While most Western media treats romantic relationships through the lense of courtly love (just think of how Romeo and Juliet or Pride and Prejudice at turns chafe against, subvert and reinforce aspects of it, then consider how much they influenced love stories overall), there is an even older way of conceiving love between two human beings. In Plato’s Symposium, Aristophanes talks about the original humans, describing them as spherical beings with four legs, four arms, two heads and three genders: male-male, female-female, male-female. Fearing that these creatures would rise against them, the gods rendered them in half, thus creating the modern human: a broken, diminished, bipedal race. And so, the longing we feel for other people, our care for them, our love is the result of the original androgynous being wanting to be made whole again.



As a metaphorical way of seeing relationships, I find this perspective much more beautiful than the courtly, romantic one. First of all, while not in line with state of the art genderqueer theory, it does not prescribe heteronormativity. Secondly, love is not something that must be continually challenged and demonstrated, as if it’s a contest to be won, but rather love is two (again, the metaphor isn’t perfect) people building a relationship, supporting each other, helping one another to become a better person. And, among other ancient Greek myths, this is the basis of David Mazzucchelli’s 2009 graphic novel Asterios Polyp.

Asterios Polyp, p. 41

The image displays a man and a woman in a relationship of some kind, arguing. The text bubble is superfluous and can be ignored for the purpose of this essay as the drawing is expressive enough by itself.

From the start we remark the visual text’s duality, even androgyny, since the halves are gendered. The man and the woman share half a room. The woman is positioned on the left, the man on the right. She stares to the right at the back of the man who holds a cigarette in his hand facing somewhere outside the frame. The woman has her back turned to a full library, a coffee table and stylish chairs, a cabinet on top of which stands a vase brimming with flowers, while the man seems alone with his thoughts over on his side. One half is noisy, while the other is barren. Neither is harmonious.

Even if it isn’t drawn in a realistic style, the author peppered the visual with details that tell us a great deal about these characters, through environment alone. From the size of the room, its contents and the man’s suit we can postulate that the two characters are well-to-do and from the presence of the coffee table and bookshelf we might (rightly) think that they are intellectuals.

We should also remark that the way the image is framed is not naturalistic, but very deliberate. By composition alone this image conveys to us a significant amount of information. Since they each are centered in their respective half of the image we can feel that there is a distance growing between them; both sides of the drawing could be seen as their own separate image, with a different character in the middle. This suggests that they share a physical space, but not an emotional one. And the contrast is almost painful painful.

Because the woman is facing toward the man we can see that she is making an effort to connect or to confront him, but he does not share this impulse. Also, interestingly enough, he is placed near a window, but does not stare through it at something beyond, as to suggest that he is yearning for something his household cannot offer. The problem is not as trite as a man feeling confined by matrimony.

What is striking about this visual text, or at least what I find striking, is that even if the author placed the two characters in the same diegetic place, he choose to render that space in two different styles. The left half is rendered heavily with crosshatches, which capture surfaces and light, while the right half is drawn with a clean, clear line, deconstructing the objects, and the man himself in volumes delimited by regular shapes. Moreover, the left side is drawn only in Magenta, while for the right side only Cyan is used.

This isn’t the case of an author simply using the style he developed over time. This even goes beyond using style, technique and color just to elicit some overall aesthetic response from the reader, but rather using it as a precise form of communication in itself. It is a tool that attracts attention to itself.

Doing so, Mazzucchelli accentuates the framing I’ve already discussed, emphasising even more the emotional separation affecting the two characters. If it were to do just that, then it would have strained a point the visual text already does quite clearly. But the colors and rendering techniques are also used as a form of characterization. The woman is warm, with a rich, vibrant personality favoring textures and creating tangible objects, while the man is cold, calculated, strict, spartan, interested in theory and abstractions, yet oddly shallow. We see here an odd mixture of traditional gendered characteristics and nontraditional traits. This is to be expected since the image does not talk about some archetypal couple. Also, separated, they seem imbalanced.

More importantly, we see that both of them are represented through drawing and printing primitives, through techniques that should be used in conjunction. To realistically draw an object in space we need both texture and volume. Cyan and Magenta are two of the three colors (the other being Yellow) used in the printing process, and from their combination we get a varied gamut of color. Again, showing the imbalance their separation brings into each other’s life.

Choosing to draw them in such a way not only lets Mazzucchelli describe their characters, but also show that they are better at each other’s side, that this gulf growing between them is destructive, leaving them not only physically separated, but emotionally and intellectually lessened. Not because one has wronged the other, not because their love is not true, but because of the man’s refusal to meet his half, literally, midway; to accept her point of view, her agency and to build their relationship together.

I think that this image is a very strong exercise in visual storytelling, using detail and composition to clearly state a premise. So clearly, that it might be considered obvious or on the nose. But, in a single image, using the deconstruction of the basic vocabulary of drawing and printing to evoke an ancient myth, Mazzucchelli describes the complex emotional reality of two spouses drifting apart and how it affects them fundamentally. He talks about the hardships of relationships, challenging naive notions of love, offering instead something maybe not as romantic, but still beautiful.