Deep impact...

Here is a comic i just did not want to finish, i liked it so much. Asterios Polyp is a biography, a philosophical tale, an allegory, a romantic comedy. It is an extraordinary reading experience.

The book itself is a beautiful object, and a real lesson in graphics. The drawing is almost arrogant in its avant-garde look, the composition of every image is worked to the extreme, and inserted in pages built like paintings from the Tate museum. Do not look for improvisation, in this work, it is built to the millimeter , every detail of it. Mazzucchelli exerts control over his character and his pages with an iron hand, and his thoughts translate on to the page without the slightest over-splashing.

But once you have accepted this surprising control, one is left to admire all the graphic talent. The colors are basic and each denotes a character, a state of mind. The hero is represented in a near abstract manner, his arms are tubes, his head a geometric form, while his wife is scribbled with red pencil. In the moments of dispute, his blue is opposed to her red... before intermeshing again. "Asterios Polyp" never separates the form from the content and even the lettering and empty spaces tell us something...

The story itself is touching and comedic. Asterios, an architecture professor, is crashing through the wall of the 50's with some difficulty. His well-tuned life has perhaps not produced the fruits he hoped for (none of his plans have been physically built, his marriage has crashed, his house is on fire...) Escaping from his university milieu to be born again in a proletarian and fantasmatic America, Asterios rediscovers, along with a certain ingenuity, some truths that are more blurred and rounded than the square and over-controled world he had built for himself. He revisits his past and his romance with his ex-wife (an abstract artist, naturally). The numerous flashbacks of teh book tell us also of a reshaping of memories, a salvatory checking process...

Asteriois Polyp, it's a greek tragedy that meets Woody Allen (for the humour and philosophy) and Wim Wenders (for the landscapes and adventure). Fate, omens, and a funest odyssey are thrown in the mix, reminding us of some slapstick romantic comedy the great Allen would be happy with. One smiles a lot reading this book, and while we have fun reading the faults and misadventures of our serious hero, one is worrying about the heavy classical references of doom and hell (here the Greek chorus is held by dead-born twin brother... )

If the past is narrated in a honest and yet ironic second degree tone and if the dreams seem to tell us about a threatening future, the present is a cool story of escape, friendship and meetings, which sticks to reality. The present is this moment when, for the first time, our architect builds his own house...
The austere professor is a character who gets more and more human as time goes, who learns - and teaches us- the art of "letting go" (great moments with the lighter, the watch, the parallax) and this character wins over time our sympathy. (Don't worry about some lengthy abstract speeches, he's far less snob as one may think: to a student who offers to build a "conceptual gap through a planar surface" Asterios replies that he might just as well built a window in the wall) Here is a person one would love to meet, in fact.

A story of redemption and discovery of one's self and the Other, and a superb graphical object full of stunning surprises, Asterios Polyp is utterly amazing, page after page. A monumental slap in the face for me and a book you MUST READ URGENTLY!