Comic Critique Saturday :: Asterios Polyp
This is a pick for a couple of reasons:
- Amazing Graphics
- Chilling Storyline (right through the end)
- It will be the top literature for 2009
- If you are a collector, it is already worth more than orginally priced
- If you want it . . . you have got to hunt for it. The 1st printing is done and already most shops (including online) are sold out. It is now an Amazon or eBay market.
Story and art by David Mazzucchelli.
Meet Asterios Polyp: middle-aged, architect and teacher, aesthete and womanizer, whose life is upended when his New York City apartment goes up in flames. He leaves the city and relocates to a small town in the American heartland.
But what is this “escape” really about?
As the story shifts from present to past, the pieces of Polyp’s life come together and we meet Hana: a sweet, smart, first-generation Japanese American artist with whom he had made a blissful life. But now she’s gone; what has happened to her?
Mazzucchelli’s extraordinarily imagined world of brilliantly conceived eccentrics, sharply observed social mores, and deftly depicted asides on everything from design theory to the nature of human perception becomes a masterpiece: a great American graphic novel.
Other Reviews :
“Finally, after a decade of silence, Mazzucchelli has returned with his own graphic novel, Asterios Polyp: sprawling, trippy, moving, and a hell of a lot of fun.Almost without realizing it, we slowly begin rooting for Asterios, and hard. A serial overthinker, he lives much of his life in his own head. So Mazzucchelli takes us there, repeatedly, with perfect clarity – it’s as if John Updike had discovered a bag of art supplies and LSD. Elegant, deceptively simple line work and nearly subliminal color symbolism make everything go down like candy. The narrative comes back to earth for a profoundly satisfying climax, but you’ll want to keep turning pages – all the way back to the beginning, for another read.” ~Entertainment Weekly
“For decades, Mazzucchelli has been a master without a masterpiece. Now he has one. His long-awaited graphic novel is a huge, knotty marvel, the comics equivalent of a Pynchon or Gaddis novel, and radically different from anything he’s done before. There are fascinating digressions on aesthetic philosophy, as well as some very broad satire, but the core of the book is Mazzucchelli’s odyssey of style-every major character in the book is associated with a specific drawing style and visual motifs, and the design, color scheme and formal techniques of every page change to reinforce whatever’s happening in the story. Although Mazzucchelli stacks the deck-few characters besides Polyp and his inamorata, the impossibly good-hearted sculptor Hana, are more than caricatures-the book’s bravado and mastery make it riveting even when it’s frustrating, and provide a powerful example of how comics use visual information to illustrate complex, interconnected topics. Easily one of the best books of 2009 already.” – Publishers Weekly
Where to Get It?
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My Favorite Comic Shop |
