Jack Kerouac | Panzner Illustrated on the Road

The Illustrated On the Road

Written by Jack Kerouac, illustrated by
Christopher Panzner

by Michael Millner

In the late 1940s and early ‘50s, Kerouac made four trips crisscrossing North America by automobile. His notebooks from these journeys became the foundation for On the Road. In The Illustrated On the Road, the artist Christopher Panzner imagines the novel as fifty-five postcards from the road.

Panzner's postcards are many things. As with all postcards, image and word, official stamps and unique signatures, mix together and speak to each other. Panzner's black ink line combines with fields of color. We are reminded that postcards are letters both public and private. The old mixes with the new in Panzner's work — social realism and modern advertising, the old country highway markers and the new interstate signs, the postcard and the digital image. There are symbols and codes that remain mysterious. These and much more are Panzner's themes — and Kerouac’s too.

Christopher Panzner is an American artist living and working in France.

All images © Christopher Panzner. All Kerouac text and Kerouac likeness copyright the Jack Kerouac Estate. This project has been approved by the Estate. Neither images nor text may be used without permission.
The Illustrated On the Road

Written by Jack Kerouac, illustrated by
Christopher Panzner

1.

“You saw in the way he stood bobbing his head, always looking down, nodding, like a young boxer to instructions, to make you think he was listening to every word, throwing in a thousand‘ Yeses’ and‘
That’s rights’.”
The Illustrated On the Road

Written by Jack Kerouac, illustrated by
Christopher Panzner

2.

“… and I shambled after as I’ve been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn…”
The Illustrated On the Road

Written by Jack Kerouac, illustrated by
Christopher Panzner

3.

“Somewhere along the line I knew there’d be girls, visions, everything; somewhere along the line the pearl would be handed to me.”
The Illustrated On the Road

Written by Jack Kerouac, illustrated by
Christopher Panzner

4.

“’If you want to go to Chicago you’d do better going across the Holland Tunnel in New York and head for PIttsburgh,’ and I knew he was right. It was my dream that screwed up, the stupid hearthside idea that it would be wonderful to follow one great red line across America instead of trying various roads and routes.”
The Illustrated On the Road

Written by Jack Kerouac, illustrated by
Christopher Panzner

5.

“I went to sit in the bus station and think this over. I ate another apple pie and ice cream; that’s practically all I ate all the way across the country, I knew it was nutritious and it was delicious, of course.”
The Illustrated On the Road

Written by Jack Kerouac, illustrated by
Christopher Panzner

6.

“I wasn’t scared; I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost. I was half-way across America, at the dividing line between the East of my youth and the West of my future, and maybe that’s why it happened right there and then, that strange red afternoon.”
The Illustrated On the Road

Written by Jack Kerouac, illustrated by
Christopher Panzner

7.

“We got a brief ride from a wealthy rancher in a ten-gallon hat, who said the valley of the Platte was as great as the Nile Valley of Egypt, and as he said so I saw the great trees in the distance that snaked with the riverbed and the great verdant fields around It, and almost agreed with him.”
The Illustrated On the Road

Written by Jack Kerouac, illustrated by
Christopher Panzner

8.

“How that truck disposed of the Nebraska nub—the nub that sticks out over Colorado! And soon I realized that I was actually at last over Colorado, though not officially in it, but looking southwest toward Denver itself a few hundred miles away. I yelled for joy. We passed the bottle. The great blazing stars came out, the far-receding sand hills got dim. I felt like an arrow that could shoot out all the way.”
The Illustrated On the Road

Written by Jack Kerouac, illustrated by
Christopher Panzner

9.

“’Hell’s bells, it’s Wild West Week,’ said Slim.”
The Illustrated On the Road

Written by Jack Kerouac, illustrated by
Christopher Panzner

10.

“I pictured myself in a Denver bar that night, with all the gang, and in their eyes I would be strange and ragged and like the Prophet who has walked across the land to bring the dark Word, and the only Word I had was ‘Wow!’”
The Illustrated On the Road

Written by Jack Kerouac, illustrated by
Christopher Panzner

11.

