Comics I Bought This Week: October 1, 2009

I'm back from the comic shop this week and I got three new comics plus a hard cover collection:

Glamourpuss -9

Usagi Yojimbo - 123

Echo - 15

Fables: The Deluxe Edition Book One

And now for a review of something I've read recently.

Asterios Polyp - By David Mazzucchelli

Asterios Polyp is the name of the lead character in this book. He is a professor of architecture and a famous "Paper Architect". That means that he has never actually had a building of his built but his designs are well regarded.

It took me a while to get into this book. One criticism that I've used before about other books is "Plenty of observation but no insight" and that is how the beginning of this book played out for me. And then Mazzucchelli gave us some insight and the book took a turn for the better. I ended up liking the book in the end.

It is a well done book but for the most part I found the characters fairly predictable. At least the two main ones, Asterios and his love interest/wife. The supporting characters were generally more interesting to me. I found the love interest character least interesting. Asterios got more interesting as the book went on but his love interest/wife never did. But the story is about Asterios so I guess that's understandable.

I also didn't quite see the ending coming so that was good.

Mazzucchelli was trying some different things with the art. Sometimes, such as in a discussion between Asterios and his wife, each would be drawn in a style that related to their feelings or arguments at that moment. I'm not sure if this was effective or not. Once again it seemed to work better for me at the end of the book and not so well at the beginning. I'm not sure if it's me or Mazzucchelli who is responsible for that. It could be I wasn't used to it. That's the way things are with new techniques. Overall I enjoyed the artwork and storytelling.

Despite its slow start I liked this book. It's the story of a man and how he found his way in the world. Twice. Each time he seems a little lucky but he makes use of his skills too. An interesting read. Give it a try.