World-over, following the browsing histories and order patterns of people, Amazon algorithms identified target groups to which the following query was sent: Would we, perchance, like to pre-order Scott McCloud’s The Sculptor? The cover blurb was from Neil Gaiman and it said: “the best graphic novel I’ve read in years.” However, it is more than this happenstance that made me read the book.
Almost 20 years ago, Scott McCloud, who had enjoyed modest success with the comic book Zot! released a book called Understanding Comics. It defined the medium as: “Juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or to produce an aesthetic response to viewer.”
Better than that, he wrote his theory of what comics are and how they achieve their peculiar role in visual culture as a comic book. And I thought that was pretty cool. Almost a decade later, he expanded the project via Making Comics. Back then, there were a few webcomic experiments, but McCloud had come to be hailed as the master theorist of the form (after Will Eisner and his opus Comics and Sequential Art). That’s all anyone expected Scott McCloud to be. After all, why would he risk his reputation, after years of telling people how to do it, by putting out a graphic novel himself?
Let me put it this way. If I had a family of hungry children and only `2000 to feed them, I’d still buy this book with that money.
Why, you’d ask?
Because it emerges that Understanding Comics and Making Comics were written as theoretical exercises, a sort of preamble so that McCloud could teach himself how to write The Sculptor. The story came to him in his late twenties. It’s out on shelves now and he’s about 60 years old. Spare a thought for his wife.
So, McCloud is quite well placed to deal with the central issue before the main character, a young, talented but has-been sculptor David Smith, and, in a way, all of us.
Our time on this planet is short. Between birth and death, there is a finite panel. Do we spend our time seeking immortality, like Kandinsky or Van Gogh, or do we seek meaningful relationships with lovers, family and friends? Sometimes, a swathe of colour or memory, can bleed beyond the set borderline. A few hundred years at best. Two or three generations of our family may remember us and when they pass on, not anyone else. Or, there’s a possibility that a work can enter into the collective consciousness and the memory of its author can survive a bit longer. The earth, on the other hand, is millions of years old. It will keep spinning, long after the last human is dead.
In some families of Jewish ancestry, like that of McCloud’s wife, it is believed that Death comes for us by our names. There are other David Smiths in this book: a policeman; another sculptor; and a panel showing a whole phone directory page of David Smiths. Who will Death take when he comes for someone of that name?
David Smith, our protagonist, promised his father as a young boy that no matter what he did, he would make a name for himself. He keeps his promises. So Smith enters into a Faustian pact with Death. He gets a super power for 200 days to sculpt and then, he dies. Finito. To complicate things a bit further, he falls in love. 200 days. Spend your remaining time achieving immortality or be with your lover?
I’ve never been to New York City but I know from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, is a beautiful city to be in love. McCloud renders the city in gorgeous and beautiful details. There are mini-stories embedded in panels that run to 488 pages of astounding artwork. With a love poem to his muse, his wife, this is a masterpiece.
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