The triumphant return of one of comics’ greatest talents, with an engrossing story of one man’s search for love, meaning, sanity, and perfect architectural proportions. An epic story long awaited, and well worth the wait.

Meet Asterios Polyp: middle-aged, meagerly successful architect and teacher, aesthete and womanizer, whose life is wholly upended when his New York City apartment goes up in flames. In a tenacious daze, he leaves the city and relocates to a small town in the American heartland. But what is this “escape” really about?

As the story unfolds, moving between the present and the past, we begin to understand this confounding yet fascinating character, and how he’s gotten to where he is. And isn’t. And we meet Hana: a sweet, smart, first-generation Japanese American artist with whom he had made a blissful life. But now she’s gone. Did Asterios do something to drive her away? What has happened to her? Is she even alive? All the questions will be answered, eventually.

In the meantime, we are enthralled by Mazzucchelli’s extraordinarily imagined world of brilliantly conceived eccentrics, sharply observed social mores, and deftly depicted asides on everything from design theory to the nature of human perception.

Asterios Polyp is David Mazzucchelli’s masterpiece: a great American graphic novel.

“Mazzucchelli manages to combine breathless formal experimentation and read feeling into a story where every line, color choice, and panel arrangement builds toward a cohesive whole, lending an air of epic proportions to what would otherwise be a simple tale.” –Library Journal
 
 “This is an epic, emotionally rich, symbol-laden work that promises to redefine the graphic novel...David Mazzucchelli has made a beautiful, elaborate construction that coyly juggles style and content in a way few cartoonists are capable of.” –Globe and Mail

“This brazenly original and complex work is easily one of the year's best novels, graphic or otherwise…Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant.” –San Jose Mercury News
 
“David Mazzucchelli's boldly ambitious, boundary-pushing graphic novel is remarkable for the way it synthesizes word and image to craft a new kind of storytelling, and for how it makes that synthesis seem so intuitive as to render it invisible…Asterios Polyp is a fast, fun read, but it's also a work that has been carefully wrought to take optimum advantage of comics' hybrid nature — it's a tale that could only be told on the knife-edge where text and art come seamlessly together.” –NPR’s The Five Best Books to Share with Your Friends
 
“As ever, Mazzucchelli keeps both the visual and storytelling fireworks coming…This is a work that demands to be read, re-read, analyzed, and discussed.”—Comics Bulletin
 
“Formally daring yet stylistically self-assured, Asterios Polyp is a bona fide masterpiece and the early frontrunner for best graphic novel of the year…It’s the presentation— the use of narrative symbolism, color and visual metaphor—that truly sets the book apart. Much like he did with Year One over 20 years ago, Mazzucchelli has once again raised the bar for his entire artform.” –Chicago Sun Times
 
 “This is a comic for artists, and it plays with space and color in ways that maybe only artists will understand, but it is a story for everyone, and Asterios Polyp is easily among the best graphic novels ever made. Go read it, and read it twice.” –Providence City Paper
 
 “Mazzucchelli experiments with numerous art styles and pushes the envelope with challenging digressions into philosophy, religion and mortality throughout Polyp's tale. The engrossing effort culminates with a bombshell that will leave readers reeling.” –Toronto Star
 
“In Asterios Polyp -- the best of the summer's new releases -- Mazzucchelli employs spotlights, coloring schemes, knitting, Aristophanes, an identical twin who died at birth and the wide array of secretions from a woman's body to lead us into the self-centered world of the title character even as the center implodes…. Asterios Polyp is a primer for both the fervent possibilities and the rich rewards of the graphic novel.”—Portland Oregonian
 
“Now, after a decade-and-a-half, he has re-re-emerged with Asterios Polyp, an epic, emotionally rich, symbol-laden work that promises to redefine the graphic novel. Published by Pantheon Books (home to master-class cartoonists such as Art Spiegelman, Chris Ware and Dan Clowes), Asterios Polyp is Mazzucchelli's first graphic novel. It is also happens to be his masterpiece, the culmination of 25 years of promise….Mazzucchelli has made a beautiful, elaborate construction that coyly juggles style and content in a way few cartoonists are capable of.”—Globe and Mail (Canada)
 
“The beauty of Asterios Polyp is that its core tenet, the need to pay attention to life as it happens, is so well reflected in the book itself—in its lush paper tone and rough-hewn, elegant design—and in the way all the formal devices serve the story. As such, it rewards attention and even devotion.” –Bookforum
 
“The more you study Polyp, the more there is to discover. This is a book that stands with works by Updike, Roth, and other giants of American literature. It is undoubtedly one of the best novels of the year.” –The Stranger
 
“Asterios Polyp is a perfect marriage of words and pictures. Every drawing, color choice and panel layout is pregnant with meaning.” –Columbus Dispatch

“Mazzuchelli is using color to convey ideas in a way not attempted by most graphic novelists. The book is all about style, design and visual language, and Mazzuchelli is moving the discussion of all of these forward with Asterios Polyp.” –Matt Price's best graphic novels of 2009
 
Asterios Polyp will cause comic-book buffs to swoon, sure, but the narrative — after a fire, an arrogant architect slowly begins to rebuild his own life — makes it much more than a pretty picture book.” –Modern Tonic 
 
“What Mazzucchelli accomplishes, though, with remarkable clarity and a jazzy pop-culture eye, and which the written word has a tougher time with, is portraying silence, moments between something said and something to come -- even thought itself. That sticks; those last pages are as tender and heartbreaking a portrait of lost time as I can recall, and no less powerful for being nearly wordless” –Chicago Tribune
 
“Critics have decried the modern graphic novel's focus on form at the expense of content. With ""Asterios Polyp,"" Mazzucchelli has put paid to that charge: It's funny, it's warm and it's beautiful. Go read it.” –Newsday.com
 
“It contains a relatively simple story (and probably a deceptively simple one), but told in a dazzlingly stunning array of comic book techniques not possible in other mediums. Mazzucchelli is a genius of the form.” –Forbidden Planet

“Each panel is a moment in the story that when connected to other panels becomes part of a scene or sequence that is rich in storytelling and fertile with ideas, inquiry, and themes.” –ComicBookBin, A+ review
 
 “Visually, Asterios Polyp is the lush