(Various other artists, with their media and aesthetic philosophies, turn up too, although some get more respect than others: Mazzucchelli particularly has it in for Willy Ilium, a snooty, priapic little choreographer whose work consists of postmodern appropriation and recontextualization.) Characters constantly digress into discussions of religion, political history, watch mechanisms and practically the entire trivium and quadrivium. A lot of “Asterios Polyp” consists of digressive flashbacks to its protagonist’s relationship with soft-hearted Hana, a go-with-the-flow sculptor who makes organic forms out of found materials.
That’s only the present-day section of the story, though.
Even his head is drawn as a two-dimensional construct: half a perfect circle, interrupted by two equally proportioned curves.Ĭredit.
Asterios himself is a metaphorical cyclops, lacking the ability to perceive emotional depth. (“Anything that is not functional is merely decorative,” he declares.) When Polyp’s father came to America, we’re told, “an exasperated Ellis Island official had cut the family name in half.” That name would have to have been Polyphemus, as in the Cyclops. The book is a satirical comedy of remarriage, a treatise on aesthetics and design and ontology, a late-life Künstlerroman, a Novel of Ideas with two capital letters, and just about the most schematic work of fiction this side of that other big book that constantly alludes to the “Odyssey.”Īsterios Polyp himself is adorably dislikable, an egocentric, condescending, irritable “paper architect” and academic who sees everything in terms of dualities. The tension between formalist rigor and emotional subtlety is not just the theme (and method) of the cartoonist David Mazzucchelli’s decade-in-the-making opus it’s basically the plot. It took creative giants to make it work in literature, music and fine art, and many comics artists of the last few decades who’ve made formal and stylistic exploration the chief focus of their work have had to neglect the pleasures - and audiences - of storytelling.Įnter “Asterios Polyp”: a big, proud, ambitious chunk of a graphic novel, with modernism on its mind and a perfectly geometrical chip on its shoulder. But explicitly presenting style as content? That’s always trickier. Cartoonists are naturally stylistic chameleons, selecting and altering visual techniques to serve their subjects.
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