Dualism: Asterios/Daisy

Dualism is what made Asterios Polyp such an interesting book for me. Mazzucchelli is a genius at expressing dualism through out the book. One of my favorite comparison was between Asterios and Daisy, during one of their confrontations. Asterios is made up of these blue geometric figures, that create the outline of his body. They mimic the general shape of his body, and reminded me of blueprints an architect would use. Daisy is drawn completely differently. She constructed to look like she was sketched with a pink colored pencil, with heavy emphasis on the cross-hatching. They create a visual contracts but to each other, but also in the way of their lives.

This is not the only difference that was displayed visually between Daisy and Asterios. Their speech bubbles reflect who they are as people. Asterios has rectangular forms around his text, showing he is precise and sharp edged. While Daisy has loose circular forms around her text, showing she is more of a free spirit. Their living spaces are also drastically different. Asterios has a sterile modern styled living quarters, completely clean with everything in its right place and the furniture is formed perfectly to reflect his manner. While Daisy’s apartment is filled with her art work, there are messes all across the room. The contract between these two charcters and the way they are displayed makes for quite the intriguing relationship to be drawn into. I think that they were a perfect compliment to each other, and I was pretty pleased with the ending.

2 thoughts on “Dualism: Asterios/Daisy”

  1. I’m looking forward to talking about the ending to Asterios Polyp, though we probably won’t get to it until Thursday. In general, I’ve found that people really like the ending, even though we tend to like our ends more neatly tied up than that (witness the chagrin over the ending of Exit Wounds). I wonder why it works so well in Mazzucchelli’s book.

  2. I really liked how everyone had their own font. It gave every character more personality when combined with how all the speech bubbles were done. For example Asterios’ bubble was the square rigid shape as you mentioned and his font was uniform capital letters. This goes along with his calculated personality. Meanwhile a character like Ursula who has a round speech bubble and cursive fluid font. This goes very well with her personality because she has a very mysterious, mystic personality.

Comments are closed.