Few Biblical scholars would have made R. Crumb -- the counterculture cartoonist famous for creating Fritz the Cat -- their no. 1 choice for reinterpreting the first book of the Pentateuch. And few among Crumb's cult following would have elected that he spend four of his creative years drawing pictures to go with Sarah Palin's favorite bedside reading. Yet the weird, obsessive, oversexed artist's pictorial interpretation of Genesis, which came out Oct. 19, has shot up best-seller lists: as of this writing, it's no. 1 on the New York Times graphic novel bestseller list and on Amazon.com's Christian books list, which is something of an acheivement.

Who's buying it? There's pent-up demand among his core fans (his last book came out five years ago), but his editor at W.W. Norton, Robert Weil, thinks this book is reaching beyond Crumb's base. One sign he's right is that it's not just selling in comic book stores. Bookscan reported sales in regular bookstores increased the second week. Amazon says most of its buyers are coming from the West Coast, which is not as surprising as the cautious promotion the book got on religious blogs.

It's not as if Crumb is the first to adapt the Bible in this way. There have long been comic-book versions of the Bible for children. Penthouse once serialized a graphic version of Genesis, which formed the basis for the book Bible: Eden, by Scott Hampton and Keith Giffen. There's a Manga Bible and one illustrated by renowned Mad magazine cartoonists Basil Wolverton. But perhaps because of the strange alchemy of the pairing, Crumb's Genesis has attracted more mainstream media attention than most graphic novels or reissued books of the Bible normally do, with an excerpt in the New Yorker and reviews in many daily papers and weekly magazines. The official religious press took little notice, although it did get a gushy review in the Jewish Daily Forward.