It’s no surprise that the title refers to the number of panels on each page that determines the panel structure of the graphic novel, City of Glass. However, it also refers to the visual motif that is the nine panel recurring in the illustrations as different images.
This happens for the first time in the center panel of page 11. Quinn’s window is shaped like the nine panel structure of the page. It is seen smack dab in the middle of the page comprised of nine panels, giving a sense of self-refection in the graphic novel akin to the novel it is an adaptation of. Auster’s novel reflects on the nature of novel writing through Quinn’s notebook, Karasik and Mazzucchelli’s graphic novel reflects on the nature of graphic novels through the motif of the nine panel imagery. This appears again, as a glass paneled door in Stillman Jr’s house, on page 29.
However, it is used more significantly, past merely breaking the fourth wall through self-reflection, through contributing to the plot when it is seen as a visual metaphor for Stillman’s prison, the dark room his father locked him in (page 22). Page 22 cleverly converts the gutter grid into a visual object that is part of the image, namely the metaphorical bars of where Stillman was trapped.
An experimental use of image and perspective is seen on page 60, when a single united image is depicted in the nine panels, broken by the gutter grid. This is not only a stylistic device but also meant to give the impression that we are seeing Quinn through the window in his room, giving the reader’s a physical position and perspective in the story. This is also done on page 37.
There are times the nine panel motif is randomly sneaked into the novel very subtly as well. An example of this would be when it is seen in the form of a telephone key pad (page 100) and post office slots (page 113).
Christina Hendricks
March 31, 2017 — 10:57 pm
I am particularly intrigued by p. 60, which does an interesting thing I think. I agree that it’s like looking into him from the outside, through the window. What the grid then allows is for both a kind of overall, simultaneous image (like Nick Sousanis talks about in Unflattening, but also a sequential reading of the dialogue by going left to right and then down in sequence. It’s an interesting way to show time passing through a single, unified image.
I’m also interested in when and how the 9 panel grid breaks down. As Paul Karasik noted in lecture, it starts to get wonky on p. 127, with more and more space and lack of symmetry between panels after that. Then the panels turn into pages, seemingly pages of the notebook that Quinn is writing, until the notebook runs out of pages and Quinn disappears. Then the grid is gone; the last few pages of the book don’t have the rigidity of the panels with outlines but just the drawings without the lines. Except the very last image, which has a straight border again (and that’s where the notebook shows up again at the end too). Karasik noted that the 9 panel grid connects to the rigidity of Quinn’s life, a regularity that breaks down at the end. It could feel that the penultimate pages are freer, more open. Though I don’t know why the last image might be more rigid again…