“How much more basic can you get? I made up a superhero and named him ‘Power.’”—David Mazzucchelli describing the cartoons he drew as a child, from his Comics Journal #194 interview (1997). How should we evaluate David Mazzucchelli’s career? His work tends to fall neatly into three chronological periods. The first is his superhero period [...]
I’ll get the obvious out of the way: Asterios Polyp is a trite, boring story with vapid characters. I more or less agreed with Noah’s assessment, so I won’t repeat what’s already been typed. And yet I was impressed by Mazzucchelli’s artistic skill, which Derik Badman discussed in some detail here. Because I’d rather not [...]
I tend to be a careless reader on first reading a book. I’m distracted. I’m too interested in just getting through. I’m testing the waters too much: do I like this, will I like this? For this reason, I’m a big rereader. I try not to review anything on only one read. Better with two [...]
Asterios Polyp takes an impeccable sense of visual design and layer upon layer of sophisticated allusion to tell a clichéd, tedious, poorly imagined, ruthlessly uninsightful story. It’s like listening to a musically brilliant opera with the book taken directly from a TV movie of the week, or (to take an analogy perhaps closer to my [...]
Darwyn Cook relegates Wonder Woman to helpmate in Superman’s psychodrama.
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