This comic made me cranky. I thoroughly enjoyed the art, which has a clean open feeling and lovely line work, and thought the story was sweet and rather sad, if a bit rote, and then….
I read the ending.
‘Rocks fall, everybody dies’ is a phrase sometimes used in manga circles to describe a long running manga that the artist, for some reason (usually boredom) hates and cannot figure out how to end. So they put the characters somewhere, dump a bunch of boulders on them, and there’s your insta ending.
This comic took a story about small character changes and growth and slammed a big artistic fist down on it. I’m sure I’m supposed to think Deep and Meaningful thoughts about why it’s an asteriod and whether Asterios is related to asteroid and whether personal changes have any effect compared to outside forces, but the story is not strong enough. I don’t care anymore. The artist took a boring subject that was drawn beautifully and poured a big can of paint on it (or insert your artistic edginess metaphor here). I no longer care because the weird ending just made the whole story immaterial. I’m sure someone, somewhere, could make it an interesting artistic statement, but this is not that comic.
And yeah, I appreciated, vaguely, the double layers everywhere. The man with confidence who dreams but never creates, the woman who builds but has no confidence, the two forms of design, the car, all of it, but I don’t care anymore. Not in a hateful way, but just in a bored way. Ah well.
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Update by Noah: The whole Asterios Polyp roundtable is here.
“Rocks fall, everybody dies”
So it came from manga; for some reason I thought it came from Avatar: The Last Airbender fandom.
I actually laughed at the asteriod ending. Maybe that was the reaction Mazzucchelli was going for, but I doubt it.
I’m familiar with the phrase — and I’m pretty sure its current, um, currency, stems from — this Something Positive comic:
http://www.somethingpositive.net/sp05032002.shtml
TV tropes says it’s older, but it doesn’t give any earlier citations, so make of that what you will.
It’s interesting that you and Craig are so down on the ending. I didn’t like it much either…but I also sort of ignored it. It feels more like a joke or a final fillip than like something we’re supposed to take seriously. I mean, the realist narrative of the book does effectively end the way Craig says it should (sitting on the couch, almost touching.) The meteor seems almost like an afterward; it’s hard for me to think of it as actually part of Asterios and Hana’s story, anyway. Certainly, it didn’t ruin the book for me the way that it seems to have for you (and to some extent for Craig.)
Though I liked it less to begin with, so perhaps that’s the reason….
Maybe there just wasn’t enough man on man action.
For me you mean, because of that comics in the closet essay? But there was a fair bit! Lots of bonding with what’s his name; the mechanic. Plenty of material for slash there!
I meant for vom.
Or am I confusing her with someone else?
Vom likes the boys’ love, yes, but you may be confusing her with our boys’ love columnist kinukitty.
So I wasn’t the only one who laughed at the asteriod ending! I thought for sure I must be an awful person for doing so.
Anyways, one thing that bothers me about all this reviewing about Asterios Polyp is that nobody seems to ENJOY the comic. Rather than point out the innovations in the drawings, they’d rather point out how superficial the story is, how one-dimensional the characters are, and how unlikeable the main character is. I don’t like Woody Allen that much either, but I prefer Asterios better, since he’s not as neurotic, even when the spotlight keeps shining on him.
Myself, I enjoyed it because after reading it the first time, and then reading it again, it gave me greater joy finding the connections between seemingly random events throughout the story. It’s part of why I enjoyed 12 Monkeys better the second time around – I was able to eventually figure out the story, rather than have everything explained to me at the end. (This was before I read the Scott McCloud review – I make it a point not to look at comic reviews too closely before reading a recommended book – I don’t want to read too many spoilers that’ll ruin my enjoyment)
I was quite taken with the reinterpretation of the Orpheus story. When I reached the halfway point, I went back to the beginning to get a better understanding, and when I reached the end of that chapter, I went back & reread it again. Given how often I just want to blaze through a book to get to the END, that’s a high compliment.
I especially liked the visual metaphors, which is something that’s been lacking in American comics for a long time. Too often, they’re too caught up in text, and wanting to say more than necessary. When I see a character in a movie talking too much, I’m immediately put off, because it rings hollow, and nothing is really being said.
It says something about a comic that, even when you know how disastrous everything turns out, you still want to read it again. I’ve even heard interpretations of that Asteroid scene as it being shown in profile, with the Asteroid being an extreme close-up, and the house being further away in the distance. Myself, I’m going for the fatalistic ending, because otherwise, what was the craters at the halfway point for?
Daniel: Oh, I enjoyed AP. Otherwise I wouldn’t have reread it a few times. Maybe I didn’t make that clear in my post…
I think it was clear that you enjoyed it, Derik! Craig was also positive — and Richard went out of his way to be positive and talk about how much he enjoyed the art rather than about his dislike of the story.
Overall the roundtable has been less positive than I thought it might be….but that’s the way it goes sometimes….
Well, that makes three of us. Yes, the story’s old hat, but so what? So was ‘Hamlet’.
