But while the book relates the strange and engrossing life and transformation of Asterios Polyp, the book is also a rumination on the nature of love and aesthetics and on the making of a work of art. The book’s title, Asterios Polyp, is also the name of Mazzucchelli’s protagonist, an acclaimed architect and New York intellectual who designs highly theoretical buildings that are never built.
So instead, PW Comics Week interviewed Pantheon editorial director Dan Frank and Knopf/Pantheon designer/senior editor Chip Kidd about the development, publication and likely reception of the book. Indeed he continues to decline to discuss the creation of the book. In fact this kind of literary mystique-the artist’s withdrawal from the speculations of the literary media mill-has become synonymous with Mazzucchelli, an artist as serious about his privacy as he is about creating inventive comics. Yet despite Mazzucchelli’s silence on the matter-he declined to talk about the work in progress, at least to the media-there have been plenty of rumors that he was at work on his first original book length comic (The book is currently published by Bloomsbury USA.) Nevertheless, since its publication Mazzucchelli has not produced another book length work of comics fiction. First published in 2004 by Avon Books under the art direction of Art Speigelman, City of Glass: The Graphic Novel has gone on to be considered one of the great literary graphic novels of its time. After helping redefine Batman for a new generation of superhero comics readers, Mazzucchelli turned his attention to working on a series of eccentric, literary and highly personal comics.ĭuring these years he published Rubber Blanket, a series of highly regarded, self-published collections of short works, before collaborating with writer Paul Karasik on the comics adaptation of Paul Auster’s novel City of Glass. Mazzucchelli started out working on various books for Marvel Comics before he moved to DC Comics in the late 1980s to draw Batman Year One, a groundbreaking Batman origin story written by another comics iconoclast, Frank Miller, and hailed for its gritty and dramatic contemporary reimagination of the beginnings of the classic noir superhero.
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