Kafkaesque: Fourteen Stories
Peter Kuper
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Kafkaesque: Fourteen Stories
Peter Kuper
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Kafka...has been given the graphic treatment in Kafkaesque: Fourteen Stories — this time by the illustrator Peter Kuper, whose menacing portraits fit so well with Kafka’s mood.
(Kuper) collects 14 short stories adapted into comic form, some of which were previously collected in 1995’s Give it Up!.
Eisner-winning Kuper’s career of 'translating Kafka into comics' began in 1995, when his initial collection of nine shorts hit shelves, with Give It Up! He adds another five here, scrambles the previous order, and includes his 'Kuperesque' foreword, emphasizing how, since Kafka’s death at 40, in 1924, 'our world increasingly reflects the adjective ‘Kafkaesque’'—nightmarish, oppressive, surreal.
Eisner-winner Kuper brilliantly accentuates both the absurd and menacing qualities of Kafka’s short stories in this graphic collection. Using a scratchboard technique to mimic the woodcut style of German expressionism, Kuper emphasizes the ways Kafka addressed social injustices rather than simply his trademark existential paranoia.
This adaptation’s source material runs from several dozen pages to just a handful of lines, and Kuper proves adept at using the synergy between text and image to both expand Kafka’s ideas and trim his word counts. In The Trees, Kuper lays the sparse text over a tableau of homelessness, giving additional poignancy to the story’s suggestion of life’s impermanence, and his depiction of the frustrated supplicant in Before the Law brings the story into a modern, racial context.