Graphic Power
Two recently released graphic novels, Asterios Polyp by David Mazzucchelli andA.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge by Josh Neufeld illustrate in very different ways the power and breadth of the Graphic Novel. Asterios Polyp also demonstrates the novelistic depth and rich beauty that the best of the genre can achieve, and will go on my top-ten list of books of 2009. I will read Asterios Polyp over and over, for the beauty and variety of Mazzucchelli’s illustrations and for the sincerity and brilliance of his story.
Asterios Polyp tells the story of Asterios, scholar of architecture, dilettante in all matters philosophical, and epicurean of all matters involving taste, and his courtship and marriage to Hana, a sincere, self-effacing, and talented sculptress. Woven in with their story is the story of Asterios’ dead twin, still alive on many of the fabulously-drawn pages of this beautiful book, and the story of another marriage of opposites, that of mechanic Stiffly and his wife, Ursula Major. Ursula is voluptuous in body, wit, intelligence, and delusions. She was my favorite character in the book, the perfect foil and complement to the intelligent and self-important but also fragile Asterios. With her attractive and formidable heft of conversation, empathy, and love of life, she is sometimes another twin to Asterios, and at other times, his opposite.
The question of differences and of contrasts is one of several recurring and fully examined philosophical themes in the book. Mazzucchelli uses various frames of drawing and discussion to explore the idea that instead of yin and yang, there are shades of yin-ism and yang-ism. Although using stark differences (absolutes of yin and yang) can illuminate traits of one character versus another (for example, Asterios and Hana), the true picture of humanity allows for shades of gray — or rather of radiant color — in all of us. My clumsy effort to explain this theme as compared to Mazzucchelli’s lovely, haunting, and eminently comprehensible exposition of the same illustrates the power of the Graphic Novel to present rich ideas, at least when in the hands of a great talent like Mazzucchelli.
Mazzucchelli is also a great storyteller. Asterios Polyp is a touching and sincere story of love, delusion, and recovery, and is as richly cast in supporting characters as it is with its original and yet familiar leads of Asterios, Hana, and Ursula. I read through the pages of Asterios Polyp mesmerized by the variety and skill of Mazzucchelli’s illustrations and amped up on his patient and vivid exploration of the basic human struggle for self-definition and self-realization against all the odds of life.
Josh Neufeld’s A.D: New Orleans After the Deluge, is more reportage than story-telling. It is a non-fiction graphic novel, using the experiences of five people who went through Katrina to report on the horrors of the storm, the subsequent flooding, and the displacement, literal and figurative, of those affected. All that is familiar, known, and secure to the five characters disappears, first in the catastrophe that is Katrina and then in the chaos that is the government’s nightmarish response to the storm and the flooding. To say that the people of New Orleans were devastated, first by one then by the other, is an understatement. Neufeld uses detailed cartooning to convey the stages of denial, realization, and despair that his five characters went through. His close-ups of faces are especially striking for the fear, anger, and disbelief that show up, in different stages and states. We cannot deny the faces nor the truth of what these very real people had to go through (and continue to go through) in a catastrophe begun by nature but completed by man.
