the hunger artist gets his wish.

The hunger artist then freelances with a circus, where he fasts himself nearly to death, without attracting the notice of the spectators or even the circus staff. One day, the circus overseer passes the hunger artist’s cage and, not seeing anything or anyone in it, complains about the cage being unused. When the circus staff open the cage, they discover the neglected hunger artist, who has now almost perished. The hunger artist explains that he had always wanted people to admire him for fasting but that they should not admire it; fasting is easy for him, since he could never find the food he craved. With this confession, the hunger artist dies, is buried, and is replaced by a panther, who knows what food he desires and devours it exuberantly, a spectacle far more popular for the circus crowds than that of the hunger artist.

The collection begins and ends with blood. In the story “The Vulture,” a vulture tortures the narrator by attacking his feet. A bystander offers to shoot the vulture and goes home to fetch his gun, whistling as he saunters off. The narrator realizes from the malicious, knowing look on the vulture’s face that the latter understood everything. The vulture then swoops high into the air, plunges into the mouth of the narrator, and drowns in its victim’s blood.

Characters

•A first person narrator is the protagonist of “The Bridge,” “Give It Up!,” “The Helmsman,” and “The Vulture.” It is unclear whether this narrator represents a coherent, single personality. However, the narrators of all four stories share some key elements. They are all underdog figures: alienated, tortured both physically and psychologically, and victimized by authority figures. They invariably undergo traumatic transformations, often ending in death.

•The hunger artist is the protagonist of “A Hunger Artist.” He is a meek and emaciated figure. Unassertive by nature, he is easily controlled and subdued by the impresario, although he is given to fits of anger whenever he is forced to end his fast. He is quiet and reclusive and does not reveal his motives for fasting until the very end. Critics of Kafka’s work believe that this character is meant to represent Kafka himself, and thus the story is a kind of self-portrait.

•A police officer appears in three of the nine stories as a thematic antagonist. The police officer is always large and looming, with a wide, menacing face and jagged teeth. He is impatient and easily angered and makes great autocratic displays of intimidation to assert his power.

Artistic Style

Many readers will recognize the stylistic similarity between the art of Give It Up! and that of the macabre Spy vs. Spy strip in MAD magazine. This is no accident: Kuper has been illustrating Antonio Prohías’s Spy vs. Spy since 1997. As in Spy vs. Spy, in Give It Up! there are no shades of gray, either literally or figuratively. The sharp contrasts of white and black mirror the starkness of the stories themselves.

Give It Up! is full of juxtapositions. Diminutive, anxious protagonists are dwarfed by grotesque and massive villains, such as the police officer and the vulture. The background images are surreal and distorted. Panels, when they are used at all, are usually arranged in skewed diagonal angles, enhancing the dystopian images contained within their frames.

Kuper takes full advantage of the interpretive potential of visual illustration. Indeed, his pictures add “a thousand words” to Kafka’s terse, minimalist narratives. The art contains numerous subtle cues that suggest particular readings and link the nine stories thematically. The cat, the panther, and the police officer, which appear in three separate stories, all have similar serrated teeth, thus putting a common face on the archetypal villain. In “The Fratricide,” the onlookers have large eyeballs growing out of their necks instead of their heads, echoing the story’s implication that people are frequently more interested in watching human tragedy than preventing it. Kuper is particularly innovative in his illustration of the story “The Trees.” The original story is a one-paragraph commentary about how tree trunks in the snow seem easily movable, although they are stuck to the ground. Kafka’s “story” is more of an observation than a narrative, but Kuper gives the plot action and shape through his illustrations of a street person being pushed and prodded by a police officer.

Kuper’s drawings contain numerous nuances that transpose Kafka’s works into modern times. For example, the mouse of “A Fable” wears a suit, carries a briefcase, and seems to be rushing to work. Thus, his confinement in the maze and his consumption by the cat serve as commentary on the modern-day corporate world.

