The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster begins with a phone call. So did Paul Karasik’s adaptation of the series.

The first book, City of Glass, was originally published in 1985. It opens on Quinn, a 35-year old writer, receiving a phone call from someone looking for the Paul Auster detective agency. The series plays with the detective genre to explore relationships with literature.

A few years after the book was published, Mr. Karasik received a call from someone looking for Paul Karasik to help adapt the book into a graphic novel. The result of that call has been an over 30-year relationship with The New York Trilogy, which is came to a close this month with the publication of Mr. Karasik’s graphic adaptation of the entire trilogy.

The project required its own detective work, along with the skills of illustrators Lorenzo Mattotti and David Mazzucchelli.

Mr. Karasik is a resident of West Tisbury, whose illustrations frequently appear in The New Yorker, the New York Times and the Vineyard Gazette, among many other publications. He first met Mr. Auster in the mid 1980s, when both men were living in Brooklyn. Mr. Auster’s son, Daniel, was a student of Mr. Karasik’s in Brooklyn Heights, and in preparation for a parent-teacher conference, Mr. Karasik decided to read some of Mr. Auster’s books in an effort to brown nose him when he came in for the conference.

“I always keep a sketch book, and I actually made some sketches of City of Glass, as though it could be a comic,” Mr. Karasik said.

Book was published this week; Mr. Karasik will sign copies at Edgartown Books on April 26.

A few years later, he received a call from his mentor Art Spiegelman, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Maus.

Mr. Spiegelman wanted his help adapting a series of contemporary noir novels into comics. Multiple people had attempted the adaptation, but things weren’t working. Mr. Spiegelman thought it might be in Mr. Karasik’s wheelhouse.

“I was like, well, what’s the book, and he said ‘City of Glass,’” Mr. Karasik recalled. “Well, let me go to the basement and get my sketchbook, because I’ve already started it.”

The graphic adaptation of City of Glass by Mr. Karasik and Mr. Mazzucchelli came out in 1994 and went on to become a cult classic. It would take another 30 years for the entire trilogy — Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy: City of Glass, Ghosts, The Locked Room — to be adapted, arriving in book stores this week on April 8.

Mr. Karasik served as the art director for the project, working with artists Mr. Mazzucchelli and Mr. Mattotti. He also wrote the entire script, which comes directly from the original books. The one rule Mr. Auster gave the creative team was that they could not add any words that were not his. Mr. Karasik focused on translating Mr. Auster’s ideas about literature to a visual format.

“His concern was the written word, so we had to find a way of translating ideas that were centrally about reading and writing to a picture language,” Mr. Karasik said. “Comics have their own vocabulary and their own syntax . . . . We’re using panels and tiers and describing environment visually, but we’re also creating rhythms and patterns, balance and unbalance.”

Mr. Karasik said it took him decades of re-reading the next two books in the trilogy to understand them as well as he understood City of Glass.

Mr. Karasik is a frequent contributor to the New Yorker, New York Times and Vineyard Gazette. — Ray Ewing

“If you’re going to adapt text, the first thing you have to do is have an understanding of what it’s really about and what it means to you,” he said. “I went to Auster, and I said I think this is what the book’s really about, and he said, ‘you got it, go ahead.’”

The Locked Room, the final book in the trilogy, is drawn by Mr. Karasik himself. He had different artists in mind for the work, but Mr. Auster, who was sick at the time, told him to do it.

“I didn’t realize it at the time, but then he kind of put his foot down and said, ‘just draw it.’ I think that’s because he wanted to get the job done. It was stretching out too long,” Mr. Karasik said.

Mr. Auster died in April of last year from complications with lung cancer.

“I’m really sad that he can’t see it but it’s a celebration,” Mr. Karasik said. “There’s a kind of a beautiful, circular end to the story. This is among his very first published work of prose, and this will be among his very final work of prose.” The New York Trilogy came out April 8.

Paul Karasik will be signing books at Edgartown Books from 12 p.m. to 2 p.m. on Saturday, April 26.