"It's as if John Updike had discovered a bag of art supplies and LSD. Elegant, deceptively simple line work and nearly subliminal color symbolism make everything go down like candy. The narrative comes back to earth for a profoundly satisfying climax, but you'll want to keep turning pages–all the way back to the beginning, for another read."
-
Entertainment Weekly
"This is a comic for artists, and it plays with space and color in ways that maybe only artists will understand, but it is a story for everyone, and Asterios Polyp is easily among the best graphic novels ever made. Go read it, and read it twice." –Providence City Paper
"We can all stop reading comics now, because David Mazzucchelli's crafted the ultimate comic book statement. Just take everything on your reading pile right now and chuck it out.
Asterios Polyp is the new standard bearer. Mazzucchelli has somehow managed to jam just about everything great about comics into 340 pages of humanity, soul-searching, graphic design, philosophy and humor." -
Newsarama
"The more you study
Polyp, the more there is to discover. This is a book that stands with works by Updike, Roth, and other giants of American literature. It is undoubtedly one of the best novels of the year." —
The Stranger
"Asterios Polyp is a perfect marriage of words and pictures. Every drawing, color choice and panel layout is pregnant with meaning." —
Columbus Dispatch
"What Mazzucchelli accomplishes, though, with remarkable clarity and a jazzy pop-culture eye, and which the written word has a tougher time with, is portraying silence, moments between something said and something to come -- even thought itself. That sticks; those last pages are as tender and heartbreaking a portrait of lost time as I can recall, and no less powerful for being nearly wordless" —
Chicago Tribune
"Critics have decried the modern graphic novel's focus on form at the expense of content. With "Asterios Polyp," Mazzucchelli has put paid to that charge: It's funny, it's warm and it's beautiful. Go read it." —Newsday.com
"Each panel is a moment in the story that when connected to other panels becomes part of a scene or sequence that is rich in storytelling and fertile with ideas, inquiry, and themes." —ComicBookBin, A+ review
"Visually,
Asterios Polyp is the lushest comic of the year--maybe of the last the 10 years, a decade not exactly thin on astounding cartooning. Mazzucchelli's work has all but abandoned the realistic musculature and architecture that made him stand out from his superhero peers.
Asterios Polyp feels like three or four cartoonists working in concert, often on the same page, all of them firmly working on the "stylized" end of comics' spectrum." —
Baltimore City Paper
"This fan of the novel is an ever bigger fan of the magic that happens in comics, and
only in comics, when text and art work together to create something wholly, wonderfully new. In books like
Jimmy Corrigan -- and the just released ASTERIOS POLYP by David Mazzucchelli, it happens on every. Single. Page."–
NPR.ORG
"This absorbing, idiosyncratic tale of love, ambition and opportunity marks the return of one of the modern masters of graphic storytelling."–
Miami Herald
"You'll be in awe of how perfect it is and certainly envious of it if you are a writer. What a beautiful, staggeringly brilliant piece of literature."–
Contra Costa Times
'The book is a satirical comedy of remarriage, a treatise on aesthetics and design and ontology, a late-life
Künstlerroman, 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." …. "Asterios Polyp" is a dazzling, expertly constructed entertainment, even as it' s maddening and even suffocating at times. It demands that its audience wrestle with it, argue with it, reread and re-examine it. Isn't that the ultimate purpose of style?' –Douglas Wolk,
New York TImes Book Review
"Heady with philosophical and mythological references,
Asterios Polyp vaults Mazzucchelli into the top rank of graphic artists. It's a sweeping, provocative book that blends the richness of the traditional novel with the best modern art. Mazzucchelli's style - effortless and so versatile that you can't imagine
Asterios in any other medium - is sweeping in every sense."–
Boston Globe
"It's a remarkable, bravura achievement - funny, harrowing and thought-provoking." –
San Francisco Chronicle
"Asterios Polyp reads like an intricately designed and heartfelt work of metafiction, juggling design theory, philosophy and sly nods to other cartoonists to create a dryly funny masterpiece."–
Time Out New York
"It's as if John Updike had discovered a bag of art supplies and LSD. Elegant, deceptively simple line work and nearly subliminal color symbolism make everything go down like candy. The narrative comes back to earth for a profoundly satisfying climax, but you'll want to keep turning pages - all the way back to the beginning, for another read." –
Entertainment Weekly
"Haunting and beautiful."–
Los Angeles Times"I was completely blown away by
Asterios Polyp, David Mazzucchelli's latest comic book, a pull-out-all-the-stops package that's funny, poignant and deep, with panels of thoughtfully shaded images that form a visual novel, a paper movie, and finally, an existential meditation on things that matter to us: religion, art, science, love and memory."–
Pop Culture Nerd
"One of the smartest and most rewarding graphic novels of the year to date."
