Asterios Polyp: A Contract With God's Spiritual Sequel

It’s been 40 years since the release of A Contract With God by Will Eisner revolutionized the comic book landscape through its creation of the graphic novel. The creation of Maus then pushed forward in the evolution of A Contract With God by popularizing the graphic novel, legitimizing comics as capable of telling more adult oriented stories and, what is most important for the sake of this piece, forever changing the layout of the graphic novel. It could be said that the reason pages in A Contract With God are styled the way they are, with images and text often separate, and the comic book styled panel often going unused and instead replaced with loose outlines, is so that it lessens the limits of what Eisner can put in each illustration, thus allowing for greater details that couldn’t be put in text. But these style of page layout also could have been done as a means of furthering the graphic novel from the comic book, since keeping a similar layout to the comic book often leads to confusion as to whether what is being read is a comic book or graphic novel. Why I bring all this up is because I haven’t seen a graphic novel in the style of A Contract With God since A Contract With God, which I believe may in part be because Maus popularized the idea of the graphic novel less as a different medium from comics and more as a comic book that tells a more adult story, but also could just be that A Contract With God was the first of its kind, thus it was still experimenting with what a graphic novel and couldn’t innovate what a graphic novel could be. Either way after weeks of searching, not searching, I think I found what I’ve been looking for.
Within the first couple pages of Asterios Polyp I was having major flashbacks to my time with A Contract With God, with page 19 being the first page to really this one in for me, this style of page, where the words carry a weight to them that the images only enhance, and not vice versa, is something A Contract With God did that most graphic novels have reversed since. In those couple of seconds I spent on the page I emerged at the conclusion that this was the modern reimagining of that original format of graphic novel Eisner had pioneered. Since Maus back in 1980 had popularized the graphic novel as a more word heavy comic book, many graphic novels had followed in the comic book format, panels, speech bubbles, etc. Asterios immediately stands out because of this, and made me curious with where it was heading. It still carries with it the standard Maus had created, but it seems to switch between the Eisner style of page layout and Spiegelman layout often, and it all culminates in what feels more like a spiritual sequel to what Eisner’s story may have been going for than what I’ve read in most stories since (not to discredit graphic novel that don’t follow the format of A Contract With God).