Many visitors to Prague follow the trail of Franz Kafka (1883-1924), a Jewish native of the picturesque city that now celebrates the great writer. Acclaimed graphic novelist Peter Kuper (Mad magazine’s “Spy vs. Spy”) first began adapting Kafka’s stories to comics in 1988. In Kafkaesque: Fourteen Stories (W.W. Norton & Co.), Kuper uses scratch board to create illustrations resembling woodcut prints. In “Coal-Bucket Rider,” the reader is transported to Golden Lane in the Prague Castle complex, where Kafka’s sister lived in a tiny house that was the writer’s studio, in 1916-1917. Among Kafka’s famous stories here are “A Hunger Artist” and “In the Penal Colony.” Kuper’s volume lives up to its title, a synonym for the bizarre and incomprehensible. — Mordecai Specktor
