CIVIL WAR 97
own detective novels, P. I. Max Work. In addition to Auster’s appearance in the graphic
novel as a character, Auster’s child in the book share’s Quinn’s fi rst name and resembles
Quinn’s deceased son. When Quinn goes to the crowded train station to pick up the
elder Stillman’s trail, he must choose between two separate men who match Stillman’s
description. What began as a simple choice to act like a detective becomes for Quinn
an abyss of mirrors and questions. By the end of the book, Quinn is naked on the fl oor
of Peter and Virginia Stillman’s apartment, unrecognizable, fading from reality into an
existential dislocation: “Was the case over, or was he still working on it?” (129).
In addition to bending ideas about identity and genre, this novel stretches the con-
cept of language to new lengths. Before he was arrested, the elder Stillman had written
about the Fall of Man as a detachment of names from things; thus, the Fall of Man was
also the Fall of Language. To test this theory, Stillman kept his young son Peter in com-
plete isolation, with no linguistic contact for the fi rst nine years of the boy’s life. At the
end of the book, Quinn’s notebook about the case is all that’s left of him; what readers
know about the case is limited to what he recorded, and readers can never get closer to
the facts and truths, since Quinn’s notebook selectively and insuffi ciently depicts reality.
In an early scene about language, Peter Stillman, now a damaged adult, provides one
of the most fi guratively abstract scenes in comics when he tells his story to Quinn. Th e
word balloons that contain Peter’s voice emanate fi rst from his mouth, then deeper from
his throat, then from a river, from a Charon character arising with his ferry-boat from the
river, from deep in the throat of the Charon character, from a cave drawing, a sewer grate, a
sink drain, from an old phonograph horn, from a well, from the throat of a baby bird, from
a pile of feces, a broken TV, an inkwell, a teddy bear, from a jail cell, and fi nally from a mar-
ionette’s mouth. After being deprived of language for nine years of his childhood, Peter’s
disembodied voice and nonsensical language seem to have reattached to these various en-
tities; he claims that his language is God’s language, in which words reveal the essence
of things. In another early scene, the lines of a New York apartment building transition
into the lines in a maze, which then transition into the lines and whorls of a fi ngerprint on
the window of Quinn’s apartment. Karasik and Mazzucchelli’s masterful deployment of
symbolic, metaphoric images contribute to the novel’s expansive, abstract nature.
Th e character of Auster provides clues about how to make meaning from this chal-
lenging plot. In a conversation with Quinn, Auster explains his latest essay, which
proposes that Don Quixote’s complex layers of narration—Cervantes claims that it’s
a translation of a translation of a dictation—are but a test of readers’ gullibility. Fur-
ther, Auster claims that people will tolerate all kinds of absurdities so long as they are
rewarded with amusement. With its labyrinthine plot, its existential crises, its layers
of interconnections, and its violations of traditional storytelling devices, City of Glass
off ers intelligent amusement like no other graphic novel.
Anthony D. Baker
CIVIL WAR. Th e Civil War sequence (2006–7) from Marvel Comics was a large scale
event that centered on the seven-issue limited series of that title by writer Mark Millar
