"Asterios Polyp" Visually Stimulating with Little in the Way Story-wise

 

    I'm officially done the collection of smaller, independent comics I've had saved on my phone. Though, I have to admit, I was surprisingly underwhelmed with this one. Don't get me wrong, I don't think it's bad, but I was genuinely very surprised at how highly touted this graphic novel was. Ultimately, I just felt like it was fine (?) story-wise, and while it was visually very appealing, I can't help but feel as if I was just left wanting more from this comic. Let's talk about it.

    Asterios Polyp follows a divorced man whose home burns down, and so decides to leave everything behind and move to a small town. It's really that simple, the premise isn't so much about following Polyp as it is about exploring who he is and how he got there. The issue? I just don't think it's that interesting of a story. His story is simple, this is a man who lived a bit of a tragic life, and became an architecture professor, except none of his designs ever end up actually get build. That's basically the point about Poylp, he's just had a lot of smoke blown up his ass, he's an incredibly prideful and arrogant person who doesn't realize that as a paper architect, he hasn't done that much.

    The story then follows his interactions with this small town couple and their children as he works as an automotive assistant, and they slowly expand on his background, including his parents, and his now ex-wife Hana. Oddly enough, Hana is basically the only person who can end up piercing his very binary way of life, in which he basically thinks if something in architecture doesn't have a function, than it is excess. Which is pretty funny since Hana is a sculptor and so you could argue everything she does is largely excess and has no function.

    I think ultimately though the issue is this entire story is shown retroactively. You hardly see the titular character, Polyp, actually do anything in the present tense. He helps build a treehouse and learns a lesson about two people learning to love each other even with so many differences in personality. Then he just runs off and comes back to Hana. It doesn't particularly feel earned. It's a very short moment in the present, because practically the whole book is spent in the past, and instead the climax is Hana and Asterios divorcing, with her asking basically why he's such a pompous ass. 

    Don't get me wrong, visually this graphic novel is amazing. Just how abstract it is, all of the different colours, lines and shapes that are used. In that sense it truly is a unique and mesmerizing experience. I particularly loved one of the final sequences in which Asterios recreates the journey of Orpheus, except this time his love is Hana, and the underworld he ventures into is basically a subway train. But it can't be everything. In my mind if there was a stronger story to go along with the illustrations, it'd be so much better, but in it's current state it doesn't have that.

Final Score: 60/100

    I mean it was pretty solid, but I spent way longer reading this comic than I was expecting to. It's only about 300 pages, but compared to something like Upgrade Soul where I managed to finish reading it in a day in bed, this one basically just lay dormant on my phone as I slowly flipped through pages feeling for the most part unattached to everything that was happening. It was only because I attended a concert recently that I finally begun reading more and more chapters of this book. Perhaps it'll splash more if I read the physical version, but in the version I read, it was just a fine graphic novel.