Kafka's Manuscript

A wordless heist, a fascist regime, a smuggled manuscript of Kafka's forbidden prose — in this tightly wound, ticking clock of a story, the loot at stake is the absurdist master's legacy.

With a stylistic nod to the wordless novels of Frans Maserell and the expressionist drawings of Franz Kafka himself, Kafka's Manuscript begins at Kafka's deathbed, where he entrusts his friend Max Brod with the task of destroying his unpublished papers. Brod refuses, and what follows is the story of how Kafka's literary legacy escaped Europe under the shadow of fascism. It is a survey of Kafka's paranoia in kinetoscopic monochrome, exploring in a new way what countless books about Kafka have previously attempted to explore with words. What better way to capture Kafka's enduring but evasive voice than with pantomime?

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Kafka's Manuscript is part of the Fantagraphics Underground imprint.