Paul Auster's (1947-2024) iconic trilogy originally was published between 1985 and 1987. In 1994, Paul Karasik, former editor of Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly's RAW magazine, adapted City of Glass into a highly successful graphic novel, with art by Eisner Award-winner David Mazzucchelli. Three decades later, Karasik returns to finish, partnering with Italian comics artist Lorenzo Mattotti for Ghosts, while singly creating The Locked Room. Book designer extraordinaire Chip Kidd devises a first-glance showcase of all three collaborators' stupendous work on this completed edition's dazzling cover.
Perplexing quests link the three titles into a labyrinthine puzzle ultimately examining writing, authorship, and identity. In City of Glass, a thriller writer gets embroiled in a potential murder, chasing a target who splits in two. In Ghosts, "White wants Blue to follow a man named Black," but at fatal personal cost. In The Locked Room, someone slips into the life of his missing childhood friend and becomes obsessed with finding that elusive friend regardless of threats.
As graphic artists, Karasik, Mattotti, and Mazzucchelli each have distinctive, affecting styles, all producing in black-and-white. Mazzucchelli's presentation of City of Glass is most noir-esque, enhancing the looming mystery with literal mazes and diagrams to be solved. His map of the story's Manhattan, overlaid with a walking figure, becomes a clever time capsule. Mattotti chooses a more illustrated book format, pairing meticulous line drawings with blocks of text. Karasik's The Locked Room favors shades of gray, memorably disorienting readers in the final pages, necessitating physical book flips in all directions to understand (or not). Together, the trio transforms canonic prose into visual masterpiece. --Terry Hong