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If you walk into a classroom, library, or bookstore and say you want to know more about comics, chances are that someone will hand you a book by Scott McCloud. Between 1993 and 2006, the comics theorist published Understanding Comics, Reinventing Comics, and Making Comics, an examination of sequential art that became a touchstone for countless artists, writers, teachers, and readers.
But after you’ve written the book on making comics, what kind of comics do you make? For a long time, it’s been hard to say. Although McCloud published a well-received superhero comic called Zot! during the late 1980s and early ’90s, he hasn’t released a graphic novel in nearly 25 years—until today. The Sculptor, published by First Second Books, is an ambitious (nearly 500 pages) graphic novel about a struggling artist who makes a Faustian bargain to achieve his creative dreams.
As McCloud is acutely aware, the stature and authority his books have achieved means that expectations are high. “It’s hard to imagine more pressure,” says McCloud. “Each book painted a big target on my chest, especially the last one. But when I wrote Making Comics, I said in the introduction that I was doing this in part to teach myself how to make comics because I had this graphic novel in mind. I was trying to make myself a better cartoonist, because I knew I had a big job ahead of me.”
Thematically, The Sculptor goes very big indeed, dealing with lofty ideas like the true nature of art, immortality, fame, and the human condition. The titular protagonist of the graphic novel is David Smith, a young man who achieved a small measure of fame as a sculptor before alienating his patron and falling into increasingly desperate poverty. After earning a spot in a gallery show, he has one last chance to break out in the highly competitive art world of New York City, but seems to be unable to make either his dreams of critical acclaim or the artistic ideas swirling in his mind into a reality. Faced with failure—or worse, anonymity—David ends up making a pact with Death (who happens to be something of a family friend): For 200 days, he’ll have the power to sculpt anything he can imagine simply by thinking about it, and then he will die. David gladly agrees.
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The basic concept behind The Sculptor has been percolating in McCloud’s mind for his entire adult life, since he was a young man fascinated with superhero comics back in the early 1980s. David’s power is a product of McCloud’s lasting affection for the strange power fantasies of the genre, but it’s also a distillation of the theme of creative frustration that runs throughout the book: as any artist knows, there’s a good bit of discrepancy between their original vision and what they actually deliver to their audience.
“Such a tiny fraction of what artists see in their head ever reaches the page of the screen or the canvas,” McCloud. “But the path is swept clean for David. He’s given a straight line, a direct conduit to the result.”
David’s frantic race to achieve fame and meaning before he dies gets complicated when he meets Meg, a love interest who literally descends to him on angel wings at their first meeting. At first glance, Meg bears a strong resemblance to the Manic Pixie Dream Girl cliche, but her genesis predates the emergence of the popular trope. “This [story] has been stewing for so long that it preceded the Nathan Rabin piece that gave a name to that character and marked her for death,” says McCloud.
Not only that, but it preceded meeting his future wife, Ivy, a woman who would inspire and infiltrate the story in ways that he had never imagined. “It became Ivy’s story at that point,” says McCloud. Rather than fulfilling a cliche, he says, Meg was inspired by a real person, and one who identified very strongly with many of the characters who were often dismissed by the Manic Pixie Dream Girl label. “After the Rabin piece came out, I remember Ivy saying, ‘they’re telling me that I don’t exist,'” says McCloud. “So I had to take into account some of the cautionary ideas about the [trope]… to be on guard for the more sexist or self-serving aspects of it, the idea of a character without agency or goals of her own. But there was no getting rid of that flavor, or the ghost that inhabited that character, because this was the woman I married.”
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The Permanence of Objects—and Art
Although McCloud has often championed the creative potential of digital comics, he says he always saw The Sculptor as a printed book, not only because the idea for it preceded the web itself, but because David’s artistic product is so tactile. “The fact that my protagonist is a sculptor working in a tangible medium does seem very appropriate,” he says. “And he’s obsessed with solidity, with something that lasts, with something that isn’t ephemeral. To him it’s like an anchor that he can hold on to so he doesn’t get swept away by time.”
This idea of permanence comes up often in The Sculptor: what lasts and what fades, what is seen and unseen, and whether the things we do and create need to be validated by strangers in order to have value. We meet Mira, a competing sculptor whose work is full of hidden compartments—places inside her sculptures that are hers alone, that no audience will ever be able to view. “I couldn’t do that,” David tells her, agitated by the very concept. “I’m too afraid all of my work will go unseen.”
During a private moment with Meg, we see David use his powers to create a sculpture of her, deep inside the Earth. She tells him not to write it down in the diary he is keeping for posterity, to allow this to be their secret, to be theirs alone. “Think about it, no fickle audiences, no critics, no second guessing,” she says. “Isn’t this what you really wanted all along?” David pauses for a moment, then writes it down anyway, saying he doesn’t want to “waste” his creation—telling both Meg and readers who and what he was really making it for.
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“I’ve been lucky throughout my entire career,” says McCloud. “I’ve had no trouble being seen. But as I rose up through that process, I also became more aware of the futility of truly lasting—how almost universal that tide of time is, and how gradually we are forgotten regardless of our best efforts, regardless of how much success we might have in our lifetime. Being forgotten is virtually inevitable.”
Although the vertical and architectural nature of New York City gives visual counterpart to that sense of rising and falling, it’s also a place where it’s easy to be feel at once surrounded by people and invisible—and a place attracts those hungry for significance. “The main appeal of New York City is the sense in which it commands the attention of the world, and the surging force of humanity converging on that one tiny point,” says McCloud. “David is also drawn to it in an almost animal way, like a salmon swimming upstream. He has to be in the light. He has to somehow have the attention of people, the warmth of that light on him.”
The Unbearable Briefness of Being
Despite this primal impulse to seek attention—one that can drive both the desire to create and procreate—The Sculptor points to what sounds like a cold shower conclusion: Although we often seek out fame or respect to validate our work and lives, seeking immortality is ultimately futile. Everything we do, everything we are, will ultimately be wiped away.
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And that’s not only fine for McCloud, it’s liberating. “It’s not just OK to accept it as futile. It’s glorious and it’s human,” says McCloud. “If it can all leads to the same result, the same heat death, then those small human experiences can be as significant as the pyramids at Giza or Mount Everest. If nothing lasts, then experientially, somebody just putting their hand on your shoulder or the even taste of macaroni cheese can be something much more. If all of it is ephemeral, then all of it can be as permanent or significant as anything else.”
It’s an idea that goes to the heart of what we hope for from our lives: to accomplish something, to leave a legacy that lasts beyond our bodies. Although we see David create some massive and intricate works of sculpture, what I remember most from The Sculptor is something he didn’t show me: a moment when he whispers something in Meg’s ear that even readers don’t get to hear. In the final accounting of his life, what will be more valuable, the monuments we create and how long our names are remembered by strangers, or the moments we share with the people close we love, even if any trace of our existence vanishes from the Earth when they do?
While The Sculptor doesn’t necessarily provide an answer, its questions offer a shift in perspective that can imbue even smallest moments with tremendous value.
“This is a story more for the forgotten than the remembered,” McCloud says. “It’s not a story about artistic greatness; it’s a story about the futility of even wanting to be remembered, and the true beauty of pursuing that even in the face of futility. What distinguishes David is the degree to which he understands the futility, even as he continues to push against it. He knows how useless and pointless it all is, and he just keeps going. That, to me, is beautiful. That’s the mark of him as an artist more than anything he actually ever made.”
First Second Books
First Second Books
First Second Books
First Second Books
First Second Books
First Second Books
First Second Books
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