Asterios Polyp is a borderline perfect comic book - albrechtfait1939

Asterios Polypus is a borderline exact comic book

Asterios Polyp excerpt (Double credit: David Mazzuchelli (Pantheon Books))

So … we can all stop reading comics now, because David Mazzucchelli has crafted the net comic book statement. Just take everything on your reading pile right straight off and chuck it out. Asterios Polyp is the modern received-bearer. Mazzucchelli has somehow managed to jam just nigh everything great about comics into 340 pages of humanity, soul-searching, lifelike pattern, philosophy, and humor.

The book's star Asterios Polyp is fifty years old, an insufferable know-all who upright happens to be one of the most notable architecture professors in the country. And he's having a midlife crisis that just won't quit. Mazzucchelli uses Polypus's computer architecture background beautifully, often literally deconstructing characters down to their own "architectural" core – semisolid shapes and lines for Polypus; soft, nuanced cross-hatching for his adoring wife Hana; etc. – while crafting graphically piquant symbols and page layouts that probe Polyp's philosophies happening life. Every element of the book tells you something about the characters; Mazzucchelli even creates one-on-one fonts and phrase balloon styles for each character to capture the uniqueness of his or her various voice. Watch Polyp's solid, square balloons and speech in contrast to Ursula's dreamy balloons or Stiff's slightly careless speech.

Technically, Asterios Polypus is an absolute tour de force-out, with a moral in cartooning to study along every page, but Mazzucchelli isn't righteous showing his virtuosity as an artist and designer. By crafting a series of distinct and internally fresh characters, Mazzucchelli enables Asterios Polyp to explore the human condition via his interactions with cardinal of the most memorable casts to grace of God the comics page. Each espousing a crisp mindset on the world, every character reaches into Polypus's soul to uncover a raw aspect of the character, his spiritism, his earnest, hardworking nature, his pity, operating theater his phlegm and self-interest.

In that respect is a yarn dealing with Polypus's stillborn matched buddy, a suggestion of lost possibilities, that is the book's only slight trip-up. IT's an intriguing idea, but is somewhat nether-developed. It's a minor quibble in an otherwise borderline perfect book, however, and readers will find themselves revisiting Mazzucchelli's Asterios Polyp many times to unveil the layers and subtleties of this masterful composition of cartooning and composition.

Dive into Mazzucchelli's opposite original work, Batman: Year Ace .