David Mazzucchelli had a rather exciting career in the comics industry. While in the 1970s, most artists and writers dreamed of joining the staff of industry giants, by the age of 20, Mazzucchelli was already drawing one of the most fearless characters at Marvel – Daredevil (Friedenthal 34). David collaborated with such legends as Dany O’Neil and Frank Miller. The drawing style in Mazzucchelli’s cape comics is strikingly different from what we see in Asterios Polyp.
The change is striking if one compares several of his works. In my opinion, this evolution of drawing can be called unique: the artist removes everything superfluous from the drawing, depicts the background quite conventionally, and the characters look more and more like schematic sketches. However, the most exciting thing here is that, while simplifying the drawing, David gives it significant meaning through composition and color. He also stops following any rules of storyboarding, sometimes abandoning them altogether. “Asterios Polyp” can be called Mazzucchelli’s most groundbreaking work. He went beyond the comic book we are accustomed to while creating a form of storytelling all his own.
To analyze Mazzucchelli’s work with color discussed in the secondary source, I selected Beyond Stereotypes: Understanding Color and Characterization in David Mazzucchelli’s “Asterios Polyp,” I will turn to the plot of the comic. The story, reminiscent of Scott McCloud’s “The Sculptor,” is riveting in its emotionality and narrative peculiarities (Aldama 157). Asterios is a middle-aged man, an architect by training, and a teacher whose projects have never come to fruition.
He is stern, confident, and practical. A typical representative of the intelligentsia, and at times he is nothing but a snob. Nevertheless, he was not always like that. After meeting his girlfriend, Hanna, his life changes, and their relationship are idyllic until a turning point. The story seems very simple, but one of the comic book features is the narrative on behalf of his dead twin brother, Ignazio. It is from his words that the reader is introduced to the character and his life.
Through Ignazio’s mouth, the author speaks of his thoughts and ideas. For example, here, the author reflects on the peculiarities of each person’s perception of reality, suggesting that reality is only an extension of ourselves (Mazzucchelli 25).
It is Mazzucchelli’s ability to weave his ideas into the main plot that complements the comic perfectly. The author masterfully maintains the emotional tension between the characters and emphasizes their individuality through unusual visuals. It is worth noting that on most pages, there is no background at all. It is simply unimportant here. Characters, objects, their shape, and color are what the author pays attention to. Everything else seems to be non-existent. The composition in a comic book requires a separate detailed discussion. For example, consider one of the spreads of an issue of the Golden Age of Comics and compare it to one of the contemporary issues. One can see a striking difference in the arrangement of the panels on the page.
The authors’ decisions to follow a particular structure also affect the way they read and, consequently, the reader’s perception of the story. Mazzucchelli’s composition follows almost no rules, yet the author manages to hold the reader’s attention until the end of the comic. Mazzucchelli’s drawing complements the author’s text and characters’ lines incredibly accurately and exhaustively, providing the reader with complete information about the characters and the mood of the comic. The composition in any comic book directly affects whether the reader reaches the end of the story or quits reading at the beginning (Marx 73).
The skillful arrangement of panels, characters, and other objects on the page often hooks the reader. It compels him or her to read the comic to the end. Mazzucchelli has his idea of telling a story, and the composition in “Asterios Polyp” is proof of that. Consider when Asterios tells Hannah about having a twin brother and his fears about losing his brother. The entire story fits into three pages.
As one can see, there are no clear rules of storyboarding, but the reader is in no way confused, and the narrative does not lose momentum. On the same page, the author plays with color. In this context, I would like to synthesize the primary color meaning, using both primary and secondary sources. Everything about the main character is depicted predominantly in cold colors, which once again emphasizes his austerity. Mazzucchelli is not stingy with emotional moments in the comic. He seems to use every technique available to him, sometimes letting the emotion come to the forefront and lead the plot (Brown et al. 124).
Globally speaking, Mazzucchelli has gone beyond the boundaries of the conventional notion of the comic. “Asterios Polyp” lacks the usual comic pages with a consistent storyboard, and the characters are often depicted almost schematically. However, despite the massive scope of potential topics for discussion in this work, I would like to focus on how the author conveys emotion and plays with the reader.
Perhaps the primary medium for conveying feelings in a comic is color. The author of my secondary source, Max Bledstein, also agrees with this (4). The palette is sparse enough; the fingers of one hand would be enough to list it all. David took a basic palette of colors: red, yellow, and blue, sometimes mixing them to produce purple, abundant in the comic. To begin with, each of the colors has both positive and negative connotations.
However, it is essential to remember that there are still no studies that confirm the meanings of particular colors without reference to the context in which they are used. That is, values of color solution the person forms itself, correlating this or that color with a context in which it is presented (Earle 84). Moreover, information on the perception of color plays a considerable role in the culture in which the person was formed and his associations. In this case, I will interpret the palette specifically in conjunction with the Mazzucchelli comic strip, sometimes drawing on some established norms.
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.
However, I believe it was the emotional strain of the characters that played a significant role in the choice of colors, not their gender socialization. For example, the fight scene and the process of the heroine’s emotions cooling off after the fight. Removing the color would have made it harder for the author to convey the right emotion to the reader.
One of the most exciting color choices in the comic is the use of yellow paired with purple. Yellow and purple are considered to be opposite colors and contrasting colors. When mixed, they give a gray, but when they are adjacent, they emphasize the brightness of each other (Hill and Dorsey 55). Having read the comic book in its entirety, the reader will probably notice that with the help of color, the author has also delimited the story’s time frame.
Thus, the period when Asterios lives in the house of Stiff and his family is depicted in purple and yellow. When it is just Asterios, we can observe predominantly blue shades. However, as soon as Hannah appears in the narrative, the pages are filled with shades of red. This systematic use is no accident either. It underscores how prone the protagonist is to a particular categorization of his worldview and the author is open about it.
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
Aldama, Frederick Luis, editor. Comics studies here and now. Routledge, 2018. Web.
Bledstein, Max. Beyond Stereotypes: Understanding Color and Characterization in David Mazzucchelli’s Asterios Polyp. Web.
Brown, Matthew, et al. More critical approaches to comics: Theories and methods. Routledge, 2019. Web.
Earle, Harriet. Comics: An introduction. Routledge, 2020. Web.
Friedenthal, Andrew. The world of DC comics. Routledge, 2019. Web.
Hill, Crag, and Jennifer Dorsey. Expanding the map of the literary canon through multimodal texts. Springer, 2020. Web.
Marx, Christy. Writing for animation, comics, and games. CRC Press, 2021. Web.
Mazzucchelli, David. Asterios Polyp. Pantheon, 2009.