I had never read a graphic novel when, in August 2009, NPR ran an article with an excerpt of Asterios Polyp, the long-form debut by comic writer David Mazzucchelli. NPR’s headline read “Bold, Experimental ‘Asterios’ Expands Graphic Genre” — and that alone caught my interest. I’ve always been a more visual person, but at no point have I cared for superheros, their villainous counterparts, or the leotards they wear to battle.

It sounded like this work would have some literary merit, and the drawings in the excerpt were spectacular. So I bought a copy with Amazon.com gift cards and soon reading it became my new bedtime ritual. It wasn’t as stimulating at watching shows on DVD, but easier on the eyes than the small font of a normal book. I found myself going slowly on purpose, wanting to draw out the experience so I could pay attention to all the fine details. I’m sure I’ll be reading it over and over again, since there have to be things that I missed. (Near the start, did you notice the ads for the treatment of hemorrhoids and diarrhea? Exactly!)

The clarity of vision is one of the book’s strongest features, and it revives the whole idea behind “show, don’t tell.” For example, Mazzucchelli could just say that Hana (Polyp’s love interest) is reserved and has low self-esteem. Instead he draws her standing outside a spotlight, first as a youth ignored by her mother, second as an adult professor and artist who is uncomfortable receiving praise for her work. The visual presentation is, as far as I can tell, very unorthodox for the medium. Hardly any pages have traditional comic frames; some have a mixture of open and enclosed elements, while others are full-page scenes.

It seems that Mazzucchelli was trying to imbue the main character with the same sense of dualism that he sees in everything around him. In short, man could either a divine creation or a diseased perversion.

I don’t intend to review the book so much as point out some of the aspects that were most interesting to me. The first may be standard for graphic novels — I wouldn’t know. There are no page numbers, so I never really knew how far along in the book I was (except for a rough estimate from bookmark placement). There are 344 pages, according to NPR, though I wouldn’t have guessed it. Despite my intentionally slow pace, I was sucked into this world and spat out rather too soon.

The book itself has a specific color scheme; for the first 98 percent of it Mazzucchelli only uses pink, purple, blue and yellow. Another interesting observation is that every character — down to the guy playing guitar in the subway — speaks with his or her own typeface. From my experience with publishing, I know that choosing between fonts can be difficult on computer. I can’t imagine writing them in any kind of consistent fashion, yet this method lends to the characterization. The font actually says something about the nature of their personalities.

It was apparent through the novel that Mazzucchelli has some interest in ancient Greece, and that was confirmed when I looked up the meaning behind the protagonist’s name. “Asterios Polyp” is actually a sort of contradiction. Asterion is a name from Greek mythology — as Wikipedia puts it, “two sacred kings of Crete.” One conception seems to be the actual king, while the other was “the star at the center of the labyrinth on Cretan coins… the Minotaur.”

Polyp sounded more familiar to me because of my former studies in biology. According to Wikipedia, a polyp is “an abnormal growth of tissue projecting from a mucous membrane” most commonly known as a cause for colon cancer. In other words, it seems that Mazzucchelli was trying to imbue the main character with the same sense of dualism that he sees in everything around him — as if his worldview was so central to him that it existed even in his name. Of course, the broader interpretation of that concept has been posed throughout literature (one notable example is Hesse’s Steppenwolf). In short, man could either a divine creation or a diseased perversion.

Strangely, the story is narrated by Ignazio, Asterios’s twin brother who didn’t survive childbirth. Throughout the book we see how Asterios lives with the presence of his lost brother, like a shadow following him everywhere. There are stunning dream sequences when Asterios gets to speak with this character. This concept of a missing half is also brought up in relation to sex (via a reference to Plato’s Symposium) to suggest that “men and women have been running around in a panic, searching for their lost counterparts, in a desire to be whole again.”

That’s closely tied to another big topic in the book, the idea that each individual has a unique perception of reality that dictates how we interact with one another. As Ignazio states (in the section excerpted by NPR):

“What if reality (as perceived) were simply an extension of the self? Wouldn’t that color the way each individual experiences the world? As one who doesn’t exist, I’m entitled to ask these questions. That might explain why some people seem to get along so effortlessly, while others don’t. Although people do keep trying.

“Yet, despite such predisposition, maybe one person’s construction of the world could influence someone else’s. You would have to imagine that these constructions, whatever their origins, are not immutable. This would suggest it’s possible for someone to freely alter his own perception of reality in order to overlap with that of another. This choice might be seen as a reflection — and not necessarily a result — of one’s genetic architecture. Wouldn’t that be nice?”

This passage is meaningful on its own, but the corresponding images provide so much context that it’s almost hard to separate the two.

My favorite thing about Asterios Polyp is that it turned me on to graphic novels. Yet I still feel slightly uncomfortable in this medium, as if my mind wants to take this content and push it into the visual formats to which I’m more accustomed. A few times now I’ve had the urge to create a rudimentary animation out of it, like a slide show of stills with music playing in the background. That would be more productive than simply hoping for this to be made into a feature length film at some point.

My next read in the genre might be Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth by Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos Papadimitriou (thanks to Amazon.com’s recommendations) about the struggles of philosopher Bertrand Russell. Although, I’m afraid that, after this epic, I might be a little let down.

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