Asterios Polyp

AUTHOR: Mazzucchelli, David

ARTIST: David Mazzucchelli (illustrator)

PUBLISHER: Pantheon Books

FIRST BOOK PUBLICATION: 2009

Publication History

After an early career working for Marvel and DC Comics, David Mazzucchelli left the world of superhero comics and turned to more experimental projects. Most notably, comics creator Art Spiegelman encouraged him to collaborate with cartoonist Paul Karasik on an adaptation of City of Glass (1994), the acclaimed Paul Auster novella. Its critical success raised expectations about Mazzucchelli’s next book, his first as the sole author and artist. Asterios Polyp was published in the summer of 2009 by Pantheon Books, which has been a major force in graphic novels since the 1980’s. Pantheon has handled the work of such comics luminaries as Raymond Briggs, Marjane Satrapi, Spiegelman, and Chris Ware. Mazzucchelli submitted a preview of about half of the material in the book in November, 2007.

Since the mid-1990’s, Mazzucchelli has been teaching, notably at Manhattan’s School of Visual Arts. As a participant in the U.S./Japan Creative Artists Program, he lived and worked in Japan from August, 2000, to January, 2001. These experiences presumably influenced Asterios Polyp, which tells of a professor’s relationship with a Japanese American sculptor.

Plot

Asterios Polyp starts with a thunderstorm, a lightning strike, and a fire in Manhattan. The date is June 22, 2000, Asterios Polyp’s fiftieth birthday. Living alone and in a state of disarray, he must flee his burning apartment. However, he manages to gather three objects: a cigarette lighter, a watch, and a penknife. The significance of each is revealed later. Although the fire occurs at the beginning of the book, it falls in the middle of Asterios’s larger story. The book’s twenty-two chapters alternate between ones set before and after the fire, forming a lengthy “abab” pattern.

Ignazio, Asterios’s deceased twin, claims to narrate those chapters dealing with events preceding the fire. He tells of the life and career of Asterios, a brilliant but egotistical professor of architecture. After a string of casual affairs (often with students), Asterios meets and marries Hana Sonnenschein, a colleague and sculptor. Later, Hana accepts a commission to make set designs for a dance production, Orpheus (Underground), based on the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, and she increasingly spends her time with its director, Willy Ilium. Soon life echoes myth, and Asterios finds Hana slipping away from his grasp. In December, 1993, after seven years of marriage, she files for divorce.

The chapters of the book set after the fire are no longer narrated by Ignazio, who nevertheless reappears in five of Asterios’s dreams. Leaving his apartment and Manhattan behind him, Asterios takes a Greyhound bus as far as he can, to an unfamiliar town called Apogee. Here, Asterios sets about making a modest life for himself. Finding a job as an auto mechanic, he lodges with his boss, Stiffly Major, and socializes with Stiffly’s friends and family. He helps Stiffly construct a tree house for his son, Jackson—it is the first structure the architect has ever built—and sees his friends’ band play in a bar. While there, a near stranger hits Asterios with a bottle and blinds his left eye. Asterios resolves to leave Apogee. He does so in an improbable manner, fixing Stiffly’s solar-powered car and driving it to the house of his former wife. Upon arriving, Hana and Asterios talk of their past together and about life since their divorce. The atmosphere becomes increasingly convivial and reconciliation seems possible.

Events then take a cosmic turn. A meteor or asteroid suddenly plunges toward Hana’s house, leaving her and Asterios’s future uncertain. Back in his Apogee tree house, Jackson spots a shooting star in the sky.

Characters

•Asterios Polyp, the protagonist, is the son of Greek and Italian immigrants and a middle-aged professor of architecture at a university in Ithaca, New York. He is a successful author and theoretician, but he is only a “paper architect” since none of his designs has been constructed. He is brilliant but rather unlikable, and his egotism is tempered by a sense of incompleteness. He is searching for something beyond himself, some complementary person or point of view. Usually depicted in strict profile, Asterios’s most unusual physical attribute is his head, which resembles the blade of an upturned ax.

•Ignazio Polyp is Asterios’s stillborn identical twin brother. Although the narrator of the book claims to be Ignazio, the dead twin may persist only in Asterios’s complicated psyche. Thus, he appears in several of Asterios’s dreams, which reveal Asterios’s complicated feelings of rivalry, guilt, aggression, and anger. In the last of these, Asterios sees his twin as an impostor and attacks him with a wrench. The two are sometimes difficult to tell apart; however, Ignazio is right-handed, while Asterios is left-handed.

•Hana Sonnenschein (whose last name means “sunshine” in German), Asterios’s wife between 1986 and 1993, is a Japanese American sculptor and an art professor with long hair and large eyes. She is inspired by nature, and her art stresses organic, curvilinear forms; her aesthetic influences Asterios’s writing and thinking, but it also stands in sharp contrast to them.

•Willy Ilium, a squat man with dark hair and a double chin, is an avant-garde choreographer whose work makes extensive use of quotations from existing dance compositions. He hires Hana as the art designer for his “new” and ill-fated work, Orpheus (Underground). While Hana and Asterios’s relationship begins to falter, Willy flatters her with his attention.

•Stiffly Major is the large, mustachioed Apogee mechanic who offers Asterios a job in his repair shop and lodging in his house.

