Mazzucchelli knows exactly what he's doing with that clean, cartoony style and his generous use of white space — he's inviting the eye, drawing the reader in. And once that happens, it doesn't take long for Asterios Polyp to reveal itself as a daring experiment that succeeds without seeming experimental, a multi-layered read that uses every tool available to the comics artist to engage us on a deep level.
Asterios Polyp is an architect who has built a successful academic career on the power of his theories alone. Casually arrogant and infatuated with the notion of duality — he is never happier than when imposing his simplistic, black-or-white worldview on others — Asterios finds his New York City apartment destroyed by a lightning strike. What happens next, as he leaves his old life behind and builds a new one in a small Midwestern town, is the familiar stuff of contemporary literary fiction — how it happens, however, is what makes Asterios Polyp such a singular creation and a quintessential example of what the graphic novel — and only the graphic novel — can do.
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