You’ll be in awe of how perfect it is and certainly envious of it if you are a writer. What a beautiful, staggeringly brilliant piece of literature.”— Contra Costa Times

I’m actually not that crazy about AP — I have a fair number of problems with it, in fact — I just thought it needed defending from some of the more unreasonable and ungenerous criticism it has received at this roundtable.This award winning graphic novel is an exploration of duality. It unfolds between the past and present. Slowly introducing us to the complex, conflicting yet fascinating charter that is Asterios. The neat division of the narrative into two chronologies and two colour schemes is an engaging way to tell this story, allowing the evolution of the present-day Asterios to play out in counterpoint to the slow sabotage his younger self enacts on his marriage. Departures from these timeframes—reaching farther into the past for a bit of pertinent biography, or breaking away into a dream sequence—are narrated by, or haunted by, Asterios’s identical twin who died at birth. It’s here, though, that Mazzucchelli’s larger thematic concerns threaten to overwhelm his book, as we learn that, for Asterios, everything is divided, or twinned, or thought of purely in binary terms—present/past, living/dead, cyan/magenta, man/woman, Asterios/Hana. Asterios Polyp is a perfect marriage of words and pictures. Every drawing, color choice and panel layout is pregnant with meaning.”— Columbus Dispatch What if reality (as perceived) were simply an extention of the self? Wouldn't that color the way each individual experiences the world?That might explain why some people get along so effortlessly, while others don't. Although people do keep trying.Yet, despite such predisposition, maybe one person's construction of the world, could influence someone else's."

Asterios gets off the bus in the town of Apogee. Your stereotypical small, clean and drab American heartland community. Een werkelijk prachtig getekende en tot in de puntjes verzorgde mooi vormgegeven graphic novel! Alles is in balans, een tekenstijl en lettertype die zich vormen naar de personages, mooi subtiel kleurgebruik, het juiste papier, van goed verdeelde witruimtes tot en met het gewichtige eindeloze gevoel van de 344 bladzijden en de kartonnen met linnen kaft aan toe. Mijn oog was gestreeld. Maar mijn geest ook. Art-Style Clash: One of the book's stylistic themes is how Asterios' rigid, blue-line architect way of seeing the world would clash with his artist wife's fluid, etched view of the world. This was visually and tonally represented by having their art styles "split" when they fought, and meld into more beautiful combined art when they loved and understood each other. This looked like a great book when I first saw it, but I had no (and still have no) idea what it’s all about!!?? O.oThe text itself is as castrated as the Author, and as such occupies the uneasy ground of the Other; Meanwhile, the interpretive reader, having as it were murdered the Author/Father, is prevented from usurping the latter’s ‘rightful’ place by the very fact of his/her parricide. The book is a satirical comedy of remarriage, a treatise on aesthetics and design and ontology, a late-life Künstlerroman, a Novel of Ideas with two capital letters, and just about the most schematic work of fiction this side of that other big book that constantly alludes to the ­“Odyssey.”…. “Asterios Polyp” is a dazzling, expertly constructed entertainment, even as it’s maddening and even suffocating at times. It demands that its audience wrestle with it, argue with it, reread and re-examine it. Isn’t that the ultimate purpose of style?”—Douglas Wolk, NYTBR

Perhaps the primary medium for conveying feelings in a comic is color. The author of my secondary source, Max Bledstein, also agrees with this (4). The palette is sparse enough; the fingers of one hand would be enough to list it all. David took a basic palette of colors: red, yellow, and blue, sometimes mixing them to produce purple, abundant in the comic. To begin with, each of the colors has both positive and negative connotations.

Success!

That’s where the simplicity of the story causes it to fall apart, because the two are too self-similar. They reflect each other rather than appearing as facets of a bigger whole. Rather than getting a new insight you get the themes and the material “looking at each other,” just get a reflection (and admittedly, the aesthetic satisfaction of a technical achievement.) They’re separate, not unified. Ha cultura vasta ed eclettica, insegna in una prestigiosa cattedra universitaria a Ithaca (upstate New York), ed è alla ricerca (teoria) di un ordine (teorico) sia esteriore che interiore This is a comic for artists, and it plays with space and color in ways that maybe only artists will understand, but it is a story for everyone, and Asterios Polyp is easily among the best graphic novels ever made. Go read it, and read it twice.”— Providence City Paper Was there anything I didn’t like about this graphic novel? Hmm… yes the ending. But that would be telling. It did close the story off and added an unexpected twist to it. I just thought it was too… real life?? Conclusion In the meantime, we are enthralled by 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.