Asterios Polyp. & Petrograd

Asterios Polyp. by David Mazzucchelli is a very well-designed comic, and much more abstract and psychology-based than most comics. People in class gave it extremely high praise, so I had pretty high expectations, but it didn't really live up to them. It was pretty and had cool design elements that abstractly represented the mind and Asterios' thought process, but I just didn't think he was very interesting as a character. The comic overall was pretty slow and hard to get into for me, and I kept waiting for something to happen. I actually liked the mechanic's wife best; she was the most interesting of everyone, and I wanted to get to know her much more than Polyp., who was pretty boring. Sometimes I wasn't even sure why we were following him. The dead twin aspect and conflict was kind of cool, but I didn't feel like it was well-utilized and the way it manifested didn't seem realistic to a person's personality. I think part of the reason the book wasn't very entertaining was that the plot followed his relatively uneventful life and didn't seem to lead anywhere. Overall the art was really interesting and pretty though - very minimalist and simple in color and style, with strong, geometric shapes and well-designed characters.

For the next week, graphic fiction and graphic non-fiction, I read Petrograd, a historical comic based in Russia during the World War, which details the life of a British man sent to Russia. Immediately the man is very likeable and gentlemanly and I connect to him throughout his conversation with the old Russian lady. To be honest, I decided to read this comic partly because it deals with Petrograd and a similar era (19th-20th century Russia) and event (assassination of an important political figure) as The Fall, a gorgeous historical comic in the Assassin's Creed series. The art style reminds me of Blankets by Craig Thompson, except instead of blue as an overall color theme it's a rusty orange, and the characters are stylized slightly more realistically. I really love the lineart though - the line weight adds a lot of dynamism and movement and the environments are perfectly detailed and implied enough to pull the viewer in and hold them within this beautiful foreign world. The panels and story are well laid-out and paced with a steady flow that keeps you reading. Overall I really liked the comic, but I wonder how much of it is actually historically accurate and how much of it is fiction.