Paul Karasik Interview: On Comics and Paul Auster

Henry Chamberlain: For someone coming in cold, totally new to the material, please give us a breakdown on the significance of this new book, a graphic adaptation of the entire series by Paul Auster, The New York Trilogy.

Paul Karasik: That’s tricky depending upon where you’re coming from. There’s three novels written by Paul Auster in the early 1980s that have been adapted into comics. They’re called, as a whole, The New York Trilogy, with two set in the ’80s and one set circa 1947. They’re all three New York tales, with three different protagonists, drawn by three different artists. I have adapted, scripted and laid out all three. They start out as straightforward mysteries but quickly veer off and are not just mysteries. As Auster put it, they end up asking more questions than providing answers. That can be frustrating for someone thinking these are straightforward mysteries. They’re not. They’re Post-Modern mysteries but don’t let that put you off. They’re very engaging, emotional, and, I hope, riveting and fun reads.

Paul Auster really gets to enjoy his subversive sensibilities, which the graphic adaptations run with. Looking back at the original tale, City of Glass, there’s a treasure trove of subversion. For instance, the sequence of pages with the wayward word balloon tail. The character is very fragile, can hardly articulate anything, and here’s that word balloon tail jammed down his throat. Can you speak to that series of pages?

I don’t think anyone has really spoken about it before. The second chapter of City of Glass is a monologue featuring this character who has been severely abused. He’s lost cognitive abilities and the ability to be specifically articulate in a linear fashion. In the prose book, it’s an entire chapter. And this was a problem. This is one of the reasons this book was chosen, back decades ago when we did the original adaptation, because this chapter seemed impossible to translate into comics. But I came up with this idea of the nine-panel grid and the idea of the word balloon tail going down into the character’s mouth. And taking the reader down a journey over the next several pages. What was 20-something pages in the book turned out to be a dozen in the comic. You take this expedition down this young man’s tortured soul.

Let’s keep this going. What was it like working with Paul Auster? What was it like being the art director, working with David Mazzucchelli?

Well,  working with both of these gentlemen was an utter pleasure. From the moment we got the green light on this book, everything was meant to happen. Working on City of Glass sort of felt like being trapped inside of a Paul Auster story, with a series of bizarre coincidences occurring. I could go on.

Oh my goodness, my jaw has dropped. That is what Paul Auster was all about, these unusual coincidences in life. You’ve gotta give us a taste.

Okay, I met Paul Auster when I was teaching at a prep school in Brooklyn Heights. And his son was one of my Fifth Graders in art class. At that point, Paul had only written a few books, including The New York Trilogy. I had heard that he was a young up-and-coming author. But I didn’t really know anything. I read The New York Trilogy. Then I turned to my handy sketchbook and made some notes about how City of Glass could be turned into a comic of some sort.

So, I thought, the next time I see him, I’ll have read the books and would be able to kiss his ass a little bit. Well, we never got around to talking about his books because we had so much to chat about his son. I never really thought about it again. And then flash forward a decade. I get a phone call, just as City of Glass begins with a phone call. It’s Art Spiegelman. He was my mentor, teacher and friend. I had worked with him and his wife, Francoise Mouly, on RAW magazine. He said that he was trying to help this editor in New York who is interested in adapting contemporary noir novels into comics. But they were really stuck on this first novel: it was a challenge to figure out how to tap into the second chapter, a couple of people had already tried. It’s called, City of Glass, are you interested? Well, let me run down to the basement and I find my sketchbook. I’ve already started.

So, this was really meant to be on its own Austerian time warp and schedule. I did the sketches very quickly. I gave the sketches to David Mazzuchelli. And he redrew my sketches and improved them significantly. David, at the time, had already drawn Daredevil for Marvel and created the all-time best Batman, Batman: Year One. He has a way of drawing New York City. He had a way of opening up the space. I had hammered down the nine-panel grid format, which allowed for subtext, and he found a way to add some fresh air to that.

I love it! I’m sure our listeners and readers will enjoy that. I want to jump over to your contribution, The Locked Room. You get to enjoy pushing the limits of storytelling here as in the rest of the series. There’s this one sequence where you get to play with word balloons. One character is flirting with the protagonist, filling the room with word balloons and setting him afloat with all of her verbosity.

She’s getting a little drunk and he can’t get a word in edgewise. At one point, Auster writes something like, “her words held me aloft.” (Looks up notes) Here we are: “I scarcely bothered to listen. I was floating inside that voice.” That little turn of phrase led me to this idea of him being carried aloft by the word balloons.

People will ask why a novel should be adapted into a graphic novel. I will get asked this when I’m pitching my own work. And the answer is that a graphic novel is its own animal. You’re investigating the work in a whole different way. It’s not a watered down version but it’s own thing. What do you think?

Auster wrote a prose novel. So, this is a graphic novel. Auster’s concerns deal primarily with what it is to be human as well as quite distinct literary concerns about reading and writing and the nature of fiction and words. In translating these ideas into a graphic novel, you’re still dealing with a novel. So, they’re sharing certain ineffable qualities, including scanning the page from top to bottom and from left to right; turning the page and the effects of turning the page.

Someone asked me the other day if I’d ever be interested in making a film version of these stories. And, yes, if I was given the control and the budget, that would be fun. But it wouldn’t be the same thing at all. It’s not a book we’re dealing with anymore. So, you’d have to reinvent a third, filmic language.

