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.

Click here for a full review and purchasing information.