R. Crumb, the underground cartoonist, has illustrated Genesis, the first book of the Bible.

It starts out with brass-band grandeur: the Creation. "When God began to create heaven and earth..." Not just something out of nothing, but everything out of nothing.

"And God said, 'Let there be light.' "

The words come from both the King James Version and a recent translation by Robert Alter. The pictures come from Crumb's pen, the same sort of art pen that he's done all of his life's work with — all of it, no pastels, watercolors, pencil, just this pen scritching away for half a century in a fury of crosshatching and black-and-white starkness.

Crumb became a mainstay of the comic world in the 1960s, when his "Keep on Truckin' " sequence ended up on T-shirts and vans all over America. His work appeared in '60s underground comics such as Zap or Despair, and has since been anthologized. His stranger-than-fiction biography became widely known with the release of the 1994 documentary "Crumb," and he has remained prolific.

God said ... R. Crumb? Here they are, together at last on the first page of this book, Crumb drawing God as if he were a madman inventor, beard and hair down to his ankles, and the whites of his eyes showing over the tops of his irises and his hairy, thick-fingered hands grasping what looks like a combination of a circle saw and a black hole, "without form, and void."

Religion has never been far from Crumb's mind, thanks in part to a troubled Catholic boyhood.

But God said R. Crumb should illustrate Genesis?

It's not as long a reach as you might think. I'm guessing there will be much celebration of the outrageous liberality, the thrilling perversity of giving Crumb the job, but in fact, after some reading you see that he's perfect for it, that there's a stupendous amount of squalid human failing of the sort that Crumb has always mined for his comedy.

The big difference between this book and Crumb's other work is that there's no comedy, except on the dust jacket, which lures potential buyers with an ironic: "Adult Supervision Recommended for Minors," and "The first book of the Bible graphically depicted! NOTHING LEFT OUT!" That's Crumb's sense of humor, and it's the last you'll see of it. He tells the story the way it's always been told.

"And God said, 'Let the earth bring forth living creatures of each kind, cattle and crawling things and wild beasts,' " and so on through the creation of Adam and Eve, and then the forbidden fruit, the expulsion from the Garden, Cain slaying Abel, mankind condemned to feed itself by work, "the sweat of your brow," the end of the free-lunch program that was Eden.

There's so much more. "And to Enoch was born Irad, and Irad begot Mehuael, and Mehuael begot Methusael, and Methusael begot Lamech. And Lamech took unto him two wives; the name of one was Adah, and the name of ..."

As the cover says, nothing is left out. This is tough stuff, too. "The Lord saw that the wickedness of the human creature was great on the earth, and that every scheme of his heart's devising was only perpetually evil."

You see a lot of white over God's irises now, and he decides to kill everybody and everything. Except for Noah, for some unexplained reason.

The God of Genesis beholds the depravity of his children, even his greatest servants. Abraham gives his wife, Sarah, over to the Pharoah. Jacob cheats his brother, Esau. Genesis doesn't need an R. Crumb to provide perversity and failure. It's got enough all by itself.

This is one reason that Crumb could play it straight with his art. No irony, no joking around here. Just one pen-and-ink panel after another until Joseph — he of the coat of many colors — dies and the book ends.

How strange it all is, how ordinary. How biblical, how Crumb.