Paul Karasik was born in Washington, D.C. in 1956 and grew up in Chevy Chase, Maryland. After graduating from the Pratt Institute in 1981, he studied at SVA under Will Eisner, Harvey Kurtzman, and Art Spiegelman. Karasik quickly struck up a friendship with Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly and became Associate Editor of RAW Magazine. With fellow Spiegelman student Mark Newgarden he edited three issues of the Bad News anthology series; the pair also took over Mr. Spiegelman's class when he was unable to continue teaching. In addition to City of Glass, his graphic collaboration with David Mazzucchelli, Karasik collaborated with his sister Judy Karasik on The Ride Together, a combination prose/comics memoir about their experiences growing up with an autistic sibling (http://www.theridetogether.com). He has contributed cartoons to the New Yorker and to Nickelodeon Magazine, including an annual Halloween mystery strip drawn by Jason Lutes. He is a teacher by vocation and currently lives with his family on Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts.

Mr. Karasik's life and career are well covered in the Fall 2000 issue of the Ganzfeld. In a wide-ranging interview conducted by Dan Nadel, Karasik describes his relationship with comics over time and offers insightful commentary on a number of cartoonists whom he admires. The piece also analyzes the first several pages of City of Glass, detailing changes made at each point in the collaboration between Karasik and Mazzucchelli. When I arranged to meet Mr. Karasik in Boston for this interview, I took that piece as my starting point while endeavoring to avoid excessive duplication. We met over coffee and enjoyed a lengthy conversation. Afterwards, Paul and I collaboratively pared down the 11,000+ word transcript into the more condensed version below, clarifying and expanding commentary within the structure of the original interview. One follow-up question was inserted along the way. Paul Karasik was extremely generous with his time as we wrestled with several drafts of this document, and special thanks go to Judy Karasik who offered some useful feedback on a late draft.

Paul Karasik

Bill Kartalopoulos: I wanted to begin with a couple of general comics questions. First of all, City of Glass is often referred to as a formal book, and you've said that you have an interest in the formal aspects of comics. How would you explain to your students, for example, what you mean by that?

Paul Karasik: I just started teaching David Mazzucchelli's spring semester class at RISD while he goes off and does wonderful things. The very first topic I put on the table was how to use icons as symbolic language to convey the essence of your ideas. Because comics are pictures and we're programmed to decipher symbolic language in our day-to-day life, the artist can speak in pictures, and know that he can be understood. When you combine symbols, you convey meanings. The first in-class exercise was to create a simple graphic icon that represents yourself, hold it up, and suffer the interpretations of your fellow students trying to guess what you meant.

The second topic I wanted them to think about was the structure of the page. First you need to know what it is that you want to say, or what story you want to tell, and then you create an armature of the page as a substructure to hang your message on, like so many wet sheets flapping in the breeze. For this assignment I gave them the classic problem of depicting how to do something: How to change a tire, how to catch a wave, how to make a martini. They did this in a multi-page format, then distilled the information down to one effective, well-designed page.

If you don't think about the structure of the page, you won't communicate, you'll tell the story badly, the emphasis will be wrong, the message will be skewed. I see this with my students' work often, that they haven't spent the time thinking about the substructure, and so they end up saying things that they don't mean to say.

Of course sometimes you get led into formal solutions by following one element at the expense of others—you get obsessed with a character, or you get obsessed with a visual element, or you get obsessed with an idea, and those obsessions generate things you wouldn't have imagined to begin with. And then you go back and pare, use your rational tools, your formal tools, but keep the elements from your messy obsession alive. It's not a rational process, but there are rational pieces to the process.

Comics look like they're a lot easier to do than they really are. And that's one of the things that I think attracts students to it. "Oh yeah, well I can become a cartoonist because all you gotta do is draw funny pictures." Making comics is an exacting, rigorous process. But if you have done your job right it looks like the easiest thing in the world. Mistakenly, many people who attempt cartooning believe that it is easy and don't understand that sweat is a necessary additive to the inkwell. It's a rare cartoonist who is just simply a natural, and I certainly don't have any of them in my class. Nor am I one myself.

