David Mazzucchelli - Graphic Novel Of Ideas

David Mazzucchelli, Asterios Polyp (Pantheon, 2009)

"Modernism came late to comics. Cartoonists are naturally stylistic chameleons, selecting and altering visual techniques to serve their subjects. But explicitly presenting style as content? That’s always trickier. 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.

Enter Asterios Polyp: a big, proud, ambitious chunk of a graphic novel, with modernism on its mind and a perfectly geometrical chip on its shoulder. 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. 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.

Asterios Polyp himself is adorably dislikable, an egocentric, condescending, irritable “paper architect” and academic who sees everything in terms of dualities. ('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. Asterios himself is a metaphorical cyclops, lacking the ability to perceive emotional depth. Even his head is drawn as a two-dimensional construct: half a perfect circle, interrupted by two equally proportioned curves.

As the book begins, his life has gone straight to Hades. His wife, Hana, has left him; his home has been struck by lightning and burned down; and he’s bought a one-way ticket to the middle of nowhere to try to figure out how to live in a world in which form doesn’t always follow function. In the little town of Apogee, he befriends the malapropistic auto mechanic Stiff Major and his holistic hippie wife, Ursula, as well as a revolution-happy country-punk band called the Radniks (say it out loud), and puts his knowledge to work in the real world for the first time. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that his personality ends up a bit more 3-D.

That’s only the present-day section of the story, though. 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. (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. On top of that, there are a handful of fantasy sequences involving the book’s narrator, Ignazio, Asterios’s twin brother, who died in the womb but keeps appearing anyway.

And atop everything else, there’s Mazzucchelli’s scrupulously controlled, composed and gestural artwork. Every chapter opens with a small, wordless tableau that introduces its themes and usually serves as the beginning of its narrative. In one early chapter, that introductory image is a grid of 16 line drawings of an apple. The first interesting thing about those apples is that they’re rendered in 16 distinct visual styles (out of the countless ones at Mazzucchelli’s command). The second is that the two colors on the page are solid purple — which he uses rather than black throughout the book — and cyan, neither of which are the color of actual apples. The point is clear: even while he’s telling a story through representation, every line Mazzucchelli draws carries symbolic freight, and its iconic value may even outweigh its literal meaning.

As a case in point, that cyan ink doubles as a recurring motif of Asterios’s intellectual and aesthetic rigidity. Every character in the book, in fact, gets his or her own illustrative technique, lettering style and dominant color scheme. Hana’s color is red; a scene where Asterios is in her studio, admiring her work, is pinkish-purple until it becomes clear that he’s talking to hear his own eloquence, whereupon the panels are suffused with cyan and a spotlight moves from her to him as she recedes into the background. There’s scarcely a concept or object in the book that appears only once, even in passing.

The book is saturated with allusions to the history of the representation/abstraction dichotomy in art. Asterios name-drops Narcissus and Goldmund and The Cloven Viscount. ('Some might argue that such simplification is best suited to children’s stories or comic books,' the narrator snarks back at him.) An Orphic descent into the underworld is drawn in a style that nods to Orphic Cubism. A cat is named Noguchi. Mazzucchelli throws in visual allusions to other cartoonists and quasi cartoonists, from Lynd Ward to Dan Clowes and John Porcellino, who’ve confronted the same issues in their work. And he can’t resist drawing implicit parallels between comics and every other medium his characters encounter: a sequence in which a composer discusses simultaneity and polyphony in music appears as a single image with overlapping panel borders, so that its viewers might better navigate its 'cacophony of information.'

Asterios Polyp is a dazzling, expertly constructed entertainment, even as it’s maddening and even suffocating at times. It demands that its audience wrestle with it, argue with it, reread and re-examine it. Isn’t that the ultimate purpose of style?" – Douglas Wolk