West Tisbury resident and award-winning cartoonist Paul Karasik comes to the Martha’s Vineyard Film Center on Thursday, May 15, at 7:30 pm to celebrate his latest book, the long-awaited “The New York Trilogy.”
The approximately one-hour show will open with Karasik’s favorite cartoon: The 1931 short film “Bimbo’s Initiation,” featuring Betty Boop and a dog named Bimbo. It’s “weirdly wonderful … surreal and fast-paced,” Karasik told The Times.
Karasik will then give an illustrated presentation about the art of graphic-novel adaptations, discuss the decades-long path to publication of the trilogy, and take questions from the audience. Edgartown Books will sell — and Karasik will sign — copies of the book in the Film Center lobby after the show.
The 2025 edition of “The New York Trilogy” is the graphic-novel version of a literary classic by acclaimed American author Paul Auster. The three interconnected stories in the book were first published in the 1980s, and have remained in print ever since.
The graphic-novel version of the trilogy was released in April by Penguin Random House. Karasik served as art director for the project, working with illustrators Lorenzo Mattotti and David Mazzucchelli on two of the stories, while Karasik illustrated the third. The work is already garnering effusive reviews: A “spectacular graphic adaptation … this long-anticipated volume was well worth the wait,” said Publishers Weekly.
Auster’s “New York Trilogy” is a collection of three interconnected stories — ”City of Glass,” “Ghosts,” and “The Locked Room.” The trilogy contains elements of postmodernism and existentialism wrapped in classic detective fiction. It’s a reading experience that moves quickly while also inspiring contemplation.
Karasik first got involved with Auster’s work when he was tapped to oversee the graphic novelization of the first volume, “City of Glass,” in the 1990s; upon publication, the Guardian heralded it as a “stone-cold classic.”
But it took three more decades to complete the other two parts of the trilogy. Karasik will talk about his role in bringing the stories together at last, and also share details of his own career, one so full of coincidences and unexpected twists that “it’s almost as if Auster wrote it,” he laughs.
That career took him from earning a graphic design degree from the Pratt Institute, and working briefly as a graphic designer, before turning to teaching at a secondary school. (That’s where he first met Auster, at a parent-teacher conference.) Karasik also studied cartooning at the School of Visual Arts with legendary cartoonists like Art Spiegelman, author of “Maus,” the only graphic novel yet to win a Pulitzer Prize. Those SVA connections had a profound effect on Karasik’s graphic-novel career.
Besides the new “The New York Trilogy,” Karasik’s books include “I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets!” (2008); it won him his first Eisner Award, the cartooning world’s version of the Oscar. He won his second Eisner for “How to Read Nancy” (2017), which has since become a seminal text in cartooning education programs worldwide. He’s also published in the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Vineyard Gazette.
Tickets for Thursday’s event are on sale now at the M.V. Film Center’s box office and also online at mvfilmsociety.com.