BK: When you took Art Spiegelman's class at SVA, what kinds of things was he talking about that related to your particular formal interests at that point?

	Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend

PK: Art started us off with formal considerations, but rapidly moved us into content, especially emotional and psychological content. For example, I was familiar with Winsor McCay's work, and I had been in awe of his amazing drawing skill, and how he uses the page, how he uses his gutters, and the transitions of time and space that occur within the gutters, between panel A and panel B. I loved all that in "Little Nemo," and it is pretty obvious, although wonderful. But when Art showed the stuff he didn't focus on the "Little Nemo" pages, he was more interested in the "Rarebit Fiend" pages, where the form charges these single page nightmares with emotional pressure. Art pushed the psychology within McCay's work. I had been so in awe of the "Little Nemo" pages that I hadn't really examined those "Rarebit Fiend" pages. The idea that you could construct a page of comics to convey a specific mental state had a huge impact. So what Spiegelman opened up to me was the idea that you need to be aware of formal possibilities, but they should be in the service of your content.

Art also exposed me to specific artists whose work I hadn't focused on. I was standing in the ticketholder's line, but he really opened up an arena. And I think I said this in the Ganzfeld interview as well, which is that Art is a master teacher, and for me he was the teacher that I had been waiting for most of my life. I'd had some really good teachers when I was a kid, who had inspired me to become a teacher, but then I went for years without have any really good teachers—so when I hit Spiegelman's class, it was like, oh yeah, this is what I've been waiting for. Someone who can help me see the next stage.

BK: And then you got involved with RAW, that must have seemed like an advance as well...

PK: Yeah, I would never have looked at Gary Panter's work before, or Bruno Richard, any of those sort of ratty line guys, and now I can't get enough of that stuff. Gary Panter is one of the greatest.

© Penguin Books / Paul Auster

BK: The origin story of your own experience with Auster's book is documented elsewhere in this issue, but just to summarize: you had read the book on your own around '87, and you were teaching in Brooklyn at the time, and you spontaneously drew some breakdowns based on the pages in that book...

PK: The origin story of this book is sort of a classic Austerian Tale. You know, he writes towards the beginning of the novel that the whole plot was just chance, but really there is no such thing as chance in Auster's world. And somehow I had become part of that world...by chance. It was just chance that I had read the book, chance that I had once thought about it as a comic, chance that I had made some sketches...

BK: Or that Auster's son was in your class to begin with...

PK: Exactly. And then it was just chance that I was on the phone with Art, and he said, you know, "Why don't you take a crack at this?" But at the same time, it was absolutely meant to be. The work had been incubating inside some nine-paneled storage locker in my brain for all those years. When Art said to give it a try, I had no hesitation, there was no doubt in my mind that I couldn't do it, take a good solid whack at this thing. When I began to break down the story, I kinda skipped over the first chapter and jumped to chapter two where Quinn meets Peter. The whole chapter is basically a monologue. Well, how the hell could you turn that into comics? Frankly, there was very little head-scratching on my part. It just rolled right out. I knew right then, if I could turn a fifteen-page soliloquy into seven pages, or whatever it turned out to be, of comics that worked, then the rest of the book would be a snap.

BK: It was a bit of a show-stopper. There's a lot to the book, but that scene right there...

PK: Right, pulling that thing right off out of your hat at the beginning is a grandstand play, but it was the key to getting the rest of the book to work. That sequence says many things to the reader right at the outset of the ride. It says here is the map, that nine-panel grid, and here are the signposts to look for along the way, the recurrent visual symbols and motifs, and, it also says, sit back and enjoy the ride. For some reason, I had confidence in that piece, and the confidence shows, I think it gives the reader the sense that he or she is in good hands for the longer journey.

