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WEEK 11: LITERARY GRAPHIC NOVELS

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I decided to check out “Asterios Polyp” by David Mazzucchelli for this week’s reading. For me, this was a bit of a long read, but it was so worth it. I don’t recall ever reading a graphic novel quite like this one before. The mix of past and present time, the complexity of Asterios’ relationships and his mind, and the looming dead twin of his made this novel so inventive. To be honest, there were a few dry spells while reading, like the areas where he was describing his work or complicated philosophies. The amount of text would be significantly larger, but overall it was still interesting to read. One of my favorite aspects of the comic was how he chose to show the distance between characters. Just by the font and the shape of the word bubbles, each character has a distinct style. Asterios, a renown and cocky architect, has the plainest type of word bubble—a box. This further implies that his personality is like a square: flat, mundane, rigid. Meanwhile, his ex-wife Hana is a soft round bubble. She is wholesome, organic, and well-rounded. To further separate the two characters, Mazzucchelli even differed the artistic style at certain points of the novel. Hana was softly rendered in pink, while Asterios was depicted as modern geometric shapes with no filling. This happened whenever they had big fights or felt apart from each other. Typically, the fault was in Asterios, which is why I believe that him being only constructed in lines was very significant to the arguments. Hana was rendered because she proved to be more fleshed out. She had better morals and a strong understanding of people. Asterios was very much the opposite. He would never listen to Hana, or anyone else for that matter, because he always assumed he was right. He was a hollow shell of a man. It was nice to finally see some character development towards the end of the novel, when Asterios goes back to meet Hana. When their words began to intertwine and mesh together, I felt the emotions of watching two people come together again. Despite their differences, they were still able to connect and imply a happy future. That is until we see the gigantic asteroid coming straight towards them. The asteroid felt very sudden to me, but then I remembered how the story started (with the house fire), and it made more sense. It was like Mazzucchelli was bookending the whole thing by starting and ending with natural destruction. Though it came out of nowhere, it didn’t feel out of place.

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