Product Description

Nine paranoid tales by Franz Kafka are put to bold graphic comics.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #549628 in Books
• Published on: 1995-03
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 64 pages

Amazon.com
Nine paranoid tales by Franz Kafka adapted to stark, black-and-white comics by Peter Kuper, whose illustrations and covers appear regularly in the New York Times, Time and Business Week. More than just straight adaptations, these clever interpretations of Kafka's tales bring out the dark humor latent in Kafka's work, better known for its despair and somberness. Heralded by Rolling Stone, Kuper's art is bold, powerful, and perfectly suited for Kafka.

From Publishers Weekly
Kuper (Stripped: An Autobiography in Comics) has taken on Kafka's eerily engaging short tales and captured both an impressive degree of Kafka's personal brand of existential dread, and his pervasive aura of extreme psychic alienation. In the introduction, Jules Feiffer describes Kuper's adaptations as "riffs, visual improvisations." And, in many ways, Kafka's short works (most are very short; Give It Up is just 11 lines of text) function perfectly within the comics format, allowing Kuper to pace the language of Kafka's imposing visions easily against his own vibrant b&w drawings. Indeed, with slight embellishments from Kuper (for example, he renders the mouse in "A Little Fable" as a mouse/man), Kafka's self-punishing visions provide their own desperate imagery. Kafka's anguished archetypal characters (the murderer and victim of "A Fratricide" or the bullied seaman of "The Helmsman") are easily rendered into visual equivalents and given new life in Kuper's raw, expressionistic graphic style. His treatment of "The Hunger Artist" is faithful, though the condensation perhaps lacks some of the bleakly amusing ironies of the original; and "The Trees" ("For we are like tree trunks in the snow") becomes a too-obvious, though poignant, allegory of urban homelessness and despair.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Comic-strip adaptations of literature are nothing new--remember Classics Illustrated?--but with the recent proliferation of graphic novels aimed at adults, they've acquired a certain legitimacy. For the latest entry in NBM's ComicsLit series, Kuper is a highly appropriate choice for interpreting nine short stories by Franz Kafka. Kuper's scratchboard style, which resembles woodcuts, is reminiscent of the German expressionist artists (Kafka's contemporaries), and his cartoony approach accentuates Kafka's dark humor while it generally avoids the pitfall of depicting Kafka's deadpan narratives too literally. The project doesn't break new ground for Kuper, however, who has previously adapted Upton Sinclair's Jungle and whose autobiographical Stripped included several unsettling dreams that resemble Kafka's waking nightmares. In his introduction, cartoonist-playwright Jules Feiffer compares Kuper's approach to jazz--" visual improvisations on short takes by the old master" --and calls Kuper's American take on alienation noisier and more raucous than Kafka's resignation. Kafka holds particular appeal for alternative comics artists: R. Crumb rendered his biography in comic strips that belong beside Kuper's adaptations on adventurous libraries' shelves. Gordon Flagg

Customer Reviews

Visual improvisations
From the introduction by Jules Feiffer:

"To 'classically illustrate' Melville, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky et al doesn't make them accessible, it makes them mute... add pictures and panels and balloons to the text, and the secret of communion that gives fiction its power is betrayed... Kuper... doesn't do what I hate, he does what I love. Jazz. This book is a series of riffs, visual improvisations on short takes by the old master. It becomes a diverting, even daring, high wire act... and it works. Like Bird doing "Embraceable You", it may not be Gershwin, but it's art. And I, for one, talk back to it."

Peter Kuper never writes text for his for-the-sake-of-argument-let's-call-it comics; if, for some reason, he does use text, he borrows it from Kafka. Give It Up! is a collection of short stories by Kafka adapted by Kuper, prior to his more ambitious attempt with 'The Metamorphosis', published separately; for the most part, the stories in this collection are better. Kuper stretches the bounds of sequential art with these stories, and comes up with stuff that is highly expressive and incredibly communicative, and compliments the old master's text perfectly while also making them entirely new. That much can be seen from the very first story, 'A Little Fable', one of Kafka's most famed creations -

"Alas, the world is growing smaller every day. At the beginning it was so big that I was afraid, I kept running and running, and I was glad when at last I saw walls far away to the right and left, but these long walls have narrowed so quickly that I am in the last chamber already, and there in the corner stands the trap that I must run into.

You only need to change your direction, said the cat and ate it up."

Kuper spreads this very short text - and one of the most beautiful and succinct written in the English language - over four pages, but what he does with them is absolutely awe inspiring, so that it's criminal to even refer to it as comics. He resigns to none of the common assumptions and rules of the medium, and instead lets his imagination run wild and uses the page spreads and compositions serve as a tool to help create the very feeling of claustrophobia that the text does, but he never loses touch with the reader who always knows exactly how to interpret the pages. In 'The System' Kuper performed the difficult task of creating truly communicative and involving comics with no text whatsoever; he manages an equally impressive fit in these short stories. This is a beautiful book and highly recommended to any comic book reader and any art and/or literature lover.

A Perfect Match
Kafka stories, with Kuper artwork. Kuper's style seems to match Kafka in a very pleasant, memorable way...

Tremedously powerful representation of Kafka's short stories
Brilliant interpretation of Kafka's nine short tales by illustrator Peter Kuper. This thin book is neither for the faint-hearted nor for those who prefer a light-hearted comic read. Kuper brings into powerful focus the intensity and dark, twisted side of humanity as Kafka would have wished it done. One is literally drawn into the stories by the compelling and solid strokes of the artist. A graphic novel of the highest standard