![]() He gets on the subway and takes a bus as far as it will go, aptly depositing him in a town called Apogee. He hurriedly leaves the apartment, taking only three items: his watch, a lighter and a Swiss army knife. The plot of the book is simple: we meet Asterios in his trashed Manhattan apartment, which is struck by lightning and burns down. However, the unstated but dominant theme of the book is the hubris of its protagonist, Asterios Polyp, and the ways in which the gods chose to punish him. The more obvious ways in which this pops up is making the character of Greek descent, the way the tragedy of Orpheus literally becomes the wedge that drives his wife away from him through her involvement in an off-Broadway production, the way the tragedy appears as a dream sequence starring Asterios, and referencing Aristophanes in Plato's SYMPOSIUM. Such works are the wellspring for many modern character archetypes and story themes, and Mazzucchelli dips into that well both overtly and subtly. That observation is not meant to be pejorative, because further readings seem to indicate that ASTERIOS POLYP is inspired by Greek tragedy as much as anything. Unlike Ware or Carol Tyler (another artist with a fine arts background), who simultaneously distance the reader with their line and use of color and draw them in with the spontaneous, organic nature of their storytelling, there's little that feels organic about ASTERIOS POLYP. There's something very cool and detached with the way he designs a page and employs color, even ones where there's a lot of drama occurring. His archetypical use of characters flattens them emotionally, to the point where some became caricatures. There's a sense that he overexplains certain aspects of his themes with his occasional use of a narrator. Mazzucchelli very carefully treads the line between innovation and wider reader appeal with this book. I don't think it's an accident that it was three colors that dominated the book the unstated importance of three instead of two (in this case, "color" vs "black and white) is repeated throughout the book as a sort of cosmic corrective for the titular protagonist. ![]() Black, the usual cornerstone of most comics, is not at all present in the final product of this book. Going back to printmaking, the basic CMYK colors are dominant in this book, as well as some of the very basic combinations of cyan, magenta, and yellow-but never black. Temporality, mood and character interaction are entirely dictated by the very basic colors he employs. His character design is stylized to the point of telegraphing each character's purpose in the story immediately upon introduction. In ASTERIOS POLYP, Mazzucchelli's line is extremely simple and clear. Dash Shaw is currently taking color in some bold and original directions, and he noted that it's actually easier to innovate with color since it was an afterthought for so many for so long, as opposed to the weight of influence he feels from other cartoonists. Chris Ware really blazed the trail in that area indeed, much of the emotional content in his stories is modulated not by his line or dialogue but by the choice and juxtaposition of colors. Very few cartoonists really think about color as the primary way of imparting information to the reader, and doing so in a way that is not an homage to past uses of color. As a result, there's a hyperawareness of the way color in particular appears and interacts with other elements on the page. Mazzucchelli, above all else, has always been interested in exploring not just the formal aspects of comics in terms of the way a page is composed and designed, but in the very production and printing process of comics. The result is ASTERIOS POLYP, a book whose scope is formally ambitious and enormously clever but whose concerns are deceptively simple. After the third issue of that series, Mazzucchelli pretty much dropped off the radar as he set to writing what was originally going to be the fourth issue of that series and instead grew in scope and ambition. Then he went in a different direction, helping to adapt Paul Auster's CITY OF GLASS with Paul Karasik and then start his own groundbreaking anthology, RUBBER BLANKET. He's an unusual figure in comics in that while he came out of a fine arts background, he first came to prominence as a mainstream superhero artist, illustrating Frank Miller's "Born Again" run on Daredevil as well as Batman: Year One. David Mazzucchelli emerging with a huge, boldly original graphic novel is akin to the occasional reappearances of Thomas Pynchon in terms of it being a publishing event.
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