"As Gregor Samsa awoke that morning of his troubling dreams, he discovered that he was transformed."
is the beginning of Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka, perhaps one of the best early history of literature. From there anything can happen and it happened. Fear is a way of understanding the world. The artist Peter Kuper, author of several graphic novels and illustrator Times and Newsweek, gave a graphic novel from the story.
With the tools of the graphic novel, Kruper Kafka's story makes a version that matches the motion of film in the development of narrative and action. The beginning of the novel is written on a black page with white font, is a curtain that opens to we get to know the tragedy of Gregor Samsa.
Life can be unbearable, but at times it may be more the possibility of change. Terrible as it is a routine, that we are subjected to security that, at least here, we know what will happen and if we take the risk of change that can upset the world around us, to the extent of making it with our fear, into a nightmare. Kruper
making ideas that will trigger the action and makes a dramatic adaptation of Kafka emphasizes patterned in black and white drawings moves evolve approaches to wide shots.
In the small room Samsa, wakes up in bed for a large beetle, the tension of the new body of Gregory Kuper recreates with large and small drawings in which the insects have their new status, believed to be in a dream , and time goes into a huge hourglass cloisters anxiety of Gregory for being late for the train, panicked screams and realizes that it is not the same when he heard his own voice.
Kuper's drawings we get into the hysteria of Samsa, the irrational fear of being different and still be in the family environment, for Kafka was always a symbol of oppression. The narrative of the voiceover keeps it in cartridges that gets into furniture, sceneries or the shell of the person creating an active voice that unfolds in the bowels of the story, which is not apart of the action. It is perceived that clarity and intelligence with which the director Michael Haneke film inserted the voiceover in his film version of The Castillo. The voice becomes intimate and poetic when describing the plight of Gregorio and inserts with white font on the lock of the door, peering through the key input, see the face of the beetle distorted by panic.
The decision to make the novel black and white gives a deep and terrible truth, the story has no nuance, no other options, is a tragic end, goes beyond the colors with the duality of light and shadow, line and absolute black. This fatality was achieved tonal with scratchboard technique: on pages printed in black ink scraping knives and other metal tools to remove the white lights of the paper is white. It invested a stroke, because what you draw is light, and leave the black form of the line and the shadow.
Portrait of Gregory's father is a horrible man, his face is changed but retains its repulsive, is angry, cold, selfish, robust, brute force to mistreat but not to work, is the figure of Kafka's father was a source of pain, contempt and fear. Kafka insecurity came from the presence of a parent who is dissatisfied with his son showed. Kafka in his letters he remembers everything that he admired the young man, his father denigrated with scathing criticism, to the extent that Kafka chose to hide their tastes, as in his novel hides the beetle. That drawing Kuper takes him harder representation, is a monster of violence that makes the transformation of Gregor into an insect, the worst of places: where the victim gives reasons for the executioner to be tortured.
In creating characters that makes Kuper, the beetle inspires compassion and solidarity Samsa, the insect is never frightening that puts the family out of it and that becomes the problem on the that will turn the most wretched of his feelings and disloyalty. It is an insect that is suffering, seeking help and who needs love and support to cope with change. Fear is destructive because it nullifies, the fear that Kafka had his father, the possibility of irritating, shame to the reality of being an insect that is consistently below expectations, he had created a character that released and purified in the literature. Kuper's graphic novel elegantly recreates the fear, in a staging grotesque cartoon characters in its pettiness.
Published in the Journal Antidote
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