REVIEW BY BART BEATY:
(from The 100 Best Comics of the Century, The Comics Journal #210, 1999)
It's rare that any adaptation of a well-written novel lives up to the standard set by the original and comic books have not had a history marked by stunning success in this arena. Except, perhaps, for one.
Paul Karasik & David Mazzucchelli's adaptation of Paul Auster's short detective novel City of Glass not only lives up to the promise of the original text but also asks to be taken seriously alongside it. Paul Auster's City of Glass, as the Avon-published comic is known, does not merely render Auster's text visually but actively brings new metaphors to the surface by plumbing the novel's depths to a degree heretofore unheard of in a comic book literary adaptation.
Take, for example, the lengthy expository monologue in which Peter Stillman tells his history to the protagonist, Quinn. Reading the text it is almost unimaginable visually, yet Mazzucchelli dives straight into Stillman's mouth to find mythic icons, reflections of primitive visual representations, and a tour de force presentation of symbols (a guitar, ink, a television) that are stand-ins for direct face-to-face communication. With these pages Mazzucchelli suggests, in a fashion more direct than Auster's text alone, the inability of Stillman and Quinn to communicate one to one. The discussion is always mediated, always partial because their experiences of language (one a writer, the other raised in absolute solitude) are so totally at odds. In every way Mazzucchelli has made the copy in this instance superior to the original.
If there is one drawback to Paul Auster's City of Glass it is that the remaining parts of the trilogy (Ghosts and The Locked Room) haven't received similar treatment. Without them, the story remains incomplete. Nonetheless, if the comic book gives up something for its lack of successors, it gains much more with the addition of David Mazzucchelli's skilful and thought-provoking artwork.
DAVID MAZZUCCHELLI:
(from an interview in The Comics Journal #194, March 1997)
Auster's book is so much about language, and the structure of language, and identity, and, in fact, the structure of identity, the shifting nature and layering of identity, that the visual metaphors that Paul [Karasik] was coming up with were necessary and apropos. That was really the challenge, to find a visual way of expressing these things without having to keep all the text.
REVIEW BY ART SPIEGELMAN:
(from the introduction to City Of Glass 2004 edition)
By poking at the heart of comics structure, Karasik and Mazzucchelli created a strange doppelganger of the original book. It's as if Quinn, confronted with two nearly identical Peter Stillmans at Grand Central Station, chose to follow one drawn with brush and ink rather than one set in type. The volume that resulted, first published in 1994, overcame all my purist notions about collaboration. It offers one of the richest demonstrations to date of the modern Ikonologosplatt at its most subtle and supple. [Read the full introduction here...]
READ THIS BOOK:
The original 1994 edition of City of Glass by Karasik and Mazzucchelli is long sold out, but the second 2004 edition with an introduction by Art Spiegelman is still available from your local comics store.
FURTHER READING:
Paul Karasik Comics
David Mazzucchelli profile at PaulGravett.com
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