Review by New York Times Review
If you want to read ambitious comics and graphic novels, you have many choices, but if you want to learn how to read them, you probably have to start with Scott McCloud. The writer and artist first got noticed for a teenage superhero series, "Zot!" (1984-91), then broke through with "Understanding Comics" (1993), an exegesis, in comics form, of comics form. McCloud drew himself as a friendly, bespectacled guide, demonstrating why "cartoony," stylized faces (as in "Peanuts") help us identify with characters; and how comics can tell many sorts of stories, whether or not there are superpowers or family traumas involved. "Reinventing Comics" (2000) predicted broad uses for digital platforms; "Making Comics" (2006) showed potential creators how to use the pen-and-ink and electronic tools we have. "The Sculptor" is McCloud's first book in nine years, his first graphic novel since 1998 and his first long, complete story with adult main characters. Easy to follow, replete with expressive faces, snappy transitions, close-ups, cutaways and countless variations on the standard nine-panel grid, "The Sculptor" reflects McCloud's decades of interest in how to design and draw sequential art. McCloud's fans - and I'm one - should read it for those reasons. But that doesn't mean we'll like all we find. McCloud's plot is easy to summarize : It's the Faust legend. A sculptor named David Smith has washed out of the New York art world. Dealers once called him "the other David Smith," to distinguish him from the eminence at Storm King; now they don't call him at all. Penniless and despondent, he encounters the ghost of his granduncle Harry, who asks, "What would you give for your art?" David answers, "My life," and so it is: The Devil-as-Harry offers him the power to shape anything - concrete, steel, flesh - with his bare hands, and "200 days to use it - before you die." David accepts, but his dealer rejects the results. Drunk, seemingly friendless, he nearly throws himself under a train. Then a bubbly, generous actress named Meg saves him and takes him in. "You'll be selling sculptures again in no time," she says, though he has kept his powers secret. She models for him - "clothes on, mind you" - too. But the intense, awkward, sexually inexperienced David wants more. Though she rebuffs him at first, the two fall in love, and David must choose how to spend his remaining days: with Meg, or with art? Can his Faustian compact be broken? David can be hard to tolerate, as well as unwilling to compromise: Even Meg calls him "creepy," with "limited social skills." And that's O.K.; ambitious fiction need not make us love its protagonist. What's not O.K. - what almost sinks the story - is the all too lovable Meg: When they first meet she's dressed as a winged angel, and she just keeps on being too good to be true. It's almost as much a cliché to complain about manic pixie dream girls as to create one, but that's what McCloud has created: She's clinically manic (in fact, bipolar) as well as beautifully childlike, with dark, elfin eyes. She's also David's savior, she pretty much tells him to stalk her ("I might try to push you away. Don't let me" ), and she initiates him into erotic life, amid dozens of candles, with almost religious devotion. David and Meg would make sense as an artistic teenager and his devoted 10th-grade girlfriend, as seen in "Zot!" Nos. 31 and 32. But it's hard to watch a grown-up with Meg's experience treat a grown-up who behaves like David so well. (Maybe one has: McCloud says she's based on his wife.) If "The Sculptor" sags as psychology, it stands up as allegory, and as a stration of art. Nobody considers McCloud a titan of figure drawing, but he has thought encyclopedically about how inks, pencils and panels can shape plot and character. That kind of thought makes page after page a pleasure, whether the characters are just exchanging glances, or whether, instead, David's tearing a building apart. One two-page, 13-panel spread includes maps, mirrors, indirect lighting, asymmetrical layout and scraps of a diary, along with cuddling on the couch: easy to analyze, if you're inclined; compelling storytelling, if not. IN ANOTHER COMIC David's powers would make him a superhero or a monster. Here, instead, David's form-making powers turn him into a symbol for the comics art itself: disrespected; inevitably representational; originating in power fantasies; uncomfortable in galleries; sometimes self-obsessed or sex-obsessed; yet able to engross us in its characters, to let us see ourselves in its faces, as no other medium can. In its plot, look and feel, "The Sculptor" strikes a blow for humanist storytelling, for the earnest and the uncool, as well as for comics pages against dealers' showings. But that last blow never quite lands. Critics diagnosed David with "irony deficiency," and they were right; the realist sculpture crucial to that ending brings David closer than he could imagine to his bête noire, Jeff Koons. It's hard to know how much distance McCloud intends between his own aims and David's style. But it's easy to see - as David finally, movingly, sees - the contradiction between a taste that puts representations of people and faces first, and a life that rejects other people in favor of art. STEPHEN BURT is a professor of English at Harvard and the author of several books of poetry and criticism, including "Belmont."