“Carlo’s basement apartment was on Grant Street in an old red-brick rooming house near a church. You went down an alley, down some stone steps, opened an old raw door, and went through a kind of cellar till you came to his board door. It was like the room of a Russian saint: one bed, a candle burning, stone walls that oozed moisture, and a crazy makeshift ikon of some kind that he had made.”
The Illustrated On the Road

Written by Jack Kerouac, illustrated by
Christopher Panzner

12.

“The night was getting more and more frantic. I wished Dean and Carlo were there—then I realized they’d be out of place and unhappy. They were like the man with the dungeon stone and the gloom, rising from underground, the sordid hipsters of America, a new beat generation that I was slowly joining.”
The Illustrated On the Road

Written by Jack Kerouac, illustrated by
Christopher Panzner

13.

“When I found him in Mill City that morning he had fallen on the beat and evil days that come to young guys in their middle twenties.”
The Illustrated On the Road

Written by Jack Kerouac, illustrated by
Christopher Panzner

14.

“The strange thing was that next door to Remi lived a Negro called Mr. Snow whose laugh, I swear on the Bible, was positively and finally the one greatest laugh in all this world.”
The Illustrated On the Road

Written by Jack Kerouac, illustrated by
Christopher Panzner

15.

“He wiped his face. ‘Whoo! I’ve told you time and time again, Sal, that we’re buddies, and we’re in this thing together. There’s just no two ways about it. The Dostioffskis, the cops, the Lee Anns, all the evil skulls of this world, are out for our skin. It’s up to us to see that nobody pulls any schemes on us. They’ve got a lot more up their sleeves beside a dirty arm. Remember that. You can’t teach the old maestro a new tune’.”
The Illustrated On the Road

Written by Jack Kerouac, illustrated by
Christopher Panzner

16.

“Meanwhile I began going to Frisco more often; I tried everything in the books to make a girl. I even spent a whole night with a girl on a park bench, till dawn, without success. She was a blonde from Minnesota. There were plenty of queers. Several times I went to San Fran with my gun and when a queer approached me in a bar john I took out the gun and said, ‘Eh? Eh? What’s that you say?’ He bolted. I’ve never understood why I did that; I knew queers all over the country. It was just the loneliness of San Francisco and the fact that I had a gun. I had to show it to someone. I walked by a jewelry store and had the sudden impulse to shoot up the window, take out the finest rings and bracelets, and run to give them to Lee Ann. Then we could flee to Nevada together. The time was coming for me to leave Frisco or I’d go crazy.”
The Illustrated On the Road

Written by Jack Kerouac, illustrated by
Christopher Panzner

17.

“I spun around till I was dizzy; I thought I’d fall down as in a dream, clear off the precipice. Oh where is the girl I love? I thought, and looked everywhere, as I had looked everywhere in the little world below. And before me was the great raw bulge and bulk of my American continent; somewhere far across, gloomy, crazy New York was throwing up its cloud of dust and brown steam. There is something brown and holy about the East; and California is white like washlines and emptyheaded—at least that’s what I thought then.”
The Illustrated On the Road

Written by Jack Kerouac, illustrated by
Christopher Panzner

18.

“A pain stabbed my heart, as it did every time I saw a girl I loved who was going the opposite direction in this too-big world. The announcer called the LA bus, I picked up my bag and got on, and who should be sitting there but the Mexican girl. I dropped right opposite her and began scheming right off. I was so lonely, so sad, so tired, so quivering, so broken, so beat, that I got up my courage, the courage necessary to approach a strange girl, and acted.”
The Illustrated On the Road

Written by Jack Kerouac, illustrated by
Christopher Panzner

19.

“It was no soap anywhere. Hollywood Boulevard was a great, screaming frenzy of cars; there were minor accidents at least once a minute; everybody was rushing off toward the farthest palm—and beyond that was the desert and nothingness.”
The Illustrated On the Road

Written by Jack Kerouac, illustrated by
Christopher Panzner

20.

“’Sure, baby, mañana’. It was always mañana. For the next week that was all I heard— mañana, a lovely word and that probably means heaven.”
The Illustrated On the Road

Written by Jack Kerouac, illustrated by
Christopher Panzner

21.

