2009
I think Asterios Polyp first caught my eye at the campus bookstore when I was in grad school. I probably leafed through it and saw the interesting art, but it wasn't until I saw an excerpt from it again recently in a volume of Best American Comics that I decided to give it a read. I'm glad I did. This is up there with Berlin as one of my favorite graphic novels of the year.
The plot Asterios Polyp is relatively straight forward. What makes it special is the character work and the art. A lot of the characters are intellectuals or believers of one sort or another, and they talk about what they think. The art is special in a way that's hard to describe, but I'll give it a try. One thing that's easy to say is that the art makes the ideas come alive.
The story is narrated by Asterios's dead twin Ignatz, who died at birth. Throughout his life, we see Asterios having a kind of survivors guilt or imposter syndrome, where he feels like he's living Ignatz's life, but doing a worse job of it than his brother would've if their fates had been reversed.
The plot has two strands that alternate every other chapter. There is no black ink in this book, by the way, purple is the one dark color. So in the present day (2000), in purple and yellow and white, a 50 year old Asterios wakes up to find his Manhattan apartment struck by lightning. With nothing but his wallet and the clothes on his back, he takes a bus out of the city and starts a new life. He works as an auto mechanic for Stiffly, who speaks in aphorisms but always says them wrong, and rents a room from Stiffly and his wife Ursula, a sort of witchy woman who believes in past lives. Slowly, Asterios makes friends and finds a kind of peace. Then he's beaten up in a bar fight and decides to try to return to the old life he left behind.
The past is shown in purple, neon pink, white, and bright cyan blue. Asterios is the child of Greek immigrants. He grows up to become an architect who teaches at Cornell. He's a successful theorist, but none of his designs is ever built. He's an extremely binary thinker, and someone who knows a lot and thus thinks he always knows more than others. He's also witty, charming, and well-liked. (I fear becoming so sure of myself that I act like he does.) He meets shy artist Hana and they fall in love. She designs costumes for a play about Orpheus for a choreographer whose every utterance is either a double entendre or naked flirtation. In the process of working on the play, Asterios's arrogance and jealousy poisons their relationship, and they divorce. When Asterios finally stops running away, he goes to reconcile with Hana.
The art illustrates the ideas people talk about in a way that demonstrates them and makes them seem true. My favorite example is when a musician talks about overlapping melodies, and the panel borders make his idea about music visible.
One idea is Ignatz's, that everyone has a secret self, and when two people are compatible, these selves merge. And so at key moments we see Hana as crosshatched pink shading and Asterios as a man made up of the blue outlines of cylinders and cubes. When they fight, each is alone in their own style; when they come together, the styles merge.
The two story strands work very well in parallel. The Orpheus play and the bar fight coincide, and we see the play rendered as Asterios's flight from his old life to an underworld where he tries and fails to retrieve Hana from the choreographer, and we understand why they broke up and why he tries to go back to get her. As I said, it's a relatively simple, realistic story, elevated to art by the way it is told.
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