After Alan Moore and several other authors in the 1980s managed to prove that the comics medium was capable of more than simply portraying various men in spandex meaninglessly punching one another, you’d have expected the comics industry to follow suit appropriately. What actually occurred is a simple penchant for shallow misery and general edginess, led by hacks such as Rob Liefeld who failed to understand what made Moore and co.’s work so effective.
It wasn’t that works such as Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns were dark, but, rather, that they engaged with the medium in a mature and measured way, incorporating real-world politics and nuanced morality in order to make a statement. To many of the comics writers of the 90s, however, this meant simply making all of their characters miserable and for them to do bad things sometimes without ever really addressing what that meant narratively.
Thankfully, this wasn’t everything the ’90s produced. During this period, author Paul Auster was approached by Spiegelman in hopes of producing a comic adaptation of Auster’s novella ‘City of Glass’, from The New York Trilogy, a collection of detective stories from the decade prior. Produced by Spiegelman and illustrators Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli, the project produced one of the best comics of the 90s, and, frankly, of all time.
The New York Trilogy (and particularly ‘City of Glass’) is supremely postmodern in its approach to storytelling, meaning that a simple comic adaptation of the novella likely wouldn’t have been effective, or even possible. ‘City of Glass’ fixates on intertextuality, delves into autofiction, and approaches words as things to interrogate and play with; how could a comic adaptation, necessarily more focussed on image rather than text, possibly hope to faithfully recreate the story?
Karasik reflected on the difficulty of adapting such source material in an interview, stating that Spiegelman saw the project as a “sort of litmus test for what could be done” with comics: “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 the project worked nevertheless, arguably even more than the novella it was based on. The comic is entirely illustrated in black and white, which might seem old-fashioned if not for the impact this simplified palette has on the visual storytelling as certain elements, like in Auster’s novella, are made indistinct. The sharp lines of Karasik and Mazzucchelli’s New York and its apartments and skyscrapers are simplified into lines marking out a maze, which are transformed again into the swirled lines marking a fingerprint.
The black and white also re-emphasises the story’s genre as a piece of noir fiction, and the novel’s visual style certainly resembles that of a postmodern detective story. Characters will smoke endlessly, with the white smoke billowing across blackened rooms. Every New Yorker is made to look the same, with flashes of light reflected off the glass buildings illuminating their robotic, barely-human faces. Scenes will contain mysteries somewhere in the back of larger shots, which, like the story’s main mystery, won’t (and shouldn’t) ever be solved.
One of the most impressive scenes in Auster’s ‘City of Glass’ is a 15-page (depending on the edition of the book) monologue given by a specific character, for whom language has been deconstructed: “This is called speaking. The words come out for a moment and die.”
In Karasik and Mazzucchelli’s version, the scene is itself deconstructed into three-by-three boxes across several pages descending down the character’s throat, following the origin of his speech bubble, which comes from within his body rather than floating outside it as the other characters’ speech bubbles do. Each panel is revelatory of the character’s struggles with language and origin; even as we’re navigating his body, his speech appears to originate from somewhere else entirely, and chasing it bears no fruit.
In recent years, Moore has expressed something of a distaste for the medium he’s most famed for working in. In an interview with GamesRadar, Moore described the comic medium as being ‘almost completely untapped’ of its potential, and expressed horror at how the superhero genre has become the comics monoculture. Moore’s not exactly wrong; comics have become inherently associated with the superhero genre, and the more successful works don’t exactly stretch the medium’s possibilities.
Yet the decades following the 80s, Moore’s primary wheelhouse for producing comics, have managed to produce creatively-inclined works such as Persepolis, or, in more recent years, Saga. Karasik and Mazzucchelli’s adaptation of ‘City of Glass’ went out of print for a time before receiving a new edition in 2004 featuring a lengthy introduction penned by Spiegelman; such works must be preserved and remembered, both for their artistic merits and for what they can do for future works in the medium.