I was also much struck by negative readings of particular scenes. Noah treats the building of the treehouse as pure schmaltz. I thought it was bitingly ironic.
And too much is made by the entire roundtable of the disconnect between bad story/good art. Art itself is the subject of the book, and its aesthetic is a major part of the statement.
Alex, what irony did you see in the treehouse scene? It’s ironic that Asterios has never built anything and now he does — but that seems more schmaltzy than biting to me.
And what statement do you think the art is making?
I’ve always favored Sean Gaffney’s generic heavy-handed ending meme – “S/he gets hit by a truck and dies.” There’s something really tactile in it. We can *imagine* what getting hit by a truck is like. And if we hate the characters enough, we can wallow in knowing how much it hurt them.
The interesting this about this roundtable, as Alex points out, is that no one seemed to like the book much. It’s like High School in which you are forced to read crappy, miserable book after crappy miserable book and when you protest, the teacher tells you that they are *important*. As beautiful as this book may be, there’s been nothing said that makes me want to read it. That’s kind of sad, don’t you think?
Cheers,
Erica
The treehouse irony seems pretty obvious to me. Here’s one of the world’s top architects, and all he’s ever built is a child’s treehouse. (BTW, the ‘paper architect’ superstar really exists. Until the 80s, Michael Graves was a famous example.)
The art is making a statement on the need to reconcile the Appolonian (Asterios) and the Dionysiac (Hana, Ilium).
Note that Hana is as enriched by Asterios’ influence as he is by hers.
And Erica– do read it, you’ll not regret it.
I’d recommend at least looking through it, Erica. It is lovely.
“The treehouse irony seems pretty obvious to me. Here’s one of the world’s top architects, and all he’s ever built is a child’s treehouse.”
Yes, I got that. But it’s schmaltzy because his actual building of the treehouse is part of his attainment of manhood/connecting with reality/growing into a full person. The life of the mind/life of reality dichotomy, and the Narrative of Personal Growth, is simplistic enough to be Hollywood. It just doesn’t seem very biting to me.
Can you give an example of how the art reconciles Appolonian and Dionysiac? Are you thinking of a scene in particular?
Well, look at the scenes where polygonal Asterios meets fuzzy-hatchy Hana, and how these opposed styles of drawing are ‘mashed up’in their sex scenes or, for that matter, in the final reconciliation scene. (Mazzuchelli may be indulging a visual pun: Asterios becomes quite literally a more well-rounded character.)
‘Yes, I got that. But it’s schmaltzy because his actual building of the treehouse is part of his attainment of manhood/connecting with reality/growing into a full person.’
What’s schmaltzy about that?
Every human story ever written involves a change in the character.
‘The life of the mind/life of reality dichotomy, and the Narrative of Personal Growth, is simplistic enough to be Hollywood. It just doesn’t seem very biting to me.’
It isn’t ‘simplistic’, it’s simple, and it’s true.
Well, we’ll just have to agree to disagree Alex. I’m actually happy to have somebody sticking up for the narrative though; the roundtable has ended up rather more brutal than I intended!
Ah, but the redoubtable Domingos now weighs in.
I actually spat in shock at this page. There is now a little white spot marring the beautiful blue.
The meteor was a metaphor. A ‘meteorphor’, if you like. We know this because on the following page we see the meteor as it actually appears, 1000-odd miles to the left, as a normal shooting star looks, a harmless little line on the sky. The ‘giant meteor’ thing is a reference to the picnic Polyp had with Ursula at the crater, where they talked about creation myhs involving ‘father sky and mother earth’, something thrusting into the earth if you want to get cruder. (This is also a reference to the not-uncommon scientific belief that life on earth started when a meteor carrying extraterrestrial biological cells hit earth, and then started evolving.) So what happened? Hana and Asterios put the past behind them and made love. The asteroid symbolised the creation of a ‘new world’ for them; new life together, new romance, presumably, a new baby too. More crudely, it symbolised a penis. It is the kind of explosive, energetic, primal lovemaking that one could describe as ‘two worlds colliding’. We also know that Mazzuchelli has used metaphor before in this comic, often; the ‘descent into Hades’ scene a perfect example.
Yes, Mazzuchelli handled it quite poorly, which I can see by the number of people who did not understand the ending. However the reason I came to the conclusion I did is because I cannot believe someone who spent 9 years and a huge amount of effort on a story as good as this one would end it in such a ridiculous way. So fellas, ladies, relax – it’s not the end of the world, it’s just a metaphor.
This comic lampooned self-important quasi-intellectuals (Willy, AP, the composer) and here we have a bunch of self-important quasi-intellectuals criticizing this book for being self-important and quasi-intellectual. Mazzucchelli must be laffffin! Quit hating! This book was great. (I do realize I am 4 years late for this convo)
The book is pretty intellectual itself. Quit hating intellectuals, you know? Go watch the Avengers and let the drool flow freely from your half-open maw, so everyone knows you’re of the people.
Toxic, I deleted that. You can try to comment again if you can manage it without spewing filth. Otherwise, you’ll just get deleted again, and eventually banned.