It’s a book to marvel at, and a book to argue with.

For want of a better word, we must call it love.Īsterios Polyp is a book to make you think: About love, about talent, about hubris, about fate, about design, about *comics*. Over the course of one conversation, though, each of their worlds become influenced by the other’s, until, in the final panel, we see that their two worlds have become one elements of each have combined to create something new. When the two first meet, we see how each of their perceptions completely color their surroundings (and note here that “color” isn’t simply a metaphor). His future wife, Hana Sonnenschein, is delineated with delicate crosshatching, with no solid outlines, reflecting her own tentative approach to her career and her less rigid, more all-encompassing view of the world. In the example below, Asterios Polyp is drawn in a flat, modernist style, reminiscent of his utilitarian approach to design as well as his sharp, unwavering – and often pig-headed – decisiveness. In certain instances, characters are drawn in a variety of styles, each one a representation of their own worldview. The book’s narrator, Asterios’ dead-at-birth twin brother, puts the question to us verbally, while Mazzucchelli the cartoonist presents the possibilities visually. Suffice it to say that Mazzucchelli takes a character who is, at first glance, a smug, self-absorbed ass, and slowly reveals depths to his character which make you at least pause to reconsider your initial impressions.Īlong the way, you’re asked to consider just how possible it is for people to change their outlook on not just another person but the world in general. Its eponymous “hero” is buffeted about by fate, taken for a turn on Fortune’s wheel, tested like Job, and ultimately found – ah, but that would be telling. A bravura piece of formalist comics storytelling, Asterios Polyp is nevertheless a story rich in heart. If writing about music is like dancing about architecture, what is writing about a comic about an architect? A damned difficult business, if that book is David Mazzucchelli’s Asterios Polyp.

Polyp comic