Drawing a City of Glass

Auster as GraphicI had a hard time deciding what to blog about for Paul Auster’s City of Glass. Originally, I thought about doing an entry on walking New York and the flaneur, but it seems several people beat me to that idea, and I didn’t want to get repetitive. Instead, I decided to do a Google search about the book and see what interesting information I could find.

I learned that in 1994 Auster’s City of Glass was adapted into a graphic novel by David Mazzucchelli and Paul Karasik, who worked as lead illustrator. I was able to read a few sample pages of the graphic novel via Google Books, and I couldn’t help but notice how appropriate it seemed that Auster’s bizarre, surrealist story works as an illustrated text.

According to Wikipedia, “The original printing was received very well, and the work was chosen as one of the 100 Most Important Comics of the Century.” The noir aspect of the novel (especially with the stylized detective-like nature) lends itself to the graphic genre, and creating a sense of place of a city like New York in the novel bodes well with the black and white ink drawings. Form follows function very well.

Art Spiegelman, who introduces the text, says that the interplay between words and pictures in the graphic novel are particularly interesting. Instead of using the traditional “word balloons” found in other comics, dialogue is depicted in ink wells, storm drains, and cave paintings. Spiegelman (according to Wikipedia) “was particularly impressed with this section of the book, noting how well it translates Auster’s descrpitions of Stillman’s speech patterns.” I’ve yet to read the actual graphic novel myself, but I’d like to see what the introduction of images adds to Auster’s text overall.