“’See you in New York, Terry.’ I said. She was supposed to drive to New York in a month with her brother. But we both knew she wouldn’t make it. At a hundred feet I turned to look at her. She just walked on back to the shack, carrying my breakfast plate in one hand. I bowed my head and watched her. Well, lackadaddy, I was on the road again.”
The Illustrated On the Road

Written by Jack Kerouac, illustrated by
Christopher Panzner

22.

“I had a dollar left. I sat on the low cement wall in back of a Hollywood parking lot and made the sandwiches. As I labored at this absurd task, great Kleig lights of a Hollywood première stabbed in the sky, that humming West Coast sky. All around me were the noises of the crazy gold-coast city. And this was my Hollywood career—this was my last night in Hollywood, and I was spreading mustard on my lap in back of a parking-lot john.”
The Illustrated On the Road

Written by Jack Kerouac, illustrated by
Christopher Panzner

23.

“Isn’t it true that you start your life a sweet child believing in everything under your father’s roof? Then comes the day of the Laodiceans, when you know you are wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked, and with the visage of a gruesome grieving ghost you go shuddering through nightmare life.”
The Illustrated On the Road

Written by Jack Kerouac, illustrated by
Christopher Panzner

24.

“Southerners don’t like madness the least bit, not Dean’s kind. He paid absolutely no attention to them. The madness of Dean had bloomed into a weird flower.”
The Illustrated On the Road

Written by Jack Kerouac, illustrated by
Christopher Panzner

25.

“’What is the meaning of this voyage to New York? What kind of sordid business are you on now? I mean, man, whither goest thou? Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?’”
The Illustrated On the Road

Written by Jack Kerouac, illustrated by
Christopher Panzner

26.

“He used the word ‘pure’ a great deal. I had never dreamed Dean would become a mystic.”
The Illustrated On the Road

Written by Jack Kerouac, illustrated by
Christopher Panzner

27.

“‘There he is! That’s him! Old God! Old God Shearing! Yes! Yes! Yes!’ And Shearing was conscious of the madman behind him, he could hear every one of Dean’s gasps and imprecations, he could sense it though he couldn’t see. ‘That’s right!’ Dean said. ‘Yes!’ Shearing smiled; he rocked. Shearing rose from the piano, dripping with sweat; these were his great 1949 days before he came cool and commercial. When he was gone Dean pointed to the empty piano seat. ‘God’s empty chair,’
he said.”
The Illustrated On the Road

Written by Jack Kerouac, illustrated by
Christopher Panzner

28.

“’Whooee!’ yelled Dean. ‘Here
we go!’”
The Illustrated On the Road

Written by Jack Kerouac, illustrated by
Christopher Panzner

29.

“We’d all learned from him. He was a gray, non-descript-looking fellow you wouldn’t notice on the street, unless you looked closer and saw his mad, bony skull with its strange youthfulness—a Kansas minister with exotic, phenomenal fires and mysteries. He had studied medicine in Vienna; had studied anthropology, read everything; and now he was settling to his life’s work, which was the study of things themselves in the street of life and the night.”
The Illustrated On the Road

Written by Jack Kerouac, illustrated by
Christopher Panzner

30.

“At one point we got stuck at a crossroads and stopped the car anyway. Dean turned off the headlamps. We were surrounded by a great forest of viny trees in which we could almost hear the slither of a million copperheads. The only thing we could see was the red ampere button on the Hudson dashboard.”
The Illustrated On the Road

Written by Jack Kerouac, illustrated by
Christopher Panzner

31.

“We were driving west into the sun; it fell in through the windshield. ‘Open your belly as we drive into it.’ Marylou complied; unfuddyduddied, so did I. We sat in the front seat, all three. Marylou took out cold cream and applied it to us for kicks. Every now and then a big truck zoomed by; the driver in high cab caught a glimpse of a golden beauty sitting naked with two men; you could see them swerve a moment as they vanished in our rear-view window.”
The Illustrated On the Road

Written by Jack Kerouac, illustrated by
Christopher Panzner

32.

