Graphic Novel Review: Asterios Polyp

 By Denis Sgouros

Asterios Polyp is a man haunted by the searing embers of his past; just ask the narrator, Ignazio, his still-born twin. Introduced looking broken and disheveled, Asterios lies alone on his king sized bed meant for two. He fidgets with his zippo, sounds of feminine ecstasy emanating from a television set its picture just out of frame, when a clap of thunder sparks the plot. It also sparks a fire in his apartment building. So it goes that on his 50th birthday, Asterios watches from out in the rain as all the mementos of his past go up in flames and he flees. He takes a wad of soggy $10 bills out of his wallet and purchases a greyhound ticket asking “how far would this take me?” The answer is Apogee.

Formerly a renowned “paper architect,” an architect whose designs are lauded but never constructed, Asterios develops a humble life in Apogee. He tends to automobiles as a mechanic and rents the spare room in his boss’s house. However, he is still haunted by the linear outline of his dead brother’s ghost and he still wrestles with the demons of his past. His arrogance; he belittled his students and cruelly mocked them. His indifference; Asterios would abide the diminutive little conductor’s snide innuendoes towards his wife. His loss; Hana, his wife, could no longer tolerate his “holier than thou” attitude nor his unfaltering failure to defend her from the conductor’s subtle but vile advances. She leaves Asterios, burning him more than any blazing fire could. Flashbacks of Asterios’ previous life unveil his self-destructive behavior towards others. It is fitting that he was renowned as a paper architect because it becomes apparent it is not in his nature to create meaningful relationships so much as break others down. Apogee, meaning the highest point in the development of something, is the perfect place for Asterios to begin a new life because it is there that he begins to rebuild himself from the top down.

David Mazzucchelli, previously lauded for his iconic artwork on the award-winning Batman: Year One, tackles his first graphic novel both written and illustrated by himself. The resulting product is both spectacular and unsettling. Unlike the dark and gritty Batman: Year One, this work of Mazzucchelli’s delights in a palette of color beyond black and grey. Vibrant, vivacious coloring shifts at every cornerstone of the plot to best reflect the mood of the protagonist – this graphic novel is worth analyzing if for no other reason than the pretty pictures; but Asterios Polyp really has oh so much more to offer.

I first laid eyes upon Asterios Polyp shelved quietly in the back of the comic book store where I work. With no customers in the store and my hands free, curiosity guided me as I reached out and flipped through the work. Page by page I became aghast and outraged that this graphic novel had been quietly brushed into a corner and was not standing prominently on display as it rightly deserved. The graphic novel medium may tend to be scoffed at by aspiring literary scholars; however, it must be recognized that the feat of welding picture and story together seamlessly has merit in it worth examining and this merit is abundant in Asterios Polyp. Plot and genre are not what make literary classics so timeless and worth studying. Rather, literature scholars argue that it is the manner and the method by which story and plot are carved onto the pages of books that make works worthwhile; Heart of Darkness for its symbolism, Lolita for its unreliable narrator and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man for its… The point being, what makes certain works of literature academic is that these works emphasize the manner in which the story is constructed rather than just the plot - something that Asterios Polyp accomplishes just as well as the classics and in such a unique manner worth studying.

Ignazio, the dead brother of Asterios as well as the narrator, poses to the reader the possibility that reality is perceived as a reflection of ourselves. Ergo, reality is subjectively different for each and every one of us. This is artfully exemplified within the confines of this work. Characters that are oriented towards a life of organization and the mathematics are drawn in sequences of high emotion as geometric facsimiles more resembling that of an artist’s wooden doll than a human being. Characters that are merely sheaths for the pressure and expectations placed upon them by others are drawn raw, emotionally, and scratched, as opposed to constructed, onto the page. When Asterios and Hana are enraptured by their love and in sync with one another their two different perceptions of the world literally meld on the page as the two different art styles that compose them combine to make them fully functioning, three-dimensional human beings. At their best, they literally complete one another. As their worst, they push each other away and plunge further into the depths of their own rendering of the world. Asterios becomes a cold, calculating machine and Hana is sketched as a blur of red lines.

The beauty of this work is that every page has something that reflects characterization in some manner, be it appearance, word bubbles, or even the construction of comic panels on the page. Asterios speaks with precisely crafted word bubbles, each a perfect square reflecting his orientation towards architecture. However, the music composer Kalvin Kohoutek speaks in word bubbles framed as though they were bars in sheet music with a font that can only be described as rhythmic.

A New York Times notable book of 2009, Asterios Polyp will grip you tightly with both its narrative and artistic display. If this review failed to craft the proper picture of the novel for you in your mind then I implore you to seek out this work and first glance at it. Then, flip through it until you bury your nose in it, escape from reality, and enter the life and times of Asterios Polyp.