- Pop Matters"It's a remarkable, bravura achievement - funny, harrowing and thought-provoking."
- San Francisco Chronicle"One of the greatest comics of all time." -
Comic Book Resources"Mazzucchelli's masterwork is by no means an easy read...but it
is a transcendent one." -
Austin Chronicle
"A sprawling work about the life and loves of a middle-aged, philandering architect who loses everything in a fire. The coming release has been compared to the idiosyncratic work of Thomas Pynchon." -
Wall Street Journal"A dazzling expertly constructed entertainment...that is a satirical comedy of remarriage, a treatise on aesthetics and design and ontology, late life Künstlerroman, a Novel of Ideas with two capital letters..." -
New York Times Book Review"Finally, after a decade of silence, Mazzucchelli has returned with his own graphic novel, Asterios Polyp: sprawling, trippy, moving, and a hell of a lot of fun.Almost without realizing it, we slowly begin rooting for Asterios, and hard. A serial overthinker, he lives much of his life in his own head. So Mazzucchelli takes us there, repeatedly, with perfect clarity - it's as if John Updike had discovered a bag of art supplies and LSD. Elegant, deceptively simple line work and nearly subliminal color symbolism make everything go down like candy. The narrative comes back to earth for a profoundly satisfying climax, but you'll want to keep turning pages - all the way back to the beginning, for another read." ~Entertainment Weekly
"Even by the standards of the graphic novel, this cosmic epic pushes the creative envelope.With previous credits including superheroes for Marvel Comics and the transformation of Paul Auster's City of Glass into a graphic novel (2004), Mazzucchelli returns with a title that suggests a mid-period Pink Floyd song and an illustrated narrative that is every bit as mind-blowing. In this graphic novel of fate, chance and shooting stars, Polyp insists that "I am the hero of my own story," yet the art provides plenty of evidence to the contrary. A visual and even philosophical stunner."~
Kirkus "The simplicity of that facile summary, along with the deceptively cartoony drawing style Mazzucchelli has adopted for the work, makes it easy to miss its genuine accomplishment. The sparseness of his illustration gives necessary clarity to his complex storytelling, which employs intricate and imaginative panel arrangements and a constantly shifting chronology.meticulously constructed.It's a testimony to Mazzucchelli's skills that by the end of Polyp's odyssey, the arrogant academic has been rendered a tragic and sympathetic figure deserving of the tale's (possibly) happy ending." - Gordon Flagg,
Booklist"For decades, Mazzucchelli has been a master without a masterpiece. Now he has one. His long-awaited graphic novel is a huge, knotty marvel, the comics equivalent of a Pynchon or Gaddis novel, and radically different from anything he's done before. There are fascinating digressions on aesthetic philosophy, as well as some very broad satire, but the core of the book is Mazzucchelli's odyssey of style-every major character in the book is associated with a specific drawing style and visual motifs, and the design, color scheme and formal techniques of every page change to reinforce whatever's happening in the story. Although Mazzucchelli stacks the deck-few characters besides Polyp and his inamorata, the impossibly good-hearted sculptor Hana, are more than caricatures-the book's bravado and mastery make it riveting even when it's frustrating, and provide a powerful example of how comics use visual information to illustrate complex, interconnected topics. Easily one of the best books of 2009 already." -
Publishers Weekly "Mazzucchelli experiments with numerous art styles and pushes the envelope with challenging digressions into philosophy, religion and mortality throughout Polyp's tale. The engrossing effort culminates with a bombshell that will leave readers reeling."
–Toronto Star
"In Asterios Polyp -- the best of the summer's new releases -- Mazzucchelli employs spotlights, c...