When the idea of a comics adaptation of City of Glass, came up, Art was really keen on it, partly because he thought it was sort of the litmus test for what could be done in the "Neon Lit" series. You know, if you could do City of Glass you could do anything, the idea being that City of Glass would be just about impossible to do. But you know what? City of Glass only appears initially impossible to do because it is so non-visual, because it is largely about the nature of language, because its subject matter is text itself, and the writing supporting that theme is so present and precise. I photocopied the whole book so I could mark it up and figure out what to do with it, and with the pink marker, I highlighted the action that needed to be depicted, and the blue pencil highlighted what needed to be said. And although the book is "about" words, Auster is very generous with giving his characters things to do, and that's why the book is so much fun to read. One thinks of it as being largely a cerebral novel, but the fact of the matter is that there's really lots of action.


BK: Do you happen to recall which section of the book you had done as your original breakdown in 1987?

PK: It was just the very beginning. This business of the telephone ringing and being woken up by it, and it's funny that that was the first thing to do, because it ended up being the last thing that we did in the graphic novel. I had this itch to get on to chapter two because of the challenge so I just did a rudimentary pass at chapter one figuring, we'll worry about this later, we'll strengthen this thing up later. The one thing that we kept from my sketch of ten years earlier was the business of Quinn walking in front of the bookcase, and the fingerprint, and the labyrinth.

BK: What inspired that particular sequence of visuals as a way to adapt that passage in the text?


PK: At the beginning of many Hitchcock films, he immediately lets the viewer know where the story takes place. It's the old fairy tale storyteller's trick of getting the audience situated. This book begins with the phone ringing and Quinn getting out of bed to answer it. The idea was to make that trip across the room to the phone full of informative background info. In real physical terms it shows the reader Quinn's humble apartment: there's a window, a bookcase, a ghost of a photo on the wall. And with each object we also learn about Quinn himself (and also the types of games the book will be playing) through the combination of text and image. There's the window, a fingerprint on the pane is a sign of identity, but it's not a fingerprint, it's a maze. There's a bookshelf containing books written by Quinn, but under a different identity. There's the ghost photo on the wall, a memory of a past identity that resurfaces and fades. It's very dense.

© Penguin Books / Paul Auster

BK: I only just recently read Auster's City of Glass for the first time — and I was really surprised that there was at least one graphic element in the book, which was the picture letters, when Quinn traces the map of Stillman's walks around the streets of New York. I had just assumed that that was something that was described in the book, but that was an innovation of the graphic novel. Is that one of the things that might have given you a sense of the graphic possibilities of the book?

PK: You know what? I think you're absolutely right, in my dim recollection. That might have been one of the things that inspired it.

BK: It's almost like Auster gets to the limit of language, and if he's going to explore every avenue of language he eventually ends up at the letterform, which is a drawing, in a way.

PK: Like the "Just So Story" about the birth of the alphabet, real things that mutated into letters, which was a conceit of Kipling's that I remember from my childhood.


BK: When I was reading Auster's text, the sequences that I was most intrigued by were probably some of the sequences that weren't underlined in your copy of the book. In a way, I felt like that's where I was getting some new stuff. At the same time, it was also interesting to see where you were able to allude to some of the non-concrete elements and where you weren't, because it seems to point to the difference between concrete images and abstract language...

PK: Absolutely.

BK: For example, there's an invisibility motif in the text, and Auster often talks about blind spots and not seeing, and that to me struck me as something that's difficult to grapple with when you're dealing with comics versus language, because it's hard to draw something that's not there.

PK: Which is why I left it out. We were able to keep in ideas about losing your identity and mistaken identity and chance, so we felt we had enough that was close to the idea of invisibility.

BK: Although in one panel, after Quinn talks to Stillman, he's thinking about the way Stillman looks at the world and he says, "When is a tree not a tree?" And what you and David did was to find a resonant image, which in this case is a pair of lungs. So in a way you can't draw a not-tree, but you can draw something that fits in with the idea of something that looks like a tree, but isn't a tree.

PK: You know, this idea came from something very specific. That lung was not in Auster's text at all, he just asked, "When is a tree not a tree?" The lung image was inspired specifically from David's story, "Air", a tale of his I had particularly admired.


