Intermission for class today: Asterios Polyp

Here are five pages from David Mazzucchelli’s Asterios Polyp (Pantheon Graphic Library, 2009). In this scene the protagonist named in the title of the book, a self-important architecture professor and his girlfriend Hana, a Japanese American artist who is caring and patient, are with Willy Chimera, a collaborator of Hana’s, who takes them to meet Kalvin Kohoutek, an experimental composer. You don’t need to get too caught up in following the details of the intellectual conversation between them, but how do the visuals of this scene convey what’s going on between the four characters?