It’s the little touches that make the difference in Asterios Polyp, the first graphic novel by Batman: Year One artist David Mazzucchelli.  On the surface things are pretty straightforward, the storytelling smooth and effective and as friendly as Charlie Brown to readers who haven’t spent their lives reading comics.  The subtleties are there though, and they do exactly what they should do: help convey character and mood effortlessly, as the story of architecture professor Asterios unfolds.

Much of the tale is concerned with the protagonist’s relationship with wife Hana, and there are simple and beautiful devices to communicate the state of play between them.  Reunited after divorce, their intimacy is quickly rekindled — something we know less from their verbal exchanges than the fact that the tails of their word balloons entwine.  But the balloons themselves are of different shapes and contain different fonts, which capture some of the speaker’s character.  None of this is rocket science, and this is hardly the first graphic fiction to indicate character through lettering, but the cumulative effect of Mazzucchelli’s choices is elegant and convincing.

But what of the story itself?  The nearest comparison I can make is to the films of Wes Anderson.  That is, the protagonist is a well-to-do academic who isn’t as smart as he fancies himself, who inhabits a world of eccentric characters.  Asterios is an architect in a purely conceptual sense: he has won competitions for his designs, but never had a building constructed from one of his plans.  He seems to see no problem with this situation, if only because his peers include similarly self-regarding underachievers.

In the latter category we have two contenders: pompous dramaturg Willy Ilium, who Hana serves as a kind of PA — the poor woman is forever overshadowed by male grotesques — and dishevelled composer Kalvin Kahoutek.  The three of them are immersed in debates about the nature of art, not forgetting to put one another down in clever ways: it’s like the relationship of psychiatrist Frasier with brother Niles.  I kind of enjoyed this stuff, but there’s a degree to which I can only tolerate fictional creations along such lines, and it’s not for much longer than I can stomach their real life counterparts.  Your mileage may vary.

Fortunately there are other characters to spend time with: odd couple mechanic Stiff Major and his pillowy wife, self-declared goddess Ursula, who Asterios lives with for a while, and the punk band who inhabit their orbit.  They ground the book a bit after the hifalutin’ stuff with the intellectuals, but Mazzucchelli is still just as interested in concepts and wordplay.

I’m hoping if Mazzucchelli does another graphic novel — and his talent is such that I’d be at the start of the queue — he’ll moderate some of his fixations and concentrate more on engaging narrative.  Maybe it’s just my desire to be immersed in bigger chunks of story, or frustration with his admittedly well-depicted characters, but I found the segmented style of the book — vignettes that capture incidents and emotions across the course of its protagonist’s life — a little unsatisfying.

Ultimately, the style of Asterios Polyp fascinates and convinces me more than its content.  Mazzucchelli is without doubt a hugely gifted cartoonist, but he has yet to convince as a storyteller.  That said, this graphic novel is definitely worth a read, as an example of a state of the art piece of graphic narrative.  Whether its creator goes on to do something more to my taste, or other people plunder the techniques he employs, Asterios Polyp is a beautifully designed landmark in the history of the graphic novel.