Copyright 2015
First Second Books
NY NY
490 pages
By art we live. These
four words appear at the bottom of the copyright page and drive David Smith’s
story in Scott McCloud’s new work, The Sculptor.
David Smith has seen success and lost favor due to his
inherent inability to behave sociably and now he struggles daily to keep body
and soul together in New York, until the afternoon of a “very bad day” when he
meets his Uncle Harry in a local diner.
Dead Uncle Harry.
“What would you give
for your art, David?” Harry asks.
“I’d give my life.”
Now David has the ability to mold any material with just his
hands and only two hundred days to live. He spends his two hundred days
searching for meaning: who is David Smith, what is art, what is most
important? And he meets Meg, the angel
who tells him “everything will be alright.”
With help from Meg, his friends, and dead Uncle Harry, David
begins to rebuild himself, painfully constructing a meaningful life as he
navigates the maze of relationships with his new love, Meg, his friends, the
art community and the rest of the world, fighting to create a true art, a true
identity, and a true life.
Scott McCloud, creator of Zot! and Understanding Comics
and its companions, has crafted a virtuoso combination of art and story with only
the most traditional graphic tools. If you want to make comics, you can learn
it all from just this one work. He
creates tone with a simple pallet of blue, white and black that can alternately
alienate or sanctify characters and scenes; express awe, loneliness or distance
in time or space. Panels that bleed off the edge of the page make dramatic
transitions, create a sense of scale, or establish simultaneity or internalized
focus. Narrow panel borders with white gutters control conventional passage of
time, helping to create rhythm with their size, shape, and position, but
McCloud manipulates even these, creating intimacy with panels placed without
gutters, separated only by black lines, varying the thickness to stretch quiet
moments into tears.
His content, too, counterbalances the palette and layout; establishing
panels of cityscapes, interiors, parkland and suburbia filled with the
rejectamenta of daily life are interspersed with panels empty of backgrounds
altogether focusing attention on moments of characterization, facial
expression, or dialogue. McCloud’s
panels are simple and unpretentious, yet sufficiently grounded in real detail
to root a story filled with moments of poignancy, humor, tragedy and
intelligence. These patterns pace his story, creating a full world without
cluttering every page in detail. And Scott McCloud is apparently a sculptor as
well, creating a world of work ranging from pedestrian to in David’s hands.
But if you have ever seen any of McCloud’s works, you
already know he can draw. Apparently he
can write, too. David Smith leaps and
stumbles to his destiny through a world filled with ephemeral moments, running
subplots, and a humor and love obviously Scott McCloud’s own. When Harry tells
David he could’ve drawn funny books for a living, “those guys make tons of
money,” David muses, “I’m …not sure that’s right.” Later, Uncle