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [May 31, 2015]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Humbled artist David Smith makes a deal with death in order to achieve immortality through his art. Granted the power to create extraordinary, impossible sculptures in exchange for giving up his life in 200 days, Smith inconveniently finds himself falling in love. It's a simple but elegant Twilight Zone-ish twist, but McCloud uses it as a springboard for a psychologically complex character and an exhilarating exploration of big ideas about art, love, and life. Author of the indispensable Understanding Comics (1993), McCloud's grasp of the craft is astonishing and complex. He offers exquisite silent passages and modulated panel sizes that guide the reader's emotional journey through powerful shifts and deepen David's compelling character, all while employing a straightforward art style masquerading as simple cartooning shorthand. His brilliant pacing and unobtrusive manipulation of the space between panels creates intimate, intense moments, and it's never more captivating than in a staggering sequence of 14 single-panel moments that encompasses the suffering of David's 26 years, continually hounded by loss. The fluidity of McCloud's visual narrative carries us along with a sweep impossible to duplicate in prose, and, through to its climax, the story's commitment to its harsh, inevitable, but ultimately sublime outcome qualifies this as a work of stunning, timeless graphic literature.--Karp, Jesse Copyright 2014 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
After previously explaining the art of making, reading, and understanding comics in his trilogy of essential guides to the medium, McCloud, in this gloriously romantic graphic novel, doesn't just define a genre-he exemplifies it. David Smith is a morbid, prickly New York sculptor tortured by the one-by-one deaths of his family members and his inability to make art, when he runs into his Uncle Harry, who just happens to be dead. Harry's Faustian offer is all the better for being delivered deadpan ("Trust me, it'll all make sense at sunrise"). In exchange for gaining the ability to mold any material into any shape he wants, sans tools, David is given just 200 days to live and achieve his dreams of greatness. But having this skill doesn't allow David to escape from his grumpy, rules-bound personality. Success and happiness don't come easily, even after a beautiful actress with a surplus of personality and baggage flies (literally) into his arms. The fractious love story and operatic swoons of despair play out against the harsh reality of a cutthroat art market and deftly handled flights of fantasy. Drawn in sharp, sure-handed lines that jump from intimate blocks of wry but poignant interactions with other characters to dramatically realized city scenery, McCloud's epic generates magic and makes an early play for graphic novel of the year. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Starred Review. After spending more than a decade, in the brilliant Understanding Comics and its two sequels, explaining what comics do and how they do it, McCloud faces an immense challenge here; proving that he can walk the walk in fiction as well as he talks the talk in nonfiction. Of course, he can. David Smith's once-promising artistic career as a sculptor has hit rock bottom, and he's desperate. Then Death grants David a power far beyond those of normal sculptors, but the gift comes with a price. David will have only 200 days to use it, and then he'll die. David agrees-and then he falls in love. McCloud's mastery shows everywhere here, in myriad expert artistic touches, mostly unostentatious but rich in meaning. Beyond that, however, he deals with existential questions-the meanings of art, and life-and death in ways that are consistently surprising, riveting, deep, and messily, gloriously human. VERDICT An outstanding achievement, extraordinarily moving and memorable. With nudity and sex, the story isn't for kids, but it's highly, urgently recommended to absolutely everyone else. This is a work to stand with the greats.-S.R. (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Comics writer/illustrator and theorist McCloud (Making Comics, 2006, etc.) presents an artist's struggle to make a name for himself and the complications love brings to the Faustian deal he's made to gain total control of his craft. David Smith once had a promising career as a sculptor, but his abrasive personality burned too many bridges, and now he can't even hold down a job flipping burgers. Stewing in self-pity and booze, he receives an uncanny visitor who offers him a choice between the long, slow burn of the compromised life or the firework pop of the superstar. Without hesitation, David chooses to be a martyr for his art, and soon he has the ability to mold any material simply by touchand 200 days to live. He launches into an ecstasy of self-expression, fantastically shaping slab after slab of granite like it was so much potter's clay, but his first showing of the new work only sends him spiraling further into despondencyuntil beautiful, free-spirited Meg swoops in on angel wings. Her joie de vivre eases David's tortured mind, and a daffy friendship eventually blossoms into mad passion. But even as David refines his manipulation of matter and his sense of life's worth, his ultimate deadline looms. At nearly 500 pages, the tale still manages a brisk pace, with crosscut scenes or subtle but telling differences between nearly identical frames propelling the gaze through uncluttered text and crisp, clear lines, while the reader's mind winds agreeably around the steadily twisting plot. McCloud can sacrifice logic in favor of function, though, and sometimes reactions feel outsized, emotions overwrought and dialogue pat, functioning more as punctuation in a sequence of panels than as the actions of nuanced characters, especially when the work nakedly addresses such grandiose issues as artistic integrity, the glories and agonies of love, and the desperate beauty of life. Masterfully paneled and attractively illustrated but populated by archetypes. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
