Freedom, truth, love, beauty.

“If it were possible for me to narrate this story, I’d begin here.

“This is Asterios Polyp.

“Right now, he’s watching his home burn up. Today—coincidentally—also happens to be his fiftieth birthday.

“Asterios lived in this Manhattan apartment for almost two decades, but until seven years ago he spent most of his time upstate, teaching at a university in Ithica. He was a tenured professor of architecture—a position buttressed by his renown as a ‘paper architect’. That is to say, he was an esteemed architect whose reputation rested on his designs, rather than on the buildings constructed from them. In fact, none of his designs had ever been built.

“Nonetheless, He had won numerous competitions and awards, enough to have earned him a highly successful career. He taught because he enjoyed the intellectual environment.

“It was at the university that he met his wife.

“His career really began with the publication of his first book in 1975. It was based on his graduate work at Oxford, where he was universally regarded as a brilliant student. It had been the same at Harvard, and in high school before that.

“As a boy he had a voracious curiosity, and practically everything he read, he committed to memory. At four, he took apart an antique swiss clock in order to learn how it worked.

“His father, Dr. Eugenios Polyp, had immigrated as a child with his family in 1919. An exasperated Ellis Island official had cut the family name in half, leaving only the first five letters. Eugenios married a hopeful young girl named Aglia Olio and on June 22, 1950. After a painful, thirty-three hour labor, Aglia gave brith by Cesarean section to identical twins.

“One was alive, the other dead. The living one was named Asterios. The dead one would have been called Ignazio, that’s me.

“And now (fifty years later), Asterios is standing in the rain, watching his home burn up, thinking one thing: ‘Not again.’”

— From Asterios Polyp, by David Mazzucchelli, most likely the best book I’ll read in 2010, one of the most original and brilliant graphic novels I’ve read, and certain to be a classic.