He returns to fiction with his new graphic novel, The Sculptor, in which David, a young artist, makes a deal with Death: He gains the ability to sculpt anything he can imagine just by thinking about it, with the condition that in 200 days, he’ll die. Inventive and suspenseful, The Sculptor is an opportunity to witness one of comics’ finest educators putting everything he’s learned into the service of a story. The character of David essentially has a super power albeit with a catch.
Is it an outgrowth of your time enmeshed in superhero comics? It was one of many random ideas I had in this big old three-ring binder I’d owned since high school. It’s a young man’s story, if you think about it. That’s the central challenge of the project for me, was coming to accept my roots as an American comics artist. In many ways I’d been railing against power fantasies for years, trying to convince people comics are much more than that – but at the same time, here was this old power fantasy that I had in my back pocket all those years. So yeah, acceptance seems to be a theme. I’m writing about an artist who has to accept his own mortality, and being forgotten, and how small he is in the eyes of the universe, and I’m trying to accept that, yes, I am part of a culture, and yes, there is that little piece of the DNA of American comics embedded in this thing.
You’re often known as a theorist, so it’s great to see you flexing your storytelling muscles again. If I’ve done my job right, I’ve obscured the theory to the extent that it’s a fairly transparent reading experience, where folks will be sucked into the story, but not necessarily overly aware of the mechanics. Even though it’s a very deliberately constructed piece of storytelling, it’s constructed with an eye toward vanishing in the eyes of the reader. I’d like it to be an intuitive, immediate, visceral experience. I have a great love of surprise. It’s so hard to pull off in a way that doesn’t feel like cheating—they key is the relationship between surprise and inevitability.
Something that takes the audience utterly unawares, but once the dust has settled, you realize it couldn’t have gone any other way. That’s what I was striving for, and there are a number of surprises in the book. Of course, I love my art form, but the one thing that I curse it for is the fact that it’s way too easy for my readers to pick it up on the shelf and page through it, and see all my surprises. Was there a technique you worked through with Understanding Comics, Reinventing Comics, and Making Comics that you were dying to get into a story?
The research that I did for facial expressions and body language for Making Comics—those were absolutely essential. If there’s one thing I wanted to really ramp up, it was what my editor and I were calling the “human theater” of it. The rhythm of conversations, the importance of gesture. Those quiet moments in between. In comics, there was such a premium on saving space for so many years, when the standard format was only twenty-four pages, that there was a tendency to cram everything that you needed to know into a big, fat word balloon. Yoga asanas in telugu videos free download. And the word balloon might contain three or four different moods.
You’ve got four different emotional ideas, but there’s no room, so here’s everything you need to know, and here’s a face, and the face is some sort of neutral, generic expression that can cover all these ideas. And that’s just such a missed opportunity. Because emotion is action. Emotion is story. When someone has a change of emotional state, that matters. So when we first started coming out with these three- or four-hundred page books, many people thought, “Oh, that’s great, I can cram more story into them.” But it took people like Seth or Craig Thompson to demonstrate that this was also an opportunity to do in twenty pages what we used to do in two.
And that there are solid narrative reasons to do that, to do what some writers and artists would call “decompressed” storytelling. Although I never liked that term because it presupposes that the compressed form is the natural order of things, which I never thought it was. What do you hope readers get from The Sculptor?
I wanted it to be a page-turner, for starters. I want it to be an emotional experience, and I want people to be left with an impression that doesn’t fully resolve itself, because of the contradictions in the story.
The story pulls in two different directions, but it pulls very strongly. I didn’t want the kind of ambiguity that’s just smudged and blurry and noncommittal. I wanted the kind of ambiguity in which great forces are pulling all the way to the ceiling and all the way to the floor. How did you settle on the black and blue color palette? Partially out of necessity. Full color is hard.
It requires a lot of control, it’s expensive and labor-intensive, and in my case, it’s a deal-breaker because my color sense is not good enough that I could do it all myself if I was doing full color. On the other end of the spectrum, I think black and white can be really effective. There’s a lot in pure black and white to admire, but for me, the way I draw, I find that the form doesn’t necessarily come through.
Scott Mccloud Reinventing Comics Setting Course To Reclaim
They eye can sometimes stumble over that jungle of lines, possibly because I don’t like to use too many spot blacks. By bringing in that second color, I can use it to clarify form.
So when you open up two pages of The Sculptor, you’re less likely to see it as a jumble of lines, and more likely to see it as a collection of places, and people, geometry, space, and depth. Those things tend to come more quickly to the eye when you’ve used that second color to clarify, to show clear overlaps, or to indicate atmosphere, things like that. What’s next for you? It’s going to be a book about visual communication—not just about comics.
I’m going to see if I can try to distill the principles of best practices for information graphics, data visualization, educational animation, educational comics—the ways that we communicate through images. Because I think in all these disciplines, people seem to be all trying to reinvent the wheel, and I’m pretty sure that most of them are knocking on the same door. The Sculptor.
Scott McCloud didn’t intend to become the premier comics theorist. But with his famed trilogy, Understanding Comics, Reinventing Comics, and Making Comics, he inspired the study of and an appreciation for the medium. His works resonated not only with comics creators and fans but with anyone keen on improving their grasp of visual storytelling.
And this February, his first graphic novel in over 15 years appears: The Sculptor (First Second), a spin on the superhero comic. The main character in the book, a young, unsuccessful sculptor named David Smith, makes a deal with Death in which he expands his creative powers but limits his life – just as he meets the love of his life. The deeply felt and skillfully paced graphic novel earned praise from Neil Gaiman who, on Twitter, said that the book made him cry twice.
