The character believes that contrasting images serve only as a convenient organizing principle, which he argues may be “best suited to children’s stories, or comic books”. Asterios argues that duality can be found in many objects, even though he acknowledges that there is a “continuum between the extremes”. The idea yin-and-yang is repeated throughout the book, as well as the idea of duality. Her realization is captured both in her facial expression, her words, and her color, as she shifts to purple, the color she and Asterios share. On the bottom, Hana is seen recognizing Asterios’s ideas. When Asterios’s is dominating the relationship, such as in this panel, the background is mostly blue, when they have equal say in their relationship, there is more purple. The top image, from the same page, shows how Hana and Asterios are drawn in both separate colors, and separate styles. Slowly, the panels shift to her being drawn in purple again, as she realizes Asterios’s feelings, and later on the next page the readers can see Asterios and Hana intertwined as yin-and-yang. This happens again, in a later scene, where Asterios and Hana get into a fight about video cameras, and Hana is sketched in red. Their red and blue colors collide, and later they are drawn in purple. After her background is introduced to the reader (in shades of red and pink), the readers see Hana meeting Asterios for the first time at a party. This becomes apparent in a chapter introducing Hana. However, when they are first meeting and again when they are fighting, they are drawn in their separate respective colors. Asterios is mostly drawn surrounded with shades of blue, Hana mostly in shades of red, the characters themselves are mostly drawn in purple.

Most notably, the colors blue and red are used for Asterios and Hana, non-coincidentally being the two colors that make up purple. However, unlike Larson’s graphic novel, Asterios Polyp has other colors as well as purple.

After reading A Wrinkle In Time which was printed entirely in blue, I didn’t think it that odd. Instead of using black for panel borders, text, and outlines of characters, he chooses to use Purple. One such way is Mazzucchelli’s use of color. Asterios Polyp, more than any of the other graphic novel’s we have read so far, uses an abstract way of showing emotions and feelings of separation and closeness that is not simply through facial emotions or text.

Polyp graphic novel