Transrendering Biblical Bodies

Abstract

This essay compares and contrasts The Action Bible by Sergio Cariello and Doug Mauss, and Genesis Illustrated by R. Crumb, focusing foremost on the ways that each work handles gender and sexuality, particularly vis-a-vis Roland Barthes’s concepts of readerly and writerly texts. The essay argues that the best of comic and graphic art productions of biblical literature does not attempt to replicate the work. Instead, by virtue of the inherently “guttural” language of the comics medium (i.e., speaking between the panels and enlisting readers in the process of writing the story), these works highlight the Bible’s own fragmentary nature, and thus leave open the possibility of a more “writerly” engagement with the Biblical text and sacred.