“Suddenly Dean was saying good-by. He was bursting to see Camille and find out what had happened. Marylou and I stood dumbly in the street and watched him drive away. ‘You see what a bastard he is?’ said Marylou. ‘Dean will leave you out in the cold any time it’s in his interest’.”
The Illustrated On the Road

Written by Jack Kerouac, illustrated by
Christopher Panzner

33.

“I said one of us had to die. She said no. I beat my head on the wall. Man, I was out of my mind. She’ll tell you, she talked me out of it.”
The Illustrated On the Road

Written by Jack Kerouac, illustrated by
Christopher Panzner

34.

“Resolutely and firmly I repeated what I said—‘Come to New York with me; I’ve got the money.’ I looked at him; my eyes were watering with embarrassment and tears. Still he stared at me. Now his eyes were blank and looking through me. It was probably the pivotal point of our friendship when he realized I had actually spent some hours thinking about him and his troubles, and he was trying to place that in his tremendously involved and tormented mental categories. Something clicked in both of us.”
The Illustrated On the Road

Written by Jack Kerouac, illustrated by
Christopher Panzner

35.

“’I think Marylou was very, very wise leaving you, Dean,’ said Galatea. ‘For years now you haven’t had any sense of responsibility for anyone. You’ve done so many awful things I don’t know what to say to you’… And in fact that was the point, and they all sat around looking at Dean with lowered and hating eyes, and he stood on the carpet in the middle of them and giggled—he just giggled. He made a little dance. His bandage was getting dirtier all the time; it began to flop and unroll. I suddenly realized that Dean, by virtue of his enormous series of sins, was becoming the Idiot, the Imbecile, the Saint of the lot.”
The Illustrated On the Road

Written by Jack Kerouac, illustrated by
Christopher Panzner

36.

“He was alone in the doorway, digging the street. Bitterness, recriminations, advice, morality, sadness—everything was behind him, and ahead of him was the ragged and ecstatic joy of pure being.”
The Illustrated On the Road

Written by Jack Kerouac, illustrated by
Christopher Panzner

37.

“’Stay with it, man!’”
The Illustrated On the Road

Written by Jack Kerouac, illustrated by
Christopher Panzner

38.

“Holy flowers floating in the air, were all these tired faces in the dawn of Jazz America.”
The Illustrated On the Road

Written by Jack Kerouac, illustrated by
Christopher Panzner

39.

“I wanted to know what ‘IT’ meant. ‘Ah, well’—Dean laughed—‘now you’re asking me impon-de-rables—ahem!’”
The Illustrated On the Road

Written by Jack Kerouac, illustrated by
Christopher Panzner

40.

“Dean headed pellmell for the mighty wall of Berthoud Pass that stood a hundred miles ahead on the roof of the world, a tremendous Gibraltrian door shrouded in clouds. He took Berthoud Pass like a June bug—same as at Tehachapi, cutting off the motor and floating it, passing everybody and never halting the rhythmic advance that the mountains themselves intended, till he overlooked the great hot plain of Denver again—and Dean was home.”
The Illustrated On the Road

Written by Jack Kerouac, illustrated by
Christopher Panzner

41.

“’Sal, Frankie, I’m going out and get a real good car this time and we’ll all go and with Tony too’ (the spastic saint) ‘and have a big drive in the mountains.’ And he rushed out. Simultaneously a cop rushed in and said a car stolen from downtown Denver was parked in the driveway. People discussed it in knots. From the window I saw Dean jump into the nearest car and roar off, and not a soul noticed him. A few minutes later he was back in an entirely different car, a brand-new convertible.”
The Illustrated On the Road

Written by Jack Kerouac, illustrated by
Christopher Panzner

42.

“Everything was in a horrible mess, all of Denver, my woman friend, cars, children, poor Frankie, the living room splattered with beer and cans, and I tried to sleep. A cricket kept me awake for some time. At night in this part of the West the stars, as I had seen them in Wyoming, are big as roman candles and as lonely as the Prince of the Dharma who’s lost his ancestral grove and journeys across the spaces between points in the handle of the Big Dipper, trying to find it again.“
The Illustrated On the Road

Written by Jack Kerouac, illustrated by
Christopher Panzner

43.

