Frankly I think I just feel out of my depth. It's after the jump.Īn extraordinarily easy book to read, Asterios Polyp is, I'm finding, a nearly equally extraordinarily difficult book to talk about. Now that it's finally coming out officially, I figured I'd repost the review here (in part to apologize for being an absentee savage these past few months). Even though David Mazzucchelli's long-awaited graphic novel Asterios Polyp doesn't come out until tomorrow, I some how ended up with a review copy months and months ago-I wanna say 2008, for pete's sake-so I reviewed the thing on my blog back in March. Each espousing a distinct outlook on the world, every character reaches into Polyp's soul to uncover a new facet of the character, his spirituality, his earnest, hardworking nature, his compassion, or his indifference and egoism.Yes, you read that headline right.

By crafting a series of distinct and internally strong characters, Mazzucchelli enables Asterios Polyp to explore the human condition via his interactions with one of the most memorable casts to grace the comics page. Technically, Asterios Polyp is an absolute tour de force, with a lesson in cartooning to learn on every page, but Mazzucchelli isn't just showing his virtuosity as an artist and designer. Watch Polyp's solid, square balloons and speech in contrast to Ursula's dreamy balloons or Stiffly's slightly sloppy speech. Every element of the book tells you something about the characters Mazzucchelli even creates individual fonts and word balloon styles for each character to capture the uniqueness of his or her respective voice.

– while crafting graphically engaging symbols and page layouts that dig into Polyp's philosophies on life. Mazzucchelli uses Polyp's architecture background beautifully, often literally deconstructing characters down to their own 'architectural' core – solid shapes and lines for Polyp soft, nuanced cross-hatching for his adoring wife Hana etc.

And he's having a midlife crisis that just won't quit. The book's star Asterios Polyp is fifty years old, an insufferable know-it-all who just happens to be one of the most renowned architecture professors in the country. Asterios Polyp (Image credit: David Mazzuchelli (Pantheon Books)) (opens in new tab)

Asterios polyp comic