BK: I wanted to talk a bit about the structure of the book as well. I want to get into this triptych that you use so much, and how it works. You spoke about Kurtzman and the rhythmic triptych in the Ganzfeld, and it seems like Kurtzman uses this device in a cinematic way: moving, rotating, showing the same thing from different angles, zooming in and zooming out, based on the rhythmic passage of time. And what you did with this book, of course, is you took the three panels and you sort of squared it across the page, and built a three-by-three structure. The rhythm this creates is interesting because you're not just showing different states of things, but you're also showing relationships between things, like the fingerprint and the wall and the maze, or the various items in Stillman's monologue, for example, so you're taking something that's built for cinematic techniques and you're using it for a very graphic and static juxtaposition that's more specific to comics...

PK: Absolutely, well the grid got to serve double duty there both as backbone and as a symbol unto itself.

BK: It became one of the icons that you investigate in the story.

PK: As well as holding the story together, and ultimately it also allowed the story to fall apart. You know, because that tight nine panel grid became a symbol for, among other things, Quinn's sort of rigid and unhappy state of mind and pent-up life, which over the course of the book really kind of unravels, to the point where the panels themselves unravel beginning on that page.

BK: I also wanted to ask about the monologue, and I actually just wanted to go through and just see if you could recall any of the kinds of associations or things that led you to choose the specific images that you chose, because they're really intriguing, especially that first page or two...

Page 6		Page 15

PK: In the first sketch to Chapter One I had the tail of the balloon coming out of one of the holes on the mouthpiece to show that the disembodied voice was coming from a distance. When it came time to work on the monologue, it was natural that the tail of the balloon should go down Peter's throat, as well. We're going to take a little journey into the heart of darkness inside of this guy. It's deceptive at first, because it's just so odd and almost amusing at first, and then you realize we're going down into the depths of the soul of this damaged man.

BK: It's coming from someplace else entirely

PK: It's from a place of deep torture.

BK: So the first thing that you go to, is that supposed to be the boatman of the river Styx?

PK: Yes, Charon.

BK: And it's so eerie the way he seems to emerge fully formed from the water, first of all, and also I wonder what led you to that and why you chose him as the first thing to...

PK: Well, Charon is the ferryman of the river Styx, and he's the one who takes you through to the other land...

BK: The land of the dead...

PK: The land of the dead, and essentially, this is where we're going, to this place where this guy's, young man's soul lies. But why he arises from the water — where is that coming from?

	Page 16

BK: The one thing that obviously links all of these things is that it's always coming out from some hole, from some opening somewhere, and I guess the opening in the water — I don't know, you could tell me perhaps. It's a very surreal image and it really works perfectly and it retains its mystery even though it works so well...

PK: I wanted him to slowly appear, but I didn't want him to appear from the distance coming at you...

BK: I see...

PK: I didn't want him to come from one side of the panel to the other, and I thought OK, well he's coming up from the depths, he's rising, you know, the truth is rising to the surface

BK: And it certainly flags that we're in a very different realm here, because that obviously obeys, like, no laws of physics...

PK: Exactly, and it had to be in a separate type of reality.

BK: And it also ... because even though this is all dialogue, the section in Auster's text, the bits that surround it really flag it as a strange metaphysical almost experience, where, you know, Quinn doesn't understand how much time has passed, or how long he's been there, and after the speech is over it's dark even though it was morning when he got there. And that's alluded to in the graphic novel, but more of that sense of unreality actually comes from these choices that you make graphically during the monologue.

PK: It's quiet, slow, still, and very methodical as a counterpoint to the staccato mumbo-jumbo dialogue coming out of this creature's mouth.

BK: Right, and then the next thing you went to was some sort of cave drawing. I don't know if it's a specific reference, I imagine it must be.

PK: Yeah, it is. It's a drawing that I got from a book of cave paintings from Lascaux, I wanted a primitive depiction of the very basic building blocks of language here, which is the pictogram, the cave drawing. And I searched for one that also looked to me like a large creature attacking or overpowering a human...

