Even if coming from the US, Asterios Polyp was awarded the Grand Prix de la Critique de l’ACBD in 2010 and the Fauve d’Angoulême – Prix Spécial du Jury in 2011. As a result, since it has been able to gain French readers and critics’ interest, everybody must acknowledge it as one true BD. .

David Mazzucchelli followed an interesting path in his career. Having started at Marvel going on and working at Daredevil, he rapidly produced with Born Again a genre classic. Subsequently, he repeated the achievement at DC with Batman: Year One. He onwards abandoned once and for all the mainstream comics’ world. The superhero comics’ world, more precisely, since the graphic novel is a much more natural form of expression than some story with Batman in it.

If at the end of the 80s and the beginning of the 90s many artists and writers abandoned the rink of the corporate superhero comic, migrating either to Dark Horse, Image or to the Marvel and DC imprints which were much more permissive with their authors, Mazzucchelli made a leap even more outside of this sphere by self-publishing his comics in the Rubber Blankets anthology. He adapted Paul Auster’s City of Glass in comics together with Paul Karasik, for a project initiated and edited by Art Spiegelman. Since then until 2009, with some exceptions in a few anthologies from Fantagraphics and D+Q, he has not published any other work.

Then came Asterios Polyp; a graphic novel completely different from anything Mazzucchelli ever did in his career. Not truly impressive in its length, but still in that place of the spectrum, almost completely printed in cyan and magenta with rare spots of yellow and without the black key. The comic is about an architect, the eponymous character, who had never constructed any building, and his ruined life, narrated by his twin brother who died at birth.

Since it borrows themes and narrative beats both from the Odyssey and Orfeus with pieces of The Myth of the Androgin, I would say it has been raised on the foundations of the Greek mythology. Nevertheless, the comic has no sublayer upon which any foundation could be built. It has no subtext, everything surfacing, any significant reference gets explained, any formalist trick is either exploited in the most didactic manner possible, or dissected by the characters. Altogether which makes reading it a rather superficial experience. Still, it’s a holographical superficiality. Layering dualities, implicitly/explicitly or connotatively/denotatively, up to the point they become dissolved in each other like the inks he uses and they give birth to the illusion of depth through the way in which different levels of the text interact, once they are on the same level. And it is a depth with much more pronounced potential than that which an insignificant matrimonial failure paced by references to the Journey of Ulysses or the love between Orpheus and Euridice could have offered. How potent this illusion is, I cannot say. It depends on each and everyones’ taste for modernist formalism.

And Asterios Polys is formalism. The style is the content. Form is function. The story writhes, reiterating scenes with various aesthetic filters in order to consolidate ideas until it devours itself like the Ouroboros. Characters, each drawn in a distinctive style, having a specific color scheme (an achievement in its own right considering the limited number of colors), glyph shapes and speech bubbles. Graphical symbols, gutters, borders, page structure, colors aren’t just receptacles for the narrative, they are the story, because they need to be decoded in order to hit the narrative core. And still it is a much more lenient and light and intelligible lecture that some superhero comics. It is almost disappointing in this regard.

This is because, despite the artifice, the story is a very simple one. It is a journey. One which repeats itself threefold. There is a journey in the present with Asterios leaving his flat in a fire, thus abandoning his entire life and attempting at making a new one for himself, eventually landing in a decrepit town in the heart of the United States. From here on, paradoxically if we consider the references to mythology, he continues only after he has encountered the cyclops of this story. There is an inner journey, slightly oneiric in nature, in which Asterios reconciles the dualities in his own psychic. And there is a third journey in the past, symmetrical to the one in present, with episodes triggered by involuntary memory in which the readers learn about his academical past, about the relationship he had with his former wife, and discover the events that lead to their divorce. Everything is apparently narrated by the dead twin brother, but it is more likely constructed, narrativized, framed and simplified by a component of Asterios’ psychee.

This repetition makes the reader find new meanings. Some could be intuited beforehands, others are new. It is somehow slightly unsatisfying that everything closes in perfectly like a tight knot, that each and every element has a precise meaning that grows in clarity as the story progresses, that the reader has to work so little and his imagination, his own critical spirit is put to so little work. It is almost didactic. Actually it is very didactic. Hardly could a comic about two teachers and conceptualists be any different. It is a true manual about graphical structure and narration and visual style and characterization. It is a comic that teaches the reader to read it while going through it, being its own instructions manual even though it doesn’t require that many explanations.

This tendency appears usually in younger, less developed authors who lack conviction in their own strengths to convey their ideas, who overestimate the power of their concepts or who underestimate the readers’ capacity to grasp it. There are two things that save Asterios Polyp from such a fate. Mazzucchelli is not an amateur by any stretch of the imagination. He is a true master. Anything he sets out to do, he succeeds in doing so. Regardless it is style or figure, character or sequence he can put it on paper apparently without effort. And never does he set out to do something easy. The surface is scarcely worked on, apparently it has been printed almost erroneously, found in a raw shape, yet it is so close to perfection, just simply lacking any sort of rigidity or obfuscation.

The second thing is that Asterios Polyp does not intend to teach its reader something about life or art or anything exterior to the comic itself. Even if it takes itself seriously as an object of art, it doesn’t place too much weight on the ideas it holds within. Which doesn’t mean that there is nothing to be learned from it, just that the text lacks the pretention to holding any great meaning that it can convey by telling and not impart by showing. Each moment that reminds of a lecture not only has an exceptional graphical execution but also serves to an immediate narrative purpose, usually to unlock via motifs other sequences in the book. Nothing goes outside the comic, because in it is like a platonic solid. Symmetric, regular, crystalline, hermetic.

Still, it is fresh, perfectly readable, funny, with precious emotional moments, lacking inhibitions, authentic. An architecture student confessed to the way it really captures the atmosphere they have at their workshops. Hence, in spite of constant experimentation (but can it be called experimentation when it succeeds at every turn?) it is not cold, but fills with warmth and life some of the most arid plots. It makes the reader sympathise with a dry, aloof, egocentrical character for which everything comes without an effort. It turns Asterios superficiality from a bug to a feature.

Almost permanently being presented from profile, with the head being a circle slightly cut, his features remain suggested only by a few lines. And this seems to me one of the greatest character’ designs in recent memory because it is sewed in the entire substance of the comic. He is slick, as modern as his life philosophy, built out of clear geometrical shapes, without any decoration, just functionality. Almost at every step he looks towards the side like the characters from the Greek amphora. Which makes him seem to be always on the move, unstable, trying to a reach a destination. To find his better half. He is dual, more than dichotomised and two-dimensional. Ironically enough, the moment when he escapes from the binary model through which he sees the world, is the one when he loses his stereoscopic vision. Over three hundreds pages of themes and ideas, motives and motifs and characterizations are held together in a handful of lines and shapes. Asterios the character is Asterios the comic. Make of that what you will.

11:26 pm • 30 June 2014 • 9 notes