Asterios Polyp

            I read Asterios Polyp for your Literature and Media Studies course but I really enjoyed it and wanted to discuss it as a comic. This was my favorite comic I read for class. It was a simple story of a pretentious man marrying a simple woman, and then having his marriage and life fall apart and him realizing what he really finds important in life. A very simple story not involving any superheroes with powers, in fact every character was a simple, regular, person.

            What really struck me was the style of animation. Every comic has it’s own style but this was something entirely new. Every character was different, every location changed, even the speech bubbles and fonts changed with every character. My favorite was Asterios, before he got married. He was the architect so he was drawn with straight lines and perfect circles in blue. He looked just like a blueprint to a building. He could not have been done any better, even when he got married and him and hers style were put together he was still very clean with sharp lines. Character wise I enjoyed the pretentious choreographer and the mechanic. The choreographer because he was such a little guy but always put himself in the spotlight and weaseled his way out of paying for dinner every time and really wanted his ass kissed my everybody. And I liked the mechanic because he was a different style than everyone else. He was this big guy who seemed to get along with everybody but still got yelled at by his wife on occasion.

            I think I enjoyed this so much because t wasn’t about superheroes, or some average person turned into something and fought crime or tried to take over the world. It was a regular story so I could almost relate to it. It is great to read the crazy fiction comics and get lost in that world, but reading something that could very well have been non-fiction was a good change and really a good read. And the ending was great. Asterios and his ex-wife were getting along and things seemed promising, when suddenly a giant asteroid was screaming toward their house showing an inevitable death to them both. The mechanic and his family are shown in the tree house Asterios helped build watching the asteroid in the far distance, admiring it as nothing more than a shooting star. If it continued and had Asterios be with her again the comic would have been a drama, but with their possible death it almost turned into a tragedy with a happy ending.