“The car was muddy brown, a whole fender crushed. The farmer charged us five dollars. His daughters watched in the rain. The prettiest, shyest one hid far back in the field to watch and she had good reason because she was absolutely and finally the most beautiful girl Dean and I ever saw in all our lives. She was about sixteen, and had Plains complexion like wild roses, and the bluest eyes, the most lovely hair, and the modesty and quickness of a wild antelope. At every look from us she flinched. She stood there with the immense winds that blew clear down from Saskatchewan knocking her hair about her lovely head like shrouds, living curls of them. She blushed and blushed.”
The Illustrated On the Road

Written by Jack Kerouac, illustrated by
Christopher Panzner

44.

“As we passed drowsy Illinois towns where the people are so conscious of Chicago gangs that pass like this in limousines every day, we were a strange sight: all of us unshaven, the driver bare-chested, two bums, myself in the back seat, holding on to a strap and my head leaned back on the cushion looking at the countryside with an imperious eye—just like a new California gang come to contest the spoils of Chicago, a band of desperados escaped from the prisons of the Utah moon.”
The Illustrated On the Road

Written by Jack Kerouac, illustrated by
Christopher Panzner

45.

“Suddenly Dean stared into the darkness of a corner beyond the bandstand and said, ‘Sal, God has arrived’.”
The Illustrated On the Road

Written by Jack Kerouac, illustrated by
Christopher Panzner

46.

“The picture was Singing Cowboy Eddie Dean and his gallant white horse Bloop, that was number one; number two double-feature film was George Raft, Sidney Greenstreet, and Peter Lorre in a picture about Istanbul. We saw both of these things six times each during the night. We saw them waking, we heard them sleeping, we sensed them dreaming, we were permeated completely with the strange Gray Myth of the West and the weird dark Myth of the East when morning came. All my actions since then have been dictated automatically to my subconscious by this horrible osmotic experience.”
The Illustrated On the Road

Written by Jack Kerouac, illustrated by
Christopher Panzner

47.

“Dean took out other pictures. I realized these were all the snapshots which our children would look at someday with wonder, thinking their parents had lived smooth, well-ordered, stabilized-within-the-photo lives and got up in the morning to walk proudly on the sidewalks of life, never dreaming the raggedy madness and riot of our actual lives, our actual night, the hell of it, the senseless nightmare road. All if it inside endless and beginningless emptiness. Pitiful forms of ignorance. ‘Good-by, good-by.’ Dean walked off in the long red dusk.”
The Illustrated On the Road

Written by Jack Kerouac, illustrated by
Christopher Panzner

48.

“It came like wrath to the West. I knew Dean had gone mad again.”
The Illustrated On the Road

Written by Jack Kerouac, illustrated by
Christopher Panzner

49.

“’We’ll go coughing and bouncing down to Mexico; it’ll take us days and days.’ I looked over the map: a total of over a thousand miles, mostly Texas, to the border at Laredo, and then another 767 miles through all Mexico to the great city near the cracked Isthmus and Oaxacan heights. I couldn’t imagine this trip. It was the most fabulous of all. It was no longer east-west, but magic south.”
The Illustrated On the Road

Written by Jack Kerouac, illustrated by
Christopher Panzner

50.

“’Look-at-those-cats!’”
The Illustrated On the Road

Written by Jack Kerouac, illustrated by
Christopher Panzner

51.

“Presently Victor’s tall brother came ambling along with some weed piled on a page of newspaper. He dumped it on Victor’s lap and leaned casually on the door of the car to nod and smile at us and say ‘Hallo.’ Dean nodded and smiled pleasantly at him. Nobody talked; it was fine. Victor proceeded to roll the biggest bomber anybody ever saw. He rolled (using brown bag paper) what amounted to a tremendous Corona cigar of tea. It was huge. Dean stared at it, popeyed. Victor casually lit it and passed it around. To drag on this thing was like leaning over a chimney and inhaling.”
The Illustrated On the Road

Written by Jack Kerouac, illustrated by
Christopher Panzner

52.

“In a few minutes half that portion of town was at the windows, watching the Americanos dance with the gals.”
The Illustrated On the Road

Written by Jack Kerouac, illustrated by
Christopher Panzner

53.

