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Written by Paul John Little Sunday, 01 January 2006 17:32

Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli’s adaptation of Paul Auster’s City of Glass is one of the best comic books that I have ever had the pleasure of reading.

(Picador; 144 pgs B&W; $14.00)
(W: Paul Karasik; A: David Mazzuchelli)

Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli’s adaptation of Paul Auster’s City of Glass is one of the best comic books that I have ever had the pleasure of reading. It is a carefully considered masterpiece of ideas and storytelling that I believe is on par with Maus, David Boring, and From Hell.

Superficially, it is a detective story in the tradition of Hammett, at least initially, but as the tale unfolds it becomes an exercise in post-existentialism that owes more to Kafka than Hammett or any of his contemporaries. It’s a story about drive and determination, language and communication, identity and self. Where does a man go when he has no place left to escape? How far will he extend himself to get to the bottom of a mystery that is not rightfully his to solve? City of Glass eagerly probes these questions without ever satisfactorily answering them, and therein lies its brilliance.

Quinn is a wifeless writer of mysteries with a dead young son who virtually never leaves his New York apartment. He gets a call from a man named Peter Stillman, who insists on referring to him as Mr. Auster, and insists also that Quinn help him. Reluctantly, Quinn, as Auster, agrees to meet with Stillman, who is revealed to be quite insane; locked away for most of his life by his addled father, also named Peter Stillman, his grasp on reality is tenuous at best. The younger Stillman is married to the speech therapist who helped him following his discovery two years earlier, and she informs Quinn she’s worried that the elder Stillman, upon his imminent release from an asylum, will pose a threat to her and her husband. Quinn agrees to tail Stillman Sr., and attacks his assignment with, erm, impressive zeal for the remainder of the book.

City of Glass is an exercise in patience—or, at least, it would be if it didn’t crackle with life and ingenuity. It’s largely metaphysical, making better use of symbols than any other comic I have read. (This includes Watchmen.) At times, a multiplicity of objects will stand in for a given character for the length of almost an entire conversation, while at others Mazzucchelli’s “camera” will wander away from his characters to focus on background details which prove more insightful than mere talking heads. The metaphysics really take over during silent passages, though, when Quinn is by himself. A particular favorite sequence is driven by narrative captions describing Quinn’s walks in New York, and begins with a simple drawing of buildings which, over the course of nine gridded panels, become a complicated maze; as Mazzucchelli’s lens draws further and further back, the maze becomes a thumbprint on Quinn’s apartment window. There is an effectiveness to this kind of frequently impressive imagery to which words alone simply cannot do justice.

Mazzucchelli’s “straight” art is just as impressive, dramatically different from his noted mainstream comics work dating to the mid-1980s. Rich and confident, it’s easy to define by its newfound sense of restraint, one that echoes the economy of language that is typical in so many detective stories. You could see Mazzucchelli tentatively beginning to explore this direction in Batman: Year One, but I suspect the artist pushed himself into new places because of the nature of Auster’s work. If he wasn’t one of my very favorite artists prior to reading this book, and he was, then he certainly is now.

If City of Glass is Kafkaesque, then it is also Quixotic, as Auster (or perhaps more accurately, a literary echo of Auster) himself figures prominently in his own story. The Mr. Auster that Stillman believes Quinn to be is in fact the writer Paul Auster, who is eventually approached by Quinn when the writer cum detective exhausts his supply of leads. There is a duality to nearly every character in the story, expressed not only in the ways that each of them behave, but also in the way that each of them is mirrored by another character in the piece: Stillman and Stillman, Auster and Auster, Daniel and Daniel; the list goes on. Fathers and sons, boys and men, writers and writers, all of them searching for something that lies just beyond their grasp.

City of Glass, textually and visually, is comprised of a shifting metaphysical milieu—although it is consistent, it is never quite the same for any length of time. After Quinn undergoes a startling psychological and physical transformation at the beginning of the story’s third act, so too does Mazzuchelli’s art. His thick, confident brushstrokes disappear and are replaced by shaky, broken lines. His art, which explores a myriad of styles throughout the book, stops flirting with surrealistic imagery and becomes almost shockingly literal.

In summary? Highest possible recommendation. This overlooked triumph of comics storytelling has already found a spot on my personal top ten list. | Paul John Little