The New York Trilogy is author Paul Auster’s best-known work, a collection of three interconnected stories: City of Glass, Ghosts, and The Locked Room. All three employ the twists and mysteries found in detective fiction with existentialist exploration of the human condition. 

First published in the mid-1980s, Auster’s Trilogy was deemed “a stone-cold masterpiece” by The Guardian. The graphic novel version of its first book, City of Glass, was released in the mid-1990s, but it’s taken until April 2025 for the entire Trilogy to be published in graphic novel form. It’s a “spectacular graphic adaption,” says Publisher’s Weekly, “and well worth the wait.” 

Internationally renowned cartoonist Paul Karasik was art director for the City of Glass’s graphic novelization and he returned to that role for the new Trilogy (and drew the third book as well). We sat down at a library near his home on Martha’s Vineyard to talk about the long road to producing the full graphic novel of The Trilogy and the Auster-like twists in his own career, as well as offer advice for aspiring graphic novelists.

Did you always know you’d be a graphic novelist? Is that what you studied?

No—I studied graphic design at Pratt. Back then—in the pre-computer age—that meant paste-up: gluing pieces of paper to other pieces of paper. I realized quickly it was going to take decades of work before I got to design a Rolling Stone cover. I loathed the work. I thought, ‘What the hell? I’m not going to do this.’

It turned out that graphic design is very useful set of tools for becoming a cartoonist. 

But I’d done student teaching while at Pratt at a prep school in Brooklyn Heights called Packer Collegiate. And they were looking for a teacher … which is something I knew I could do, I loved doing and is really my best skill.

So how did you go from teaching to turning Paul Auster’s work into a graphic novel?

Auster’s son was in my class, and I knew Auster was this author. He was not a famous author. But I thought, He’s coming in for a parent-teacher conference so when he comes I can kinda kiss his ass a little bit. And as I was reading City of Glass, I made some visual notes about how this might work as a comic. 

Auster came in for the conference, but he never mentioned he was a writer, let alone talk about City of Glass. Because his son was so interesting, we had plenty to talk about … That was around 1986. About five years later—I’d left my job and New York. I was here on Martha’s Vineyard, had had kids. And the phone rings and it’s [Pulitzer prize–winning cartoonist Art] Spiegelman. He said, ‘We’re trying to do this impossible thing: City of Glass by Paul Auster. Have you heard of it?’

And I said, ‘Not only have I heard of it, I’ve already started it.’ 

That’s like a twist in an Auster novel.

100%. And with the phone involved, too, [like at the start of City of Glass].

But how did you know Spiegelman?

So, let’s go back to me getting out of art school, being disillusioned with graphic design. I was freelancing part-time in Manhattan, and I’d heard about the School of Visual Arts—it’d begun as a cartooning school. And three of the greatest living cartoonists were there: Will Eisner, who created the comic The Spirit. Harvey Kurtzman, probably the single-most important influence on my actual work and, one of the most important cartoonists of all time. And the third was Art Spiegelman.

So, it’s like being a novice painter in the Renaissance and studying with Da Vinci and Michelangelo and Botticelli. 

So, Spiegelman was the bridge who showed you how to get from ‘unhappy graphic designer’ to cartoonist?

It’s more like the bridge has been washed out, and I had to take a detour from the direction my life was going. A complete change. There’s my life before Spiegelman and my life after Spiegelman. 

Spiegelman calls in the early 1990s and asks you to work on Auster’s City of Glass. And then?

From there, the process of creating City of Glass was very swift. I already understood the book—as soon I re-read it, I remembered exactly what I was thinking [in 1986]. And it was the great good fortune of the book Spiegelman had enlisted David Mazzuchelli to do the final art. He was a very experienced cartoonist at that point, though quite young. He’d drawn Daredevil for Marvel for years; he drew the definitive version of Batman, Batman: Year One. Once you read Batman: Year One, you don’t need to read any other Batman. That’s as good as it gets.

So, I did a thumbnail version—postcard size—sketches of each page, and on a yellow legal pad I did a drawing for each page with a fairly tight sketch with the lettering. This is before computers, so everything was by hand. I gave my sketch to David, and he did an entire sketch version. 

I remember this. I was stunned at how quickly he brought it back to me—within weeks. And it was improved in very significant ways, not the least of which was—well, he had drawn Batman and Daredevil, so he knew how to draw New York City. And New York City is one of the main characters in Auster’s book. He was able to open up the space and give air and space to what I had constructed as fairly claustrophobic piece of work. 