BK: Right, to emphasize the abuse...

PK: Exactly. And so then we go into this character's mouth. And then down the sewer, really going to go down into the depths, down into the drain. Peter's voice has a repetitiveness to it, hence the phonograph, the replayable record, stuck on a groove.

BK: Yeah, because Auster talks about how his voice has a strange, modulated tone...

PK: Yeah, and I thought it has that sound, like, in the distance, that distant, old phonograph sound, and then down a well...

BK: And at that point when you go from the well to the bird's nest, you're starting to break your repetitions and you're starting to go...

PK: The velocity increases as we head down the shaft.

BK: Right, so you have two pages of the boatman...

PK: Two pages of the boatman, and then zooming in the boatman, and then a single page featuring the caveman...

BK: Then a tier each...

PK: A tier each for the gutter and the drain and the phonograph then we're down to two panels on page 20, of the well and the baby bird's nest, and then...

Page 20

BK: And then Henry...

PK: The mute character... shown here reciting Hamlet, the joke being, of course, that Henry is a character who doesn't speak at all, let alone recite Hamlet. His odd man-childishness reminded me of Peter...

BK: When we were talking about this passage at the University of Florida conference, when Martha Kuhlman presented her paper, this was definitely something that we talked about, the idea of resonant imagery, and here, for example, it's less important that the bird might be in the well — It may or may not be. But what's more important is that you've got these shapes that rhyme with one another.

PK: Right, exactly.

BK: The well, and then the bird's nest. The open beak even seems to suggest the shape of Henry's head...

PK: Exactly. So you don't have the shape of the bird's nest in the Henry strip, but you definitely have the shape of the open beak echoed in Henry's profile. And then you go back to that rounded donut shape with the dog turd, with the flies. And then off the page and then on page 21 everything's...

BK: Everything's just one panel each...

PK: One panel.

BK: And what they all have in common is that there's some opening, there's something that lies behind it or inside of it or something like that.

PK: Exactly. And each one is an object. Each one is a thing that can be summed up in a word or picture.

BK: Right, it's an icon.

PK: It's an icon. And the tic tac toe panel is of course is the three-by-three grid.

BK: And of course, something you couldn't wait to do, finally, the jail cell door.

PK: Although there was a question whether this should be the final image for the sequence. I wasn't sure, initially I thought that it should end with the jail cell, but I really wanted to get down and see this broken cripple puppet of Peter Stillman inside the cell in this cesspool down at the bottom of the hole. It has got so much more echo to it.

BK: Well it does two things, I think, one is that it just reinforces that idea that we're constantly going further into this nine panel grid, whatever it is, and the other thing is you set up that smoldering pit or whatever it is, the cesspool, that comes back at the end, somewhat mysteriously...

PK: Yeah...

	Page 23

BK: And it also gives you a chance to use the broken puppet boy image, because he says that in the textual monologue in the book, I'm not sure that you included that metaphor in the version of the monologue in the graphic novel, I don't seem to think that you did, but he says something like, "Perhaps I am the broken puppet boy, who will become real..."

PK: Why say it if you can show it? As I said, this was an easy book to work with, because there was so much visual imagery built into the text.

BK: It's a fantastic sequence, and thank you for guiding me through it that way. And since we brought it up, I wanted to look at the ending of the book. I felt like the last few pages of the book, in particular the ones before and after the grey wash, were the most strongly interpretive parts of the book, which isn't to say I necessarily got the sense that there was a very specific interpretation being communicated. But Auster's text ends with the account of this anonymous narrator who's been interposed into the narrative at that point. Whereas here you kind of go back to that smoldering pit and you resurrect a lot of the imagery from the book, and quite mysteriously you take this typewritten text that we assume comes from someone we haven't met, and you insert it onto a page of Quinn's notebook, in Quinn's handwriting.

