Once a successful and admired university professor Asterios ‘escapes’ into the American heartland? Why? Read on to find out… What to Do When Your Life Goes Up in Flames… Literally but Steinberg’s technique (if OK used in small doses) is, at least, tiresome and blunt used in a graphic novel. It tells the reader what to think denying her (or him) all possibilities of interpretation.” The artwork in Asterios Polyp is unique, as Mazzucchelli’s illustrations often use geometric shapes and bright colors to portray a whimsical and surreal world. His artwork is often compared to the works of Pablo Picasso, due to its surreal nature. The artwork in the novel also serves as a metaphor for Asterios Polyp’s life, as the shapes and lines illustrate the struggles he faces in his life. Meet Asterios Polyp: middle-aged, meagerly successful architect and teacher, aesthete and womanizer, whose life is wholly upended when his New York City apartment goes up in flames. In a tenacious daze, he leaves the city and relocates to a small town in the American heartland. But what is this “escape” really about?

Asterios Polyp - Wikipedia

Zeyl, Donald, and Barbara Sattler. 2022. Plato’s Timaeus. In The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy, summer 2022 edition, ed. Edward N. Zalta. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2022/entries/plato-timaeus/ The beauty of Asterios Polyp is that its core tenet, the need to pay attention to life as it happens, is so well reflected in the book itself—in its lush paper tone and rough-hewn, elegant design—and in the way all the formal devices serve the story. As such, it rewards attention and even devotion.”— Bookforum So anyway.... what does any of the above have to do with Asterios Polyp. Well, there's barely any violence at all in this comic. Really, not much happens, but at the same time a lot of things happen. I think this is up there with some of the best serious literature I've read. Sometimes when I read things I like to imagine why the person who created it did so... so the more unique a piece of art the more I start to wonder this. Why would anyone want to make such a well crafted and carefully thought through graphic novel about an architect struggling with his preconceptions on the nature of duality? Being able to ask that question is a wonderful feeling. But through interpretation, the once-supine reader forces the work towards the primal catastrophe, the confiscation of meaning that snatches the phallic sceptre from the Author-Father. This castration shifts the work from ‘phallic’ (i.e.over-determined) to ‘post-phallic’ (i.e. ‘open’ to penetration by alternate readings.)Asterios has built his life on this kind of thinking… Thinking that depends on classification and labeling. But when his life falls apart nothing makes sense anymore. Formally daring yet stylistically self-assured, Asterios Polyp is a bona fide masterpiece and the early frontrunner for best graphic novel of the year…It’s the presentation— the use of narrative symbolism, color and visual metaphor—that truly sets the book apart. Much like he did with Year One over 20 years ago, Mazzucchelli has once again raised the bar for his entire artform.”— Chicago Sun Times Mazzucchelli’s masterwork is by no means an easy read…but it is a transcendent one.”— Austin Chronicle

Asterios Polyp Quotes by David Mazzucchelli - Goodreads Asterios Polyp Quotes by David Mazzucchelli - Goodreads

They live a blissful life together. But somehow it ends. And we find Asterios alone, in a mess and reminiscing about the past. Teško je zamisliti bolji udžbenik za čitanje stripova. Macukelijevi kadrovi ne ilustruju samo priču; oni komuniciraju čitav sopstveni konceptualni okvir. Za svaki element postoji razlog i mesto, a analizirati svakog pojedinačno desetostruko nas nagrađuje.“ – „Portland merkjuri“ While I agree that the entry of comics into high culture these years is a very important development for the medium, I am unconvinced that comics have not yet experienced their “modernism,” or their “postmodernism” for that matter. To argue that is to expect them to develop in similar ways, and with a similar logic, as the high culture forms they by virtue of their history as a bastard, low-culture medium, are significantly different from. 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.” I also want to clear up something in your summarization of my argument, here: “Caroline rather cavalierly accuses Mazzucchelli and his critics of missing the point by perpetuating this pernicious binary, while [italics mine] bluntly claiming that the book “pays disproportionate attention to one side of the binary, the “visual.”” It’s that word “while” that’s bothering me.He actually feels like a real person. He is brilliant, but vulgar. He has a measure of success, but not the one he wants. He is arrogant but capable of empathy (in the end). Originally, humans were spherical, with four arms, four legs, and two faces on either side of a single head. (In evolutionary terms, it's hard to see the advantage of this construction.) Such was their hubris that they dared to challenge the gods themselves. Zeus, in his wisdom, split the upstarts in two, each half becoming a distinct entity. Domingos, I think we’re pretty much in line. Mazzucchelli’s use of ‘expressionist’ devices *is* prescriptive, but I believe he also *wants* it to be for the specific reasons I’ve detailed. I’m not entirely convinced by this choice, and I don’t think it matches Spiegelman’s explorations use of similar territory in Maus, or David B’s in L’Ascension du haut mal/Epileptic, but it still merits better from critics than mere scoffing.