“It’s powerful, mature, brilliant work. Don’t want it to end.” The book’s editor Mark Siegel, previously told Publishers Weekly, “To work with Scott McCloud on any project of his choosing was a long held hope of mine.
But to join him as he sheds the theorist and embraces ambitious, adult fiction — that’s a dream come true.” “My love of comics was preceded by a hatred of comics,” Scott McCloud tells me by phone from his studio in Los Angeles. When he was a kid living in Lexington, MA, he thought that he had already outgrown comics. But when his friend Kurt Busiek, who grew up to become a renowned comics writer himself, lent McCloud his stash of books, he reconsidered.
“By the age of 15,” he says, “I decided I wanted to make comics for a living.” His big break came before he even graduated from college. For a class assignment, McCloud sent his resume to one of his dream employers, DC Comics.
Marvel Comics Rapidshare
Three weeks before he graduated, he landed a job in the company’s production department. The work at DC was, well, workmanlike.
He corrected other artists’ pages, which included altering lettering or fixing lines that went over panel borders. Working with established artists in this way, he says, helped frame his career. “The mystique of the tools and standards for creating comics just vanished.” But McCloud wanted to embark on his own projects. Around the same time, a startling life event occurred: his father died. McCloud says that when that happened, “Something clicked inside of me. I just decided that I didn’t want to wait.” After a year and a half at DC, he left and began to work on a comic called Zot!, a lighthearted story about a lonely girl who encounters a superhero from an alternate world.
“I remember vividly the sense of going to bed that first night after quitting,” he says, “knowing that in the morning, I could wake up and just start drawing all day long. It was an extraordinary feeling of freedom.” While McCloud was making his own comic, he was taking notes on the form in general. Beginning in 1986, he began to make drawings and diagrams about what made comics work. He says that, at one point, his pile of notes overtook its folder in the filing cabinet. It was then that he realized he needed to retire Zot!
And create a comic book about making comic books. He collected these trenchant concepts about art in the innovative book Understanding Comics.
Inspired by Larry Gonick’s nonfiction cartoon guides and Art Spiegelman’s essay “Cracking Jokes,” McCloud created Understanding Comics as a way to explain the inner workings of the comics universe to both the comics nerd and the curious layperson. He demystified the complex vocabulary of comics and explained the six steps for creating art – a way for readers to understand the artist not just as a stylist but a storyteller and, hopefully, a visionary. McCloud’s McLuhan-caliber insights took hold in the comics community and beyond. To this day, the book is taught widely, not just in illustration classes but in courses on film, web design, and data visualization. Why did Understanding Comics resonate so strongly? “I liken it to drilling down to the core of a sphere,” he says.
“If you drill down far enough, you will discover the very same thing that others around the globe would find if they drilled down that deeply.” “It’s a young man’s idea,” says McCloud of his new book The Sculptor. The concept originated decades ago during high school, a rough concept scrawled in his old, blue notebook. “It’s quite nearly a superhero story. And, in many respects,” he muses, “there’s nothing more detestable than a serious superhero story.” In developing the narrative, the idea evolved from a mere hero arc with a morbid twist to a more complex tale of existential angst, the limits of art, and the power of love. The Sculptor tells the story of David Smith, a young, frustrated, and obscure artist without a family, a girlfriend, or a remarkable career. In a Faustian bargain, David barters away the rest of his life in exchange for 200 days of creative omnipotence; he’s able to sculpt any material with his bare hands.
It’s a power that he uses to create pieces that he hopes will earn him everlasting fame. But as his time runs out and his legacy remains uncertain, a young woman with whom he falls in love has the power to redeem him, if not rescue him. McCloud spent two years conceptualizing the book and three years executing it. For an entire year, he took pages of notes for his new graphic novel.
“I was trying to create something that celebrated the vitality of that young, crazy idea but did so in a way that didn’t feel like a dressed-up power fantasy,” he says. His main characters were, in part, inspired by his own life. “I think David is about 40 percent me,” he says of the frustrated artist protagonist, but “he’s braver than I am, he’s crazier than I am. And he’s more morbid.” Of the female lead, McCloud estimates that 70 percent of the character is based on Ivy, his wife Meg, who struggles with depression, is the sort of complex female character who doesn’t often grace the pages of comics penned by men. McCloud says, “It became a better story when I had the balls to actually use more of the real-world person in the creation of that character.” The resulting book seethes with intensity. The reader feels David’s struggle acutely – so universal are the desires for self-expression, love, and recognition. “It’s not the hunger for fame and immortality that drives him forward,” says McCloud of his protagonist, “it’s this deep-seated, cold terror that he has of being forgotten.
It’s not the product of some artistic philosophy or some pompous delusion. It’s a railing against the human condition.” Though McCloud is best known for his salient comics analyses, he says that, when it came to The Sculptor, “I just really wanted to create a great page-turner.” This new work – germinated in high school, conceptualized for two years, and realized over a total of five years – is both an ode to and reimagining of the superhero comic genre. Rather than revel in fantasy, the tale is grounded in its humanity.
It hits notes that you wouldn’t expect from a comics academic. With The Sculptor, the author has reinvented himself. “The most exciting thing of all was just rediscovering how to tell a story,” says McCloud.
Grace Bello is a freelance writer who writes regularly for PW about comics. Parts of this site are only available to paying PW subscribers. Subscribers: to set up your digital access. To subscribe,. PW “All Access” site license members have access to PW’s subscriber-only website content.
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