•Ursula Major is Stiffly’s wife and Jackson’s mother. Blond and buxom, she is confident of her ability to attract men, but her relationship with Asterios remains platonic. Ursula is drawn to Native American traditions, astrology, and other manifestations of New Age culture. Like Hana, she offers a distinctive counterpoint to Asterios’s worldview.

Artistic Style

Asterios Polyp requires its reader to consider how visual elements contribute to the story’s possible meanings. Notably, Mazzucchelli employs a number of different representational styles and makes innovative use of color, experimenting to aid organizational clarity, for thematic ends, and to suggest important differences among characters.

Thus, each main character is associated with a specific color, drawn using an appropriate style, and given a particular type of speech balloon and font. Asterios is associated with blue and rendered in sparse and geometric lines. His speech bubbles are rectangular and enclose all-caps lettering. In a number of scenes between Asterios and Hana, their contrasting design elements blend harmoniously when they are getting along, but suddenly separate when conflict arises.

The book’s page layouts are notably varied. Conventional panels are used extensively but are interspersed with borderless panels, bleeds, splash pages, and near the center of the book, a double spread. The author helps the reader to navigate the complicated architecture of his unpaginated book by breaking the material into twenty-two chapters, each preceded by a blank leaf and a single illustration in the middle of the opposite (recto) page.

Through calculated use of the “printer’s primaries” (cyan, magenta, and yellow), color also plays a crucial organizational role. Cyans, purples, and reds are used for the pre-fire chapters of the book, while the scenes set in Apogee are rendered using yellows and purples. Found in both palettes, purple, not black, serves for most of the line work and for most of the retelling of the Orpheus myth, which links the two major sections of the book. Late in the story, after Asterios is partially blinded, Mazzucchelli introduces a more varied color scheme. The reader encounters oranges, greens, and browns for the first time. This more naturalistic palette hints that Asterios is leaving the stark divisions of his past behind him.

Themes

Asterios Polyp is a book about doubles, divisions, dualism, and the relationship among these things. Its eponymous character is a twin who has been separated from his stillborn brother and whose dualistic worldview seems to emerge from this primary trauma. “Duality is rooted in nature,” Asterios informs a skeptical colleague. Events test and soften Asterios’s philosophical convictions, while the characters he meets advance alternative and less rigid worldviews.

Accordingly, Asterios maintains that the important thing about the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers is simply “that there are two of them.” During a sculpture class, Hana echoes their arrangement by placing two bricks on end. She asks her students, “How many do you see?” and, on the grounds that the space between the bricks “is the same size and shape of a brick,” welcomes the answer “three.” The choice of the Twin Towers is hardly casual: This, after all, is a book set largely in 2000 (not long before the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks that destroyed both towers) and about the untimely destruction of twins. Through this imagery, Mazzucchelli teaches the reader about negative space, about how absent things can be evoked merely by the things surrounding them.

Just as James Joyce’s novel Ulysses (1922) and the Coen brothers’ film O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000), this book retells and modernizes the Greek classics. Like the divided twins mentioned in Plato’s Symposium, Asterios is driven by a desire to find wholeness and companionship. Further parallels are made between Asterios’s life and the mythical lives of the poet Orpheus and the wandering warrior Odysseus: Asterios also experiences trauma and loss, is compelled to wander far from home, and will eventually return, except that his destination will not be Ithaca but the person he met there, Hana.

Asterios Polyp explores how loss and suffering may also allow for personal reinvention. Asterios starts out an inflexible egotist, but he gradually becomes a sympathetic character—generous, companionable, helpful, and vulnerable. The paper architect is now substantial, having moved from believing in a world of two dimensions to living in one of three.

Impact

Upon publication, Asterios Polyp was greeted with widespread critical acclaim. A book with evident crossover appeal, it was reviewed positively both in publications devoted to comics and in several major daily papers, including The Guardian, Los Angeles Times, and The New York Times. In 2010, French and German translations of the book appeared, thus broadening its readership and realm of influence. Positive reviews stressed the book’s appeal as a beautifully designed object, applauded Mazzucchelli’s ability to integrate formal experimentation and philosophical themes into his story, and observed that the book repays multiple readings.

More skeptical voices countered that the artist’s visual inventiveness merely masks a routine story. Some critics found the book’s secondary characters underdeveloped and stereotyped rather than humorous, taking particular issue with the characterization of Willy Ilium and the Majors. The book’s dense web of literary, artistic, and astronomical references also had the power to either enchant or irritate. Scholars, critics, and fans alike will undoubtedly continue debating its merits.

Further Reading

Madden, Matt. Ninety-Nine Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style (2005).

McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art (1993).

Spiegelman, Art. In the Shadow of No Towers (2004).

Bibliography

Mazzucchelli, David. Interview by Frank Young. Comics Journal 152 (August, 1992): 114-119.

“TCJ 300 Conversations: David Mazzucchelli and Dash Shaw.” Comics Journal, December, 16, 2009. http://classic.tcj.com/tcj-300/tcj-300-conversations-david-mazzucchelli-dash-shaw/

Wolk, Douglas. “Shades of Meaning.” Review of Asterios Polyp by David Mazzucchelli. The New York Times Book Review, July 26, 2009, p. 11.