Broken Frontier

Whatever happened to ... David Mazzuchelli? One of the comic medium's contemporary visionaries disappeared from the scene after he re-invented his approach to comics with the graphic novel adaptation of Paul Auster's literary novel City of Glass. At cocktail parties across the land rose the question 'Whatever happened to David Mazzuchelli?' And just when rumors of weird deviant behavior of gutted fish and electrical wires finally started to die down, the comics market was knocked flat on its back with 344 pages of new Mazzuchelli entitled Asterios Polyp. Yes, 344 pages.

Meet Asterios Polyp: middle-aged, meagerly successful architect and teacher, aesthete and womanizer, whose life is wholly upended when his New York City apartment goes up in flames. In a tenacious daze, he leaves the city and relocates to a small town in the American heartland. But what is this “escape” really about?

Well what it is not about is solely the story of a man who sets out to find himself and the American heartland, this is not a Neil Gaiman novel. But what it is about ... that's another pair of sleeves said the one-armed tailor. Douglas Wolk coined Asterios Polyp as David Mazzuchelli's Künstlerroman and I couldn't agree more. Mazzuchelli presents Asterios Polyp - the protagonist - brutally honest in all his facets on the comic page and uses every aspect of formalistic graphic storytelling. The reader is left to his own devices and interpretations of the psychological, moral and social shape Asterios is forming in the mind of the reader. As with so many things in this graphic novel, nothing is to be taken at face value and even in its classification, Mazzuchelli doesn't make it easy. A Künstlerroman is about the maturity and personal growth-process of an artist and Asterios fits this perfectly except that, through his maturation process, his art gets lost along the way, another symbol of his imperfect worldview.

Asterios Polyp, the character, dives straight ahead into dualism as his life philosophy. But where Asterios is a dualist, Mazzuchelli is a formalist (a position he clearly marked with his version of City of Glass which was more of an interpretation than a translation to another medium) and this GN is clearly a formalist work. Dualism is a brand of worldview that is particularly easy to dissect - this being the very nature of polar opposites - but disect is the keyword here. Mazzuchelli certainly seems to have made Asterios Polyp with the intention of making people raise the scalpel in order to carefully cut away layer after layer of meaning and double entendres.

To talk about Asterios Polyp is to talk about the drawings, the visualisation, the pacing, the lettering, the coloring, the meaning behind the veil etc. The book is so perfectly made that it lends itself perfectly for categorisation, for making a closet consisting of nothing but drawers; each drawer containing one aspect of Asterios Polyp. It will be a big closet for sure, to move one line, to adjust one colour, to redraw one letter is to alter the meaning of intent.

What's interesting to note here is that the graphic novel itself - the tale - departs from Asterios' worldview while at the same time is a part of the general public view of the material chosen. Dualism denotes a state of two parts and what is comics but two parts: pictures and words, but as in the Gestalt philosophy, the sum is more the its parts and it is the combination that elevates the work.

Anyway, dualism is a very rigid way of looking at the world and the design of Asterios reflects this. Asterios the character is all geometric shapes and corners and tubes, like a walking drawing tool for first grade art students. And of course, he's an architect who stands by symmetries and who mostly delves into fictional architectural designs, buildings that never get made. An ultimate reflection on his life style? Sometimes it is hard to stop reading the symbolism and deeper meanings of this graphic novel.

And Asterios itself is just the tip of the iceberg. Mazzuchelli has designed an approach for each character in terms of delineation, coloring, lettering, speech patterns, body language etc. And while some individualistic approaches tend to come more to the foreground than others, like the lettering and line work, the most subtle work is done with the coloring. Each character has his own color scheme and this is not limited to the character itself but flows over into back- and foreground and into the psychological dimension. For instance, Hana is a shy persona and one of the few times she steps into the spotlight, her color scheme comes to the front. But Asterios being Asterios talks over her, largely ignoring her and while Hana's speech trails off into a smaller font, on the background we can see the colors assigned to Asterios slowly invading Hana's colouring pattern. And the GN is full of little subtle transitions and allusions like that.

Talking about Asterios Polyp can take hours. For instance, I haven't even mentioned that half of the GN is told from the viewpoint of Asterios' dead brother or the meaning of the chapter headings that each contains a little illustration related to that chapters theme or how the dualistic nature of Asterios is also reflected in the switching between present and flashbacks in the storytelling mode or the relationship of Asterios between Ulysses and Orpheus etc. You get the point.

Asterios Polyp is a formal tour-de-force with a heart. Despite all the formalistic trappings, writer and artist David Mazzuchelli moves likea Russian ballet dancer around and through all the obstacles such a challenge presents, incorporating philosophies, myths and dichotomies along the way. The result is a graphic novel that is too dense to fully grasp at the first read and therefore will have a long shelf life in the minds and book closets of the readers or should I say participants. To read Asterios Polyp is to interpret Asterios Polyp.

Asterios Polyp by David Mazzuchelli is published by Pantheon. It is a 344 pages counting full colour hardcover graphic novel, retailing for $29.95 and is available in finer bookstores and comic shops across the world.