On form and content...

Looking back over the interview with Paul Karasik on the Indy Magazine link, I found Karasik’s statement about the layout of City of Glass very interesting. He said, “the grid got to serve double duty there as both backbone and as a symbol unto itself […] as well as holding the story together […] ultimately it also allowed the story to fall apart.” Keeping in mind that City of Glass was adapted from a novel, I was thinking about the ways in which form often mirrors content in novels and how that enhances the text as a whole. The structure of the graphic novel varies from a tight controlled nine panel grid to a full page, borderless image with panels staggered across the page, as on pages 130-131. The deterioration of the grid mirrors Quinn’s descent into madness and losing the already precarious sense of reality and identity that he had in the beginning. Karasik even says that Quinn’s “state of mind and pent-up life […] kind of unravels, to the point where the panels themselves unravel.” We get a preview of the impending dissolution of the form as Quinn reads Peter Stillman’s book about the breakdown of language on page 39. (I mentioned this section in my first post on COG, but in a slightly different context. )

Page 39 looks at Stillman’s theory about the separation of language from God and illustrates how words and images were interchangeable before the Fall. This “fall from grace” of language led to a disparity between word and image and this is one of the several smaller breakdowns that prepares the reader for the eventual breakdown of the system of the grid that was holding the story in place up till the end.