Asterios and the Nature of Duality

Asterios Polyp, by David Mazzucchelli, is an incredible feat of both design and content – much like its main character of the same name. Asterios was one-half of a set of twins, but his brother, Ignazio, died at birth; the latter is the narrator of this graphic novel. While the story at first appears to follow the life, career, and relationships of Asterios, there is really only one thing being illustrated by Mazzucchelli: Asterios’ desperate scramble to find balance and symmetry in the makeup of the world in an attempt to compensate for the constant feeling of extreme unevenness that the death of his twin created (even his surname was cut in half by an "exasperated Ellis Island official). He goes on long, philosophical rants about the construction of things, and how there are really only ever two aspects of a person or object’s nature; he accepts the existence of a spectrum in any given situation, but in the end restates that there is only ever “this or that.” In his architectural designs, Asterios drew up concepts that featured symmetry, like his “Parallel Park,” and lauded the parallelism of the World Trade Center. In every night’s sleep that is featured in this story, his dreams are haunted by duality or – lack thereof. Most feature Ignazio. After sleeping with Hana, Asterios reveals his perpetual feeling of having someone standing behind him, just out of sight, but eternally present. This duality is challenged, however, when Hana accuses him of only ever being able to talk about himself. Ignazio’s death may very well have served to define Asterios, driving his most successful designs. Through the theft of his duality, Asterios became singular. By means of his beautiful designs and brilliant narrative construction, Mazzucchelli is able to very literally illustrate empty space and the effect it can have on an individual.

Buddha by Tezuka

Buddha, by Osama Tezuka, is an incredible series interpreting the life of Gautama Buddha, the founder of Buddhism. The first volume, Kapilavastu, wastes no time immersing its readers into the story. Tezuka establishes the story by means of a map of India, overlain with information marking important events in the life of Buddha, thus serving as a roadmap (if not quite a table of contents) of the story about to be told. There is a stark, almost rattling contrast of different levels of realism and simpler, more cartooned styles. Tezuka manages to balance them, however, by carefully choosing what to simplify and what to render more thoroughly. His drawing of the “Brahmin” icon looks as if it could be a realistic, black and white rubbing of art made in the time period from which it is meant to have been created; but his depictions of people and animals (in the manner of a firsthand account) are simpler cartoons that come to life much more readily than the characters he etched into stone. This abstraction, to invoke Scott McCloud, allows the audience to give them nuances and individualistic qualities in a way that would otherwise prove impossible were they more naturalistic in their representation. The abstraction also allows Tezuka to display some of the more gruesome events that take place in Buddha: Kapilavastu, like the rabbit’s suicide, the tiger attack, or the brutal scourging of the young thief; were these drawn more realistically, his readership would have to be much narrower. Coming into this week’s reading assignment with very little knowledge of Manga, Tezuka’s work adheres to familiar artistic and storytelling concepts, thus rendering this foray into Japanese comics much less daunting.

RanXerox

RanXerox, by Stefano Tamburini and Tanino Liberatore, is an Italian Science Fiction comic from 1978. Coming into the story with no prior knowledge of the narrative or any of the characters, I thought I was beginning to enter a comic of an entirely different genre. The story opens up as a group of people dealing drugs – and going through the inevitable drama that goes along with that. Lubna, Ranx’s love interest, talks about being able to control Ranx completely. In the subsequent panel, Lubna is shown to have removed the top of his cranium (like a cap) and begins to tinker with the mechanical inner workings of the man’s mind. Not knowing that this was a Science Fiction comic, I thought the authors were speaking metaphorically, that Lubna was able to control Ranx because he loved her, and was therefore transformed into a piece of machinery powered not by conscious, rational thought, but by the whims of his almost disturbingly young lover. A few panels later, however, I realized that Ranx was, in fact, a robotic man (whom I later learned was built from parts of a Xerox machine, of which fact the name is indicative). This misunderstanding proved to be a fairly good indicator of the theme behind this comic. Every single character is either being used or using someone, usually for sexual reasons. Lubna, on several occasions, uses Ranx to make money while simultaneously cheating on him, then tries to assuage him with sexual favors – these favors are mainly for her benefit, however, as his robotic nature does not allow him to reap any sort of enjoyment from these exploits. Through my misunderstanding of RanXerox, I was clued into the narrative to come much faster than I would have otherwise.

March: Book One

March: Book One, by John Lewis, Andrew Aydin, and Nate Powell, delves into a firsthand account of the suffering caused by segregation and the Jim Crow laws that ultimately led to the 1960s Civil Rights Movement. The graphic novel’s tone is set through an introduction that consists of a march for equality in which peaceful protesters are being “dealt with” by angry members of the police force, each officer equipped with tear gas. The writers, however, are careful to abstain from placing the blame for this mistreatment of the African American citizens of the United States; a gentle, nonjudgmental narrator simply states the facts and backs them up with vivid, emotionally invested art that brings the reader inexorably into that tumultuous time for the sole purpose of bringing to light what it was truly like for people living during that period of U.S. history. Important historical events and people are referenced, but so too are local heroes finally given their due; there exists here a parallelism between local and national struggles. Ultimately, the novel sheds rays of hope over the grim state of the government by highlighting the power of people’s voices in a democracy. The fact that this story is told by means of a book (a graphic novel, no less) puts power into the hands of the common individual. Through a medium in which offensive, inaccurate stereotypes abound, those very same tropes are shattered. Through March: Book One, it is shown that words change people; words can sway the opinion of an entire government. In short, words are power.