Mazzucchelli's extraordinarily imagined world of brilliantly conceived eccentrics, sharply observed social mores, and deftly depicted asides on everything from design theory to the nature of human perception becomes a masterpiece: a great American graphic novel.

Kolorka Specijal 3 Asterios Polyp | Alan Ford Kolorka Specijal 3 Asterios Polyp | Alan Ford

I was completely blown away by Asterios Polyp, David Mazzucchelli’s latest comic book, a pull-out-all-the-stops package that’s funny, poignant and deep, with panels of thoughtfully shaded images that form a visual novel, a paper movie, and finally, an existential meditation on things that matter to us: religion, art, science, love and memory. Well, Scott, Noah’s mileage I guess differed but I agree it’s pleasurable and I can agree that it works as a “gateway” novel.The graphic novel also contains a great deal of symbolism, with many objects and characters being used to represent ideas and thoughts. Enter Mazzucchelli’s brilliant but eccentric story that takes side trips into morality, Greek myths and touches on a little bit of everything from the meaning of self, parallel dimensions to design theory. I’m very, very late to this party, but have just finished teaching AP to 30 entranced Stanford undergraduates. It seems to me a perfect way of expanding the scope of what we’ve experienced reading the comic to the cosmological.

Asterios Polyp is a borderline perfect comic book - GamesRadar+ Asterios Polyp is a borderline perfect comic book - GamesRadar+

Comics’ “modernism” was their insistence on figuration and archetype at a time when literature and the fine arts, respectively, eschewed those, and their “postmodernism” is their current blurring of boundaries between high and low.

Mazzucchelli manages to combine breathless formal experimentation and read feeling into a story where every line, color choice, and panel arrangement builds toward a cohesive whole, lending an air of epic proportions to what would otherwise be a simple tale. Asterios Polyp grew out of a story idea that would have filled the entire fourth issue of Rubber Blanket.