PK: Auster's very clear here to be enigmatic. He doesn't spell it out to you. You can make some guesses, well... So we needed to do that as well, visually, so as to not tie up the ends and to make it as unclear as he did in a very clear fashion, and I think it's fairly successful. You know, this narrator voice shows up about five times in the course of the book... a sentence here, a sentence there...

BK: Well, you introduce it, I think, more strongly and at earlier points in the text, than Auster does. In Auster, it's clear, maybe in retrospect...

PK: He only drops that voice in for a sentence at a time. To me it was like a red flag that there was another person looking over the shoulder of this action, the uber-Auster. I think that he's an absolutely marvelous writer, and I tried to follow his lead. The idea was to make as accurate an adaptation as possible that would also be a graphic novel, that would be worth doing and would be worth reading. The reader who reads both the novel and the graphic novel is the one who's going to have the most fun.

BK: Well I certainly had a lot of fun reading the novel for the first time in preparation for all of this...

PK: Reading it in reverse, to see how it works...

BK: Absolutely. Well I guess I just wanted to ask you generally how the discoveries or innovations or the "problem-solving" of working on this book might have affected some of your thinking about comics, or might have changed or advanced the way you might have thought about certain things...

PK: It pointed out the lack of rigor in most adaptations in general, whether it be for screen or for any medium.

BK: Very true.

PK: Because the adaptation should be valid in its own right.

BK: And as far as the issue of rigor goes, I've read the graphic novel several times now and it really rewards the re-reading in a way that a lot of comics don't. The imagery that keeps coming up, the structure, the very many ways of giving information that are in the book, there's just a lot to it. And Martha wrote a wonderful paper about it, and as I was taking notes I could have written a completely other kind of paper, different from Martha's, there's just a lot to it that it rewards that kind of investigation, certainly.

PK: And part of that comes from, of course, being really intentional about certain things, but a lot of it happens automatically when you get into the groove. I did the breakdowns for this over a very short period of time, just a few weeks, and once I got rolling other things started happening, that were not pondered over and thought about late at night. They just occurred because it was so logical for them to happen, like one of those Auster "coincidences."


Here's one odd bit from page 57. This is the cover to an actual issue of the New Yorker that I had lying around at the time. It would have made sense that Stillman might have picked up this issue of the New Yorker because it had an egg on the cover, with the Henry Dark and the Humpty Dumpty connection. So I picked it up, sketched it, started leafing through it and I was stunned to discover that coincidentally inside was a story about Kasper Hauser, the wild child. Hauser makes another appearance in the book for sharp-eyed readers.


BK: With this book, it's like you had two collaborators, Auster and Mazzucchelli...

PK: Gestalt at its greatest. We're all at our best — I like Auster's work in general, but this is my favorite. I recently read Auster's The Book of Illusions, and it's got this great mythical life of a silent comedian who never existed. It's fantastic, dead on, great writing. And what David brought to the table was enormous. I was very attached to the nine-panel grid in my original breakdown, and David opened it up and let some air through the door, and his drawing is just sublime. Did I mention his superb lettering? Stop me gushing before you have to mop me up. It was a great collaboration.


Right now, though, I am working on a solo strip about an obscure cartoonist from the 40's who disappeared.

BK: That's interesting...

PK: Yup. I have done a bit of sleuthing and uncovered the sordid truth. I've been struggling with how best to tell the tale, though I've done about ten different versions of this thing, the latest one is 20 pages long. I keep taking it apart and reassembling it. I have no idea when it will be finished or who will want to publish the thing.

BK: So you have a sort of historical truth or something, but I suppose you're in the position, then, of trying to figure out how you're going to structure the actual historical facts, and highlight whatever it is that you feel is important to highlight.

PK: It's quite a struggle, but it's the most interesting part of making comics for me. I'm not a great draftsman; I'm barely a good draftsman. It's not my strength. My strength is in thinking about how the clock works, and not what the face looks like.

BK: I look forward to learning about a cartoonist who vanished, like Quinn did, and I look forward to seeing it, whenever it comes out, however it comes out, in whatever form...

PK: So do I!