Broken Frontier

Active Images has just released, in a beautiful trade paperback, a definitive edition of the noir thriller KAFKA by Steven T. Seagle and Stefano Gaudiano. Originally published as a six-issue limited series in the ‘80s, when Seagle and Gaudiano were in college, KAFKA was their first professional work in comics. Their “little book cranked out in a college dorm room” went on to acclaim and an Eisner Award nomination for Best Limited Series. KAFKA (ISBN 0-9766761-5-x, $14.99, 184 pages, black and white) is now presented by Active Images in a complete and re-mastered edition, filled out by a comprehensive interview between Active Images’s Richard Starkings, Seagle and Gaudiano, and a look at the duo’s never-before-seen follow-up project, VOLCANO.

“It’s a little weird to revisit your first work with fresh eyes,” said Seagle, writer of KAFKA and the nationally lauded graphic novel it’s a bird… and the hit new Vertigo series AMERICAN VIRGIN. “It’s strange to look back at how you used to work and stranger still to make choices about leaving that alone or cleaning up the blemishes. In the end I opted to polish KAFKA without doing too much major remodeling. The result is still the first story I ever got published, but better---better reading, better looking due to the new lettering, better designed, just better.” Seagle explains that the re-mastering helped fine tune some youthful exhuberence. “That was an exciting time in my life---I met Stefano, a life-long friend, I met a number of my future business partners, I even met my significant other, Liesel, who helped with the original paste-up. But the book, though very well received at the time, was always a list of ‘should-haves’ to me. Thanks to this new edition---those ‘should-haves’ are now ‘dids.’” 

“Having worked with Steven on SOLSTICE,” said Active Images President & First Tiger Richard Starkings, “I knew he had other projects lurking in his catalogue that I wanted to publish. KAFKA was one of them. A brilliant book, made even more brilliant considering this was Steven and Stefano’s first work in comics. KAFKA’s look at repressed memory, alienation and loneliness is an achievement worth revisiting.”

In KAFKA, a man with no past has six days to recover his future. Dan Hutton lost everything... his name, his past, his wife, his life. Now in a witness relocation program, Dan is told his new identity has been compromised...by two different groups each claiming to be US agents. Not knowing whom to trust, Dan runs—back to the world that took everything he loved. Can a man who's forgotten his past hope to reclaim it? 

KAFKA is available in finer comic book stores everywhere.