Josh is right about the relationship here between this book and ULYSSES. Mazzucchelli is extremely savvy in his choice of theme here. And, for my money, as freely as Joyce used the story of Odysseus to play with the form of the modern novel, Mazzucchelli has done the same within the language of comix and our preconceptions of the graphic novel. There are passages of tremendous wit here in handling form, as in the one Gene shows above, but just as clever a set of dance steps when it comes handling notions of the novel’s own personal irony. Did anyone else notice two of the main characters taking a picnic to visit an enormous crater? The pages of Mazzucchelli’s book are unnumbered, but that giant hole sits dead in the middle of the novel leading to discussions of each characters ego, a foreshadowing of the stories eventual end, and a surprisingly lyrical place for the book to turn around.

In an age of comix and mainstream entertainment where being meta-textual seems to be a stand-in for our cultures rather juvenile sense of irony, ASTERIOS avoids overt allusions to the comix you know and gives you a wonderful piece of fiction built on idiom and the subtleties of style.

The smartest damn comic I’ve read in quite some time.
-Rob

I will also mention – although I’ll leave it to others to discuss for now – that there are a lot of parallels and allusions to The Odyssey in this story. In fact, Douglas Wouk, in his New York Times review called it “…just about the most schematic work of fiction this side of that other big book that constantly alludes to the ‘Odyssey.’ “