The limbs of the characters are often elongated and contorted. Kuper likely took inspiration from not only Kafka’s stories but also his drawings. Kafka was fond of doodling black-and-white stick figures, whose limbs are stretched and twisted, as though they were trapped in societies and environments that restrain and deform both their bodies and minds.

Themes

Although the stories are not explicitly linked by either Kafka or Kuper, the plots share similar elements. In almost all the stories, a diffident and alienated male protagonist is victimized or preyed upon by a predator or an authority figure. The protagonist is usually isolated in his plight, without supporters or defenders. Each protagonist has little or no possibility of “winning” against his opponent, and his only options are futile resistance or surrender. The protagonist usually resists, at least for a while, but his perseverance is rendered pointless when he is ultimately annihilated by opposing forces.

Kafka suggests that we are not in control of our destiny, and our destiny is invariably bleak. Beginning with “A Little Fable,” the protagonists frequently find themselves “out of the frying pan and into the fire.” The words of the police officer in the title story “Give It Up!” sum up what seems to be the only rational response to this predicament: giving up. Despite the inevitability of defeat, the protagonists are nonetheless compelled to resist; their sense of justice will not allow them to do otherwise.

Despite the nihilism inherent in the narratives, the protagonists still yearn for salvation and release. Only in the last story, “The Vulture,” is there a possibility of redemption, but it is bought at the cost of the protagonist’s death. When the vulture flings itself into the narrator’s mouth, the narrator says, “I was relieved to feel him drowning irretrievably in my blood which was filling every depth, flooding every shore.”

The protagonist is always alone in his struggle, but that is not for lack of people around him. Almost every story has one or several witnesses, who seem utterly indifferent and unsympathetic to the protagonist’s plight. There is a sense that all the bystanders form a single, monolithic entity, which is invariably apathetic or voyeuristic.

Impact

Adapting literary works to the comic book medium is a long tradition in the industry. The first such series was Classic Comics, later Classics Illustrated. The series, started by Lewis Kanter in 1941, published more than 150 adaptations of literary classics until it folded in 1971. Classics Illustrated titles include Frankenstein, A Tale of Two Cities, and Moby Dick, but nothing as dark or avant-garde as the works of Kafka.

Give It Up! differs from many other comic book adaptations in that the artist not only illustrates but also interprets the work through innovative techniques that cast the timeless stories into new contexts. As Jules Feiffer notes in his introduction to the collection, Kuper’s drawings are not so much illustrations as “riffs, visual improvisations.”

Give It Up! received excellent reviews from The New York Times, Publisher’s Weekly, Kirkus Review, and many other publications. Critics have commented on the sophistication of Kuper’s interpretations and his success in capturing the mood and themes of Kafka’s work. There is general assent that Kuper’s expressionist artistic style corresponds well with Kafka’s moody, terrifying prose.

The same year that the Give It Up! reprint appeared on shelves, Totem Books published Introducing Kafka as part of its “Introducing” comic book series. Introducing Kafka also contains adaptations of Kafka’s “A Hunger Artist” and The Metamorphosis.

Further Reading

• Hernandez, Gilbert, Jaime Hernandez, and Mario Hernandez. Love and Rockets (1982-1996).
• Kuper, Peter, and Franz Kafka. The Metamorphosis (2003).
• Mairowitz, David Zane, and Robert Crumb. Introducing Kafka (1993).

Bibliography

• Celayo, Armando, and David Shook. “Comic Adaptations of Literary Classics.” World Literature Today 81, no. 2 (March/April, 2007): 33-36.
• Josipovici, Gabriel. Introduction to Collected Stories, by Franz Kafka. New York: A. A. Knopf, 1993.
• Kafka, Franz. The Great Wall of China, and Other Short Works. Edited and translated by Malcolm Pasley. London: Penguin Books, 2002.

• Give It Up! And Other Short StoriesCritical Survey of Graphic Novels: Independents & Underground Classics Bart H. Beaty Stephen Weiner 2012 Salem Press