Aggiungiamo che gioca anche col lettering, assegnandone uno per personaggio e mutandolo a secondo degli stati d’animo. Con esta novela gráfica he quedado fascinada sobre todo en el aspecto formal: el dibujo, el cambio en los colores para caracterizar a los personajes o para indicar el tiempo... en la tipografía, las formas de representar a los personajes, toda la cantidad de detalles (por ejemplo del mobiliario). Una grandísima obra, imprescindible diría yo para todo el que disfrute con el género, y muy recomendable para aquellos que todavía piensan (parece imposible que puedan existir, pero sí, por ahí andan) que los cómics son un género menor. Wolk, Douglas (July 23, 2009). "Shades of Meaning". The New York Times . Retrieved December 30, 2011.

Noah: I don’t understand how you can maintain that the things I’m talking about are not in the comic — look at the divorce letters, for example, and what about the scene where Hana breaks down? To claim that those things just appeared in the comic without Mazzucchelli wanting them there for a specific reason goes against the whole tenor of the work. He has clearly thought long and hard about the choices he made. Therefore, “Asterios Polyp” is a unique, unparalleled experience of storytelling. It is a comic book that transcends the usual storytelling within the genre. Through the color scheme, the author categorizes the characters and also gives them emotional coloring. Careful choice of color helps the reader to feel the changing mood of the narrative entirely. Color rendering is one of the primary means of storytelling, making the comic so unique. Works Cited

Works Cited

What if reality (as perceived) were simply an extension of the self? Wouldn't this color the way each individual experiences the world? As one who doesn't exist, I'm entitled to ask these questions." As metadiscourse, Asterios Polyp as bold and sophisticated as anything in comics, but its success ultimately might have to be gauged elsewhere and on more uncertain terms. The readings made here of the main characters, Asterios and Hana, have tended toward the ungenerous, and this is no doubt in part Mazzucchelli’s own problem for miring them in this seemingly prescriptive construction of a story, which threatens his larger ambition of transcending the limitations of his form. It’s arguable how well he succeeds, but I, for one, find the lives they live beyond what he makes visible recognizably affecting. Asterios’ worldview doesn’t provide a satisfying framework for understanding his actions, but we can try by going beyond it. And for Asterios, and therefore the reader, the true Hana remains intuited rather than stated. But they are both there, beyond the binary.

Thing is Asterios Polyp isn’t the kind of graphic novel I like to read. I generally don’t do character driven dramas or ‘real-life’ fiction. But this one captured my imagination and wouldn’t let me go! Brown, Matthew, et al. More critical approaches to comics: Theories and methods. Routledge, 2019. Web. My point is that the “paying disproportionate attention” is the mechanism by which the binary is perpetuated in the book…it’s a binary in the sense of two things that can be separated from each other (only separate things can be treated disproportionately). “While” implies that these things don’t fit together, but the two bits you quote from me are a cause and its effect… Mixed Metaphor: Asterios points it out when Hana uses the phrase "drowned out by someone barrelling over him." In the meantime, we are enthralled by Mazzucchelli’s extraordinarily imagined world of brilliantly conceived eccentrics, sharply observed social mores, and deftly depicted asides on everything from design theory to the nature of human perception.I so wish more graphic novelists did what Mazzucchelli did in this one. Rather than merely have the graphic element supplement the story, Asterios Polyp makes graphics a part of the theme, using it to highlight conflicts and characterize its protagonists. The journey of this full-of-himself man, Asterios, is begun through an event beyond his control, an act of god. He ends up doing some self-exploration, and we go along with him as he, or the narrator (his dead/unborn twin brother), shows us what kind of man he is/was. He's actually a well-meaning, albeit full-of-himself sort, the kind of which most of us have met. He's smug and happy to stay in his comfort zone so, as such, he is unable to even see where he goes wrong. He's not a bad guy; just no one had ever pointed out his flaws to him. The narrator is a haunting figure who helps Asterios realize he DOES have control over some aspects of his life -- not all of them, but some. Asterios Polyp, as well as being the bearer of one of the most verbally unwieldy names in the American educational system, is a Professor of Architecture at prestigious Cornell University in upstate New York. He has both Greek and Italian heritage and both of these storied architectural ancestries are present in the buildings he also designs. He lives an unremarkable life that he very much enjoys, happy in his insulated educational bubble, until the day when his apartment building burns down as a result of a lightning strike.

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 After this dramatic introduction, we begin to get to know Asterios. He is an architecture professor, but a "paper architect," meaning that none of his designs have ever been built. He has always been something of an aloof genius. He had a twin brother who died in the womb, and who will be our narrator throughout the book. He was married to a sculptor and fellow professor named Hana. Break the Haughty: It's shown that in the past Asterios was quite pompous and self-important towards the people around him. His experience eventually tempered him into becoming a more humble and down-to-earth person as shown in his interactions with the working-class Stiff and Ursula. Consider, for example, the first meeting of Asterios and Hannah. Each character is depicted in a different color: Asterios in blue and Hannah in red. Furthermore, in one of the panels, one can see how the blue schematic lines and chaotic red strokes intertwine. Both characters are depicted in the same mixed manner. The author of the secondary source emphasizes the gender polarization expressed in this dichotomy (Bledstein 5). Indeed, if the color were removed here, the scene would lose its emotional meaning. The author would have to resort to redundant text to explain to the reader how the characters felt at the moment of their meeting. Much has been said, this past week—not to mention and this past year or so—about David Mazzucchelli’s Asterios Polyp, and I feel I don’t have much to add to the discussion of the work itself that I haven’t already said in my earlier examination of the book. However, I think much of the discussion in the present forum has highlighted how excitingly—albeit also frustratingly—open discourse on comics is in these times of redefinition. My contribution, thus, will at least initially concentrate on this discourse rather than on the book, which is perhaps fitting in that Asterios Polyp itself can be seen as meta-discourse on comics.Questa graphic novel è un autentico manuale per capire e studiare il mondo dei fumetti: chirurgicamente Mazzucchelli disseziona la tavola del disegno, smonta tavola e disegno, pezzo per pezzo, in un continuo viaggio fuori e dentro le forme, i contenuti, le sequenze, gli stili estetici, giocando da una parte con l’uso dei colori e dall’altra con la (s)composizione della stessa pagina.