Paul Karasik

Life and career

In the early 1980s, after having graduated from the Pratt Institute, Karasik studied briefly at the School of Visual Arts (SVA) in New York, where he was a student of Will Eisner, Harvey Kurtzman, and Art Spiegelman.

In 1981, Spiegelman, with his wife, Françoise Mouly, invited Karasik to become associate editor of their seminal international comics and graphics revue, RAW, a position Karasik held until 1985. During this period, originally under the auspices of Spiegelman and SVA, Karasik co-edited with fellow cartoonist Mark Newgarden three issues of Bad News, which ran work by many of the RAW cartoonists, including Kim Deitch, Ben Katchor, Richard McGuire, and Jerry Moriarty. He and Newgarden wrote the essay "How to Read Nancy," originally published in The Best of Ernie Bushmiller’s Nancy by Brian Walker (Henry Holt/Comicana, 1988). Karasik and Mark Newgarden expanded the "How to Read Nancy" essay to book-length, to be published by Fantagraphics Books as a companion to their multi-volume Nancy reprint series.

In 1994 Karasik collaborated with David Mazzucchelli to adapt Paul Auster’s novel City of Glass into a full-length comic. This adaptation was cited by The Comics Journal as one of the "100 Best Comics of the 20th Century". Translated into more than a dozen languages, the graphic novel has been exhibited in Italy. It was excerpted in The Norton Anthology of Post-Modern American Fiction.

Karasik's book, The Ride Together: A Memoir of Autism in the Family (2004), co-written with his sister, Judy Karasik, employed the format of alternating prose and comics chapters to tell their story of growing up with an older brother with autism. The Ride Together was named the Best Literary Work of the Year by the Autism Society of America.

Karasik co-edited of Masters of American Comics (2005), the coffee-table companion catalog to the first major American exhibition of comics, co-sponsored by the Hammer Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art.

His anthology highlighting the work of the (previously) obscure Golden Age cartoonist Fletcher Hanks, I Shall Destroy All The Civilized Planets (Fantagraphics, 2007), won a 2008 Eisner Award, the highest honor in the industry. A second volume, You Shall Die By Your Own Evil Creation (Fantagraphics, 2009), when combined with the first, comprises the complete works of Fletcher Hanks. Turn Loose Our Death Rays and Kill Them All!, a volume combining the two earlier books with some added material, was published in 2016.

As Program Director of the comics festival Comic Arts Brooklyn for two years, Karasik conducted interviews with Paul Auster, Charles Burns, Roz Chast, Jeff Smith, Art Spiegelman, et al.

Paul Karasik’s gag cartoons have appeared in The New Yorker.

Teaching

Also a teacher, Karasik has taught at Packer Collegiate Institute, the Rhode Island School of Design and the School of Visual Arts in the United States, and abroad at the EESI school in Angoulême, France, The Animation Workshop in Viborg, Denmark, and, at the Scuola Internazionale di Comics in Rome and Florence, Italy. He has given workshops and lectured at The Center for Cartoon Studies, and given writing seminars at Bennington College, American University, Princeton University, Penn State, and Wheaton College.

Personal life

Karasik grew up in the Washington, D.C. area. He moved to Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts, in 1989. Karasik's wife, Marsha Winsryg, is an accomplished pastel artist and painter.