Asterios Polyp

(China Daily)
Updated: 2009-07-21 11:00

Modernism came late to comics. Cartoonists are naturally stylistic chameleons,

Asterios Polyp

selecting and altering visual techniques to serve their subjects. But explicitly presenting style as content? That's always trickier. It took creative giants to make it work in literature, music and fine art, and many comics artists of the last few decades who've made formal and stylistic exploration the chief focus of their work have had to neglect the pleasures - and audiences - of storytelling.

Enter Asterios Polyp: a big, proud, ambitious chunk of a graphic novel, with modernism on its mind and a perfectly geometrical chip on its shoulder. The tension between formalist rigor and emotional subtlety is not just the theme of the cartoonist David Mazzucchelli's decade-in-the-making opus; it's basically the plot.

The book is a satirical comedy of remarriage, a treatise on aesthetics and design and ontology, a late-life Kunstlerroman, a Novel of Ideas with two capital letters, and just about the most schematic work of fiction this side of that other big book that constantly alludes to the Odyssey.