“Suddenly I heard the dogs barking furiously across the dark, and then I heard the faint clip-clop of a horse’s hooves. It came closer and closer. What kind of mad rider in the night would this be? Then I saw an apparition: a wild horse, white as a ghost, came trotting down the road directly toward Dean. Behind him the dogs yammered and contended. I couldn’t see them, they were dirty old jungle dogs, but the horse was white as snow and immense and almost phosphorescent and easy to see.”
The Illustrated On the Road

Written by Jack Kerouac, illustrated by
Christopher Panzner

54.

“The shepherds appeared, dressed as in first times, in long flowing robes, the women carrying golden bundles of flax, the men staves. Under great trees on the shimmering desert the shepherds sat and convened, and the sheep moiled in the sun and raised dust beyond. ‘Man, man,’ I yelled to Dean, ‘wake up and see the shepherds, wake up and see the golden world that Jesus came from, with your own eyes you can tell!’
The Illustrated On the Road

Written by Jack Kerouac, illustrated by
Christopher Panzner

55.

“Dean, ragged in a motheaten overcoat he brought specially for the freezing temperatures of the East, walked off alone, and the last I saw of him he rounded the corner of Seventh Avenue, eyes on the street ahead, and bent to it again.”
The Illustrated On the Road

Written by Jack Kerouac, illustrated by Christopher Panzner

The idea was to create a watercolor/ink carnet de voyage (travel sketchbook or “Moleskine,” in English) to make it appear to have been done on the road while travelling with the real people in the book. All of the real people—and in color—were used to show who they corresponded to in the book for each of the 55 illustrations (with younger versions of each to correspond to their age in 1947-50). Famous musicians like George Shearing and Perez Prado from the era as well as other Jazz stars were included. Images of the real people were as authentic as I could find according to my exhausting research.

The location of each illustration shows where Jack was when he wrote the quote from On the Road and includes on what trip he based the experience from: Summer 1947/^1st trip, Winter 1949/^2nd trip, Spring 1949/^3rd trip, Spring 1950/^4th trip. The roads he was on for each quote are also included—based on maps of his trips—or the city seal of the big cities he spent time at or passed by on his trips (New York, Denver, San Francisco, Los Angeles, New Orleans, Detroit, Chicago, etc.) All of the cars, buses, trucks, tractors, trains, buildings, etc. are authentic as well as the clothing, props, decorations, signs, logos, advertisements, street signs, etc. from historical information from 1947-1950 or before.

All of the illustrations were done with watercolor and ink. The date for when the series was finished (April 28th, 2019), a stamp of the Eiffel Tower (since all of the illustrations were done in Paris), the original dimensions of the illustrations (31 X 41 cm/12 X 16 in), a “CMYK” reference for accurate color correction, a corresponding number of the fifty-five works, signed (with my own Asian stamp) with “APPROVAL” of the artist’s proof and “FINAL” for the master, and “carnet de voyage.”

Some effects like lightning, rain, headlights, street lamps, snow, sparks, etc. were added in Photoshop (with color correction on all of the illustrations to give them uniformity and continuity.)

I also used Jack Kerouac’s handwriting—fortunately, he always wrote in block letters—from his letters and notes to make an alphabet and then used that to quote him in his own handwriting. Jack Kerouac’s date of birth is also on each illustration (1922-1969) with a logo to commemorate the fiftieth year (2019) after his passing.

These illustrations are my homage to the mastery of Jack Kerouac and to his classic, On the Road. I am especially grateful to The Jack Kerouac Estate’s participation in the presentation of this series. My special thanks to UMASS Lowell’s Dr. Michael Millner for his wonderful dedication to bring it to the public and to Wyeth Stiles, of In Flight Studio, for creating the online design.

Christopher Panzner is an American artist originally from East Islip (Long Island), New York. The Illustrated On the Road is his fourth illustrated book in addition to having illustrated a number of poetry books. He lives and works in Paris with his French wife, Sophie, and two children, Emma and Maximilien. He is currently working on an animated feature film, the illustrated Night of the Living Dead.