 Day 29, A Stereo's Polyp, suggested by Dixit Dominus and seconded by 23 People. True story, I ordered this less than five minutes after I first saw it being recommended, so I'm glad it won. It's impossible for me to talk about A Stereo's Polyp without addressing what happened in McMinn County, Tennessee last week when the local school board banned the teaching of Arch Beagleman's seminal work, Mouse, in classrooms. The claimed justifications that a story about the fucking Holocaust features bad words and nudity and won't we think of the children are laughable? The result isn't. The easiest way for these Trump types to ensure that their children grow up to be good little fascist soldiers is to ensure that they don't know what fascism leads to. Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it blah blah blah. So edit the history a little or a lot at a time so that we all grow up thinking sure slavery was bad but it wasn't that bad right that that way when we're faced with the truth when our broken worldview is confronted by the cruelty of reality we reject it outright. That can't be true. If it was we would definitely have learned about it in school. Unfortunately as one of the characters in A Stereo's Polyp puts it, the government has a vested interest in keeping people ignorant, drawing a line from the push for improved education that followed Sputnik's launch ahead of a US satellite to the galvanization of youth against the Vietnam War a decade later. And is that true? I could find out. Makes sense. It's certainly the case that educated people are more likely to question authority if they don't become key players in it. A Stereo's Polyp follows its titular character beginning on his 50th birthday as a bolt of lightning strikes his Manhattan apartment and all of his mysterious possessions go up in smoke. Save his wallet and three sentimental items grabbed before fleeing. A lighter, a watch, and a Swiss army knife. Instead of waiting around to file insurance claims and all that he gets onto a bus and takes it as far as the cash in his pocket will go. At the end of the line he asks for a job and a room from the head of a local auto body shop who agrees to both. We will go back and forth between this present specific moments from his past mostly relating to his failed marriage and then more abstract moments out of time. The narrator of our story there is Ignacio Polyp, a person who does not exist. A Stereo's identical twin who died in the womb, but who A Stereo's has always imagined was there in some other reality where whatever had taken his brother took him instead. He puts cameras in every room of his house thinking of the footage as a virtual doppelganger, the brother he didn't have. That's the sort of guy he is, deeply intellectual and incredibly self-absorbed. He's an award-winning architect whose work has never once been built. It's all theory, but celebrated just the same. Creator David Mazzucalli has, as this book's bizarrely small jacket notes, been making comics his whole life. In the 1980s he worked as an illustrator primarily with Marvel, but also a couple of gigs with DC, including one of the few superhero graphic novels that I actually own, Batman Year 1. In the 90s he went in a different direction, making more independent projects beginning with a series called Rubber Blanket, which only saw three issues over three years. What would have been the fourth issue eventually became this graphic novel 16 years later. And in it he really commits to the medium, the sequential art of it all, rarely using a traditional grid panel structure and instead messing with the negative space of a page or drawing without borders in the midst of other panels. He uses different fonts to represent different characters and emotions, sometimes placing two totally different thoughts next to each other that are connected but still able to be clearly distinguished. Although it's not hugely colorful, its use of color is deliberate and meaningful, and the palette or even the entire art style will shift to enhance the emotion of a moment. Mazzucalli clearly has a keen understanding of how this form of storytelling is unique, and each page has been deeply considered to maximize its impact. Hell, even the design of this jacket is an example of that. This bullshit thing that is too small to cover the book was designed specifically to frustrate, just as the protagonist does. And to that point my only real hang-up is with Osterios himself. The book is inspired by the Odyssey and there are other allusions to Greek myth and most of the men in those myths are awful because most men in most stories are kind of awful, but as much as the book makes clear that it doesn't hold his actions in high regard, he's still the protagonist, and I've always had trouble getting past central characters who I simply don't like. Yet I would still recommend Osterios Pulip to literally everyone, because while it's less societally important than something like Mouse or Joe Sacco's Palestine, it too exemplifies what makes comics such a vital medium. This is a work that could only exist in this form, one that breaks a lot of assumptions that people have about how a comic should look and function. But I think it is able to keep from feeling too pretentious, because it's not doing that for its own sake, it's not unique because being unique is cool, but because Motsikelli had a specific vision for this story and executing it necessitated throwing aside conventions that he had long followed. It is a sincere work written by a man who sincerely loves his medium, and the medium's better for it. 8.5 out of 10. Thank you so much for watching. Thank you particularly to my patrons, my mom, Hamrein Marco, Kat Saracota, Benjamin Schiff, Anthony Cole, Elliott Fowler, Greg Lucina, Kojo, Phil Bates, Willow, I Am The Sword, Riley Zimmerman, Claire Bear, Taylor Lindy's, Andrew Madison Design, and the folks who'd rather be read than said. If you liked this video, that's great. If not, oh well. If you want to see more, tomorrow is the last video of this whole thing.