It was a rainy late afternoon when we went to Soho to Spiegelman’s loft. Me and David and Spiegelman and Auster. I remember it: we sit down and we’re looking at the sketches page by page. And, well, you can’t stop Spiegelman. He’s like, ‘Well, maybe he should be walking from the left to the right instead of right to left. And maybe this should be three-quarters view… He’s just a comics genius at work. Everything he suggests is an improvement. 

Meanwhile, Auster: stone silence. And I’m thinking, ‘Oh shit. We’re like on page 10 and he hasn’t said anything. Except nod, smoking that little black cigar and drinking espresso and being very Auster-y. Finally, we’re on page 20, and he says, ‘Wait a second. That’s not a colon; that should be a semi-colon. And a few pages later: ‘Oh, this is in the present tense. This should be the third-person past tense. He was just being—

A writer!

Yes! He gave us a rule: Every word in the book had to be a word he’d written. We had to use far fewer words, because it’s an adaptation and we’re letting the pictures do a lot of the heavy lifting. But every word had to be his word, in the right order, the right sequence. So… 

So, you couldn’t move scenes around…

No—and I wouldn’t want to.

But look: the key question is—What took so long to do the other two volumes in the Trilogy? The stories are gripping, there’s plenty of plot. All three books are about three different lonely men, each one makes an unfortunate decision or another that lands them in terrible hot water. I know that—the plots, they’re juicy. 

Wherever I went, I’d bring the other two books. They’ve traveled with me to Italy, to France, To California. I’d re-read and think, There’s got to be something here I’m missing. Because with City of Glass I immediately understood. 

There’s a level of story that’s gripping and engaging. But Auster also had said he’s interested in: What it is to be human. That’s pretty much a direct quote. His characters behave irrationally, the way humans do, impulsively, obsessively. All three of those guys, once they get that bone in their teeth, they’re not willing to let it go, even though it’s dragging them to the pit of hell. That’s the story level.

But then there’s a whole secondary level. With City of Glass, I understood it immediately. The other books took me years. But then lightbulb went off: I was in France, reading, and suddenly: Oh, I get it. 

And I said to Auster: I think these books are fundamentally about fiction. The nature of fiction; reading fiction; and writing fiction. He sat straight up in his chair and said: “That’s it!”

So many things fascinated me about how you drew the third book, The Locked Room. It made me think: Are there rules, principles for designing a graphic novel?  If someone wants to create graphic novels, are there certain principles you teach first?

First and foremost … how do I put this poetically?” [A long pause, a deep breath.] I imagine there are very few cartoonists who decide they’re going to be cartoonists. It’s kind of a calling. And I think there’s a certain level of compulsion. 

I would say you should read a lot of comics outside of the comics you’re interested in. You learn something from everything. Use every one of those reading experiences actively to learn from the work. That said, there’s a couple of key books that are worth reading. [A self-conscious chuckle here.] One of them is How to Read Nancy—the center section of it is a textbook. Study it, it will teach you, maybe, 80% of everything you need to know.

I know it works because it’s what I teach in class, that single comic strip Nancy. It’s one of the first lectures I do in class, and I ask the students, What do you see? Bit by bit they see more and more until they’ve seen everything that they need. 

I’d say Art Spiegelman’s Breakdowns, his experiment comics work, mostly from the ’70s, is a key text. But nothing takes the place of spending hundreds of hours of reading comics that you would never pick up. 

The internet encourages ‘mole reading,’ where you just go burrowing deeper and deeper … until you know everything about one thing. I’m not saying you shouldn’t do that—it’s fun. But if you want to be a cartoonist, you’ve got to look at the world of, the history of, cartooning. 

How have graphic novels changed through history? 

Part of the problem with City of Glass when it came out in 1994, the graphic novel revolution hadn’t started yet. City of Glass often ended up on the shelf next to Auster’s novels. And people would pick it up and say, ‘What’s this?’

But now the time is right—there’s a place for it on the bookshelf, with ‘literary’ graphic novels. And there’s never been a better time for a younger person to break into comics—there have never been so many opportunities.

Brenda L. Horrigan, a writer and editor, spent a decade as a foreign affairs analyst in Washington, D.C., and Denver before moving her passion for research and writing to Martha’s Vineyard. Since then, she’s published essays, reviews, and features in a range of magazines and online publications. Her novel The Petrova Project, based on her DC years, now out on submission, was runner-up in the 2023 Faulkner-Wisdom International Writing Competition.

Photo: Ray Ewing

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