No One Way of Looking at Asterios Polyp

Sorry about the title, but I just had to!



















If I had to pick one picture that would summarize Asterios Polyp, it would be this one. This comic is about duality, contrast. On the left is Hana, drawn in a sketchy style and with vibrant magenta. She is angry and her body shows it, with arms crossed and brow furrowed. Asterios is on the right, drawn as if he were a series of hard shapes. His head is symmetrical. You could divide his cyan-colored head down the middle. Where he stands there are only external lines, sharply delineating one shape from another. His posture is rigid and uncommunicative.

This comic is an exploration of what happens when the sharp and angular meet the gray and fuzzy. What happens to Asterios's when his worldview is so split? What happens when a binary view of the world encounters complexity?

The narrative is ostensibly written by Asterios's dead twin, Ignazio. Everything in this novel has a twin or is in a binary relationship: living/dead, woman/man, Hana/Asterios, magenta/cyan, present/past.
Even when Hana and Asterios blend (creating purple in their scenes of relative peace), the sameness/difference of the two is still explored. The angular head of Asterios looks like another version of Hana's head in the image above. She regards the dead deer with what looks like horror (wide-open eyes, frowning mouth), and Asterios regards the crashed vehicle coolly. Hana is looking at the end of life and Asterios looks at the end of structure. They see two different scenes in this one event: a car is wrecked as it hits a deer.

In a self-aware way, Mazzucchelli has Asterios study binary relationships in academia. The comic is about the binary life of a guy who studies binaries:


  The architectural (and literary and visual) school of thought that Polyp comes from is modernism: Modernism video.

The belief was that the world could be cleaned up and made better through streamlining and simplification. Though the roots of modernism are deep in history, it gained a lot of cultural weight after the first world war, as a startled world responded to the messy destruction of war on such a large scale, begun in such a tangled way.

One last note about the color: Cyan, yellow, and magenta are the basic colors of printing. Together, they create a full spectrum of colors: Animation of CMY color

Mazzucchelli is even examining what happens when we break the very lines down into their constituent colors. What makes up a full color world?

Here's what I'd like us to talk about on Monday:

• The use of color; what does each color "mean"?
• The use of white space, between panels
• The ending--what's going on? Is it real? A metaphor? Does it matter?