Asterios Polyp

David Mazzucchelli’s career began in the mid-Eighties, when he drew a bunch of monthly issues for Marvel’s Daredevil. His style at that time was fairly run-of-the-mill, straight-laced superheroics, marked with the occasional burst of expressionist creativity, especially when he inked his own pencils. That individualistic spark appealed to creator Frank Miller, then at the peak of his game. Miller and Mazzucchelli collaborated on two projects ”“ both destined to become superhero classics. One was Daredevil: Born Again, the story of a hero’s fall into despair and subsequent resurrection and the other, Batman: Year One, a definitive origin story steeped in noir and crime fiction. While most artists would capitalise on their mainstream success to dive headlong into more fan-friendly projects, Mazzucchelli did something no one quite expected ”“ he walked away from the industry and chose to indulge in alternative, quieter projects. An adaptation of Paul Auster’s City of Glass and a highly personal three-volume work called Rubber Blanket were the only full-length works he produced other than the occasional New Yorker illustration. That is until Asterios Polyp, which he chose to both write and draw.

As you turn the first few pages of Polyp, what strikes you is the stylistic verve of the unique colour palette, limited to the printer’s primaries ”“ cyan, magenta and yellow. (Incidentally, another much-anticipated and very acclaimed graphic novel of 2009, Darwyn Cooke’s adaptation of Richard Stark’s The Hunter, makes use of a similar limited colour scheme. Coincidence?) The next thing you will notice is the free-flowing nature of the storytelling ”“ Mazzuchelli plays with perspective, with narrative structure, and even with the negative space between panels, something that is not usually seen in Western comics. Geometric patterns replace people as they appear from the points of view of different characters, and panel borders blur into each other, even as the story jumps in space and time. An early example of how the medium is employed to great effect is the opening sequence, as lightning strikes an apartment. A page is devoted to various inhabitants running down the stairs, the dark background containing a single framing shot of Asterios opening the door to his apartment ”“ the door being the panel itself, Asterios’ body contained in it, even as his shoe enters the negative space of the background. It is supplemented by four vertical panels of staircases on the right, each panel could represent the same staircase at different points in time, even as more and more people rush out of their dwelling, or they could just be viewed as a simultaneous occurrence of people running down multiple stories. Sounds complicated? Such visual tricks dominate the book ”“ it is as much about the story as about the way the artist draws the characters or a situation, and the colours he employs to convey them.

The main storyline follows two distinct timelines, both narrated by Polyp’s never-been-born twin Ignazio ”“ the one in the present tells us of how after his apartment is razed by fire, Polyp undergoes a journey of reckoning, taking up employment in a suburban neighbourhood as an auto mechanic. The past is revealed in a series of flashbacks where we know more about Polyp’s career from twenty years ago. Polyp is a “paper architect,” an academic whose ideas remain confined to paper, and whose egocentric, exasperatingly lecturing self is represented by transparent wireframes straddling abstract architectural structures. The flashbacks reveal his relationship with his eccentric wife Hana ”“ the emotional pivot of which opens the book ”“ and the whens and hows of the partners is revealed little by little as the book progresses, telegraphed through different iconographic representations yet again. In sequences when they fight with each other, Polyp is blue and coldly geometric while Hana becomes a mass of scratchy red lines. The character of Polyp himself combines the aesthetics of a Chester Gould villain with the blithe, wry charm of a Dickensian character, and the sequences where Ignazio talks about Asterios’s past are the ones where Mazzucchelli is at his demented best ”“ indulging in sinful exhibitions of form and aesthetics. Again, it could be coincidence or homage, but a major part of Asterios’ pedantic posturing resembles comic guru Scott McCloud’s long-winded discourses on sequential art in his own book, both in terms of style and visualisation.

Reading Polyp was quite an experience for me ”“ the joy of reading a slowly unfolding character study was interspersed with observing the way the writer and artist in Mazzucchelli come together to create a complex work of graphic fiction. Literary references, Greek mythology in particular, are scattered aplenty ”“ a retelling of Orpheus’s descent to Hades in search of his wife Eurydice, echoing Polyp’s estrangement with his wife, is etched in a style very different from the rest of the book, with looser inking. Polyp name-drops Italo Calvino and Herman Hesse, and the reader is left to figure out the way the works of these writers resonate with this work. But it’s not like this is a work that revels in seriousness, bereft of any humour ”“ sparks fly even as Asterios meets vertically-challenged choreographer Willy Ilium (“How can I hope to succeed, surrounded by flaccid imaginations and puny minds,” Willy yells at a point, “when my head is FILLED WITH NIETSCZHE?” ). Willy and his musical cohort Kalvin Kohoutek are just some of the decidedly weird ”“ not to mention oddly-named characters that make up Polyp’s world. Suburban America (in a town aptly named Apogee) comes to life through characters like his employer Stiff Major and his hippie wife Ursula. Consider the giggle factor inherent in a band called the Radnicks (“Radical country punk. We used to be called the rednecks, but nobody got the “red” part.”) But most interesting of all are the digressions in the storyline, where a strand of memory unravels into a complicated sequence of overlapping events, or a simple statement has connotations that are explained in wordless panels that might quickly flash for a moment or span pages and pages, all narrated by the seemingly-omniscient Ignazio.

Ultimately, Asterios Polyp might very well be the most challenging graphic novel you’ll read in recent times. It is a comic that oozes style, and yet does not wear it as a badge of conceit. One of those rare works that not only come with an emotionally satisfying ending, but gives you more bang for the buck with multiple readings (and trust me, you will appreciate it all the more if you end up doing that in the same session). It is not really a flawless work ”“ just like the films in Woody Allen’s oeuvre, a lot of themes seem uncannily familiar, and occasionally they get heavy-handed as well, when the creator’s tendency to infuse every panel of the work with thematic layers gets in the way of the story. But these are minor criticisms ”“ it’s already a foregone conclusion that Asterios Polyp will be on multiple award-lists next year, and rightfully so.

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