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Mazzucchelli returns with his best yet
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Mazzucchelli's late
David Mazzucchelli has only just today become a graphic novelist. Sounds a bit weird doesn’t it? According to the dust-jacket of his latest book, Asterios Polyp (released by Pantheon today), “[he] has been making comics his whole life. This is his first graphic novel.”
Perhaps most widely known for his adaptation of Paul Auster’s City of Glass, which he crafted with Paul Karasik, and his superhero collaborations with Frank Miller (Batman: Year One, Daredevil: Born Again), Mazzucchelli is no stranger to the graphic novel. But his claim that Asterios Polyp is his first has certainly called to mind a number of questions about collaborative endeavors. In any case, the book is largely about duality, among other things, and this statement has furthered the motif; those previous books are either his, or not his. This one, however, is.
Asterios Polyp follows a “successful” architect, for whom the book is named, through the latter half of his life as depicted by his late stillborn twin brother—and if you haven’t noticed by the premise, the book is epically ambitious. Mazzucchelli approaches art in all its forms, depicting it through life both linearly and cyclically, ranging even within the form of a comic from gag-strip to diagram, with discussions pertaining to the theological, philosophical, and just about any other topic worth discussing. And on top of it all, to clearly demonstrate his command of the medium, he fills his pages with tools and imagery that can only be produced in the form of a graphic novel. What he has created is an astounding fusion of visual and linguistic metaphor, and one of the best graphic novels to be produced in years.
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