Asterios Polyp

by: David ­Mazzucchelli

A quick Review

     This is a story of a journey of perceptual awakening. Asterios is just traveling along trying to interpret information about his surroundings that he views in specific black and white dualities. 

     Asterios Polyp is a paper Architect / Academic whose house gets burned down and he then relocates to middle america where he has a very introspective reflection of his past life with his wife, a first generation Japanese American artist named Hanna, who tries to motivate him into a broader view of the world and the people in it.

The book is packed with graphic art as context, and by that I mean Mazzucchelli uses the way he lays out a page with the colors and lineweights and style to bring about an emotion response from the reader. Like when Asterios and Hanna are having an argument he becomes much more cyan and geometric looking and Hanna becomes much more hand drawn looking with red shading all around her and her surroundings.

     Overall I found this book to be a very nice read, I liked the use of the graphic style to relate context of the emotion that was being carried out in whatever scene I was reading.