by R. Crumb, published by W.W. Norton — it’s about God, but it’s really about watching one of our greatest artists draw humans.

Captivating, illuminating, at times laugh-out-loud funny, and almost belief-beggaringly gorgeous, R. Crumb’s ambitious adaptation of the Bible’s first and foundational book hit pretty much every note I wanted to hear from such a project.

For starters, as a showcase of Crumb’s drawing chops–masterful even in his old(er) age–it’s tough to top. I’m aware of the criticism that it could have been subtitled Beards on Parade, and I reject that criticism, or rather I invert it: the beard parades were among the best parts! And they’re perhaps the most emblematic sections of the entire book, in that they boil Crumb’s project down to its essence. Genesis’ long multigenerational tale of the patriarchs of the Israelites and their large extended families necessarily includes a lot of hirsute dudes in Cecil B. DeMillian garb, and at times even substitutes litanies of their names for any actual story or plot. So what you get during the long lists of sons or what the back cover jocularly refers to as “The ‘Begots’” is a bit like folding one of Crumb’s sketchbooks into a comic. As the generations rattle by, Crumb draws scene after one-panel scene depicting some family activity at random: A mother nurses and laughs as her other son runs past playing; another mother breaks up a fight between two kids; people dance and drink at a party. At other times he’ll simply insert postage-stamp panel portraits of each person, inventing them out of whole cloth, and the act of reading becomes a master class in how many variations of the human face can be captured by one artist. In each case, through Crumb’s attention to detail, mastery of crosshatching and stippling, and rock-solid carved-from-clay character construction, an entire life, and the world that surrounds it, is suggested in the space of a panel.

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Every day throughout the month of December, Attentiondeficitdisorderly will spotlight one of the best comics of 2010 — or in this case, a comic from 2009 I did not read until 2010. Today’s comic is GoGo Monster by Taiyo Matsumoto, published by Viz — kids in a world all their own, with all the terror and possibility that entails.

Planes fly low overhead, their departure and destination unknown. A rabbit run is the only world its furry inhabitants ever know, and one of them disappears without any of its fellows or minders able to say how or to where. I have no idea if “perspective” has the dual meaning in Japanese that it does in English, but Matsumoto frequently skews and warps it so that the school leans in on its inhabitants. One pivotal character literally sees the world from inside a cardboard box. Most importantly, except for one key sequence I won’t spoil here, our heroes never leave the school grounds, and on the one occasion that parents visit, they are viewed only from a distance.

In short (haha, yeah), Asahi Elementary is the world for Yuki, who is either psychically sensitive or psychologically impaired; and for Makoto, the new kid at school who befriends Yuki out of what seems more like a fascinated respect for his indifference to his peers than any kind of Heavenly Creatures-style shared psychosis; and for IQ, the eccentric-genius older kid who says he’s no more capable of taking a test without wearing his customary cardboard box than a normal person would be if forced to wear one. Their problems are solely their own and completely inescapable. If they don’t solve them, they won’t be solved.

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Every day throughout the month of December, Attentiondeficitdisorderly will spotlight one of the best comics of 2010 — or in this case, a comic from 2009 I did not read until 2010. Today’s comic is Footnotes in Gaza by Joe Sacco, published by Metropolitan — the comics journalist’s abyss-gazes-also moment.

[One of the strongest sequences in the book is a] reminiscence by an old woman, recalling how she found her husband in the chaos after the book’s central round-up took place. Two panels show him fleeing for his very life, panicked and paranoid, mouth agape, eyes darting to and fro, a look of raw animal terror on his face–until in the third panel his wife literally catches him as he runs, looking up at him plaintively as he turns toward her mid-stride, the fact that he’s been grabbed by the woman he loves and not by…someone else clearly still not having registered. In that moment I tried to imagine what it would be like for my wife to see that look on my face, the look of all other thought and emotion and sentience out of my eyes, the look of a lifeform’s basic, primordial desire just to survive the next moment.

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