Yes, a lot of processing would need to take place. I will move on now to Ghosts, illustrated by Lorenzo Mattotti. As we were talking, Mattotti’s version is its own thing. We see here issues of surveillance, of questioning what is being documented, going back to issues of trusting the written word.

Yes, the primary issues that Auster is interested in, and especially reading and writing in this story. You know, this wasn’t a planned trilogy. One thing led to another. There are certain fundamental themes. After two stories, it made sense to pursue a third. Auster once described the three stories as more of a triptych than a trilogy. Each has similar underlying ideas and concepts but each is a distinct story with a distinct plot line so each deserves a distinct graphic solution to the translation.

What did Paul Auster think of the final version?

Before he died last year, he reviewed everything several times. He was very supportive from the outset. The most important thing to know, in terms of working with Paul, was that he gave us complete freedom to do pretty much whatever we wanted to do, with only one rule. The one rule was that every word in the adaptation had to be written by him. Of course, we used fewer words given that we could use pictures. In comics, you don’t need to say it if you can show it. Other than having to be faithful to his text and his story line, we could monkey around with three different sets of graphic ideas. I think he was quite pleased with them.

Coming from your background, everything from RAW magazine to your study of Ernie Bushmiller, can you give us a little more of a window into how you tackled your contribution, The Locked Door?

This is, by far, the longest sustained piece of comics that I’ve ever done and may ever do. It was very challenging for me to do this much work and to have the trust and confidence in my own drawing. It took me a long time with several false starts. But I know this is as good as I could do at this point. So, it does the job.

I know exactly what you mean in terms of finding the right feel for the book. Your version is so smooth and natural. You must have been asking yourself, How can I compete with the original City of Glass? But you have your own thing going.

Exactly. It had to be something that did not look at all like David’s work or Lorenzo’s work. Most of my published work, certainly in the last twenty years, my gag cartoons for The New Yorker or my extended pieces in The New York Times and Washington Post, have been done using a Blackwing pencil, ink wash and Photoshop. So, it wasn’t like I needed to learn a new tool.

Well, I’m blown away by what you accomplished in The Locked Room.

Thank you.

Now, just looking at another page from The Locked Room, here we’ve got the main character sort of stuck on a Möbius strip. Can you tell us something about this page spread?

The implication is that he’s gotten himself trapped in an endless loop. Having agreed to be the steward of his friend’s unpublished work, he’s fooling himself into thinking that he’s actually doing something other than marrying his friend’s wife and building a family. Besides that, he’s stuck in lockstep on this loop.

I think of Paul Auster as a writer who would have been happy in the Modernist era. He reminds me of some writers who loved larger-than-life characters, like Bernard Malamud. Auster has these sort of magical characters, like Fanshawe, very mysterious.

Yeah, you never actually see him.

And there’s that Nathaniel Hawthorne connection that runs deep. For whatever level of reading you’re coming into this, you’ll find something to your liking.

There’s references in here to Cervantes, probably Auster’s favorite writer. There’s a Melville story in there too. A couple of Hawthorne stories. Some are just visually implied.

There are only so many cartoonists who do everything, known as the “auteur cartoonist.” I wanted to get your thoughts on that considering your work on auteur cartoonist Fletcher Hanks.

So, Fletcher Hanks was a cartoonist that I learned about while I was Associate Editor for RAW magazine. The cartoonist Jerry Moriarty walked into the office one day with a stack of weird comic books. Well, between Art Spiegelman and myself, we felt we knew everything there was to know about Golden Age comic books, which honestly is not that much. Most of them are pretty shitty. But these comic books surprised us. We’d never seen them before. Never heard of this artist before, although he used several pseudonyms so he could work simultaneously at various lousy publishing houses. He made 51 comic books during the early years of comics, between 1939 to 1941. Then he disappeared. We printed one of these in RAW. This was before there were any standards. Anything goes. He would torture and mutilate people. Superhero stories but very twisted and grim.

Fast forward several years and somebody sends me a few Fletcher Hanks stories. This is still the early years of the internet. I find a link about World War II pilots and, at the end there’s an email for a Capt. Fletcher Hanks. I assume that Hanks stopped drawing comics because of the war. I decide to contact this person. He says he’s Hanks Jr. and maybe his father is the cartoonist I’m looking for. But he wouldn’t really know because his father walked out when he was 10 years-old after having beat up his mother and stolen the family’s money. This led to my tracking down all of the Fletcher Hanks stories and so that took up ten years of life. The first volume I collected turned out to be so well received that it led to my winning an Eisner Award for it.

So, did this indeed to turn out to be the father of the person you spoke with?

Yes, it turned out to be the father.

Wow.

He was a horrible man, a violent alcoholic. But, once you know that, and you read the Fletcher Hanks comics, there’s a certain resonance that’s created. The stories go from just being twisted and weird to being emotionally powerful.

Something else to mention is that City of Glass is such a wonderful time capsule. It’s set in the 1980s. The whole mission that the main character is on is now outdated. Today, unless he was incredibly obsessive, he could have let some surveillance cameras do the heavy lifting. Any thoughts?

Yeah, it’s set in the ’80s.

Well, you do what you have to do in the era you’re living in. Is there anything else we should cover? Did I miss anything?

I’m just thinking in terms of having designed the book, that I also hope people will enjoy it as an object. Let’s just say there are a number of Easter Eggs for folks to find.

Once I picked this up, I could not put it down. Thank so much, Paul.

Thank you, Henry.

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