Franz Kafka

This chapter explores Crumb’s work on the book Introducing Kafka, for which he provided the illustrations. The chapter begins with the ways Crumb has incorporated themes from Jewish culture into not only his Kafka drawings, but in his work as a whole. Crumb often depicts himself as a schlemiel —Yiddish for a vulnerable loser. Like Kafka, Crumb had a troubled relationship to his own father. This is one reason why Crumb felt such an affinity for Kafka’s writings. Crumb also concentrates in several drawings on Kafka’s intense relationship to writing, a theme which he also depicts in his Bukowski drawings. Crumb also created powerful drawings to illustrate Kafka’s The Trial and we may see in these works the ways Crumb includes Christian imagery in his conceptions. Another example occurs in Crumb’s illustrations for A Hunger Artist where we may observe a clear allusion to Rogier van der Weyden’s The Descent of the Cross in the way Crumb portrays the fragile body of the Hunger Artist. As we saw in Chapter 4 with Sartre, here again Crumb incorporates themes from Kafka in his own autobiographical drawings, depicting himself as a suffering Christ or as a Hunger Artist who must beg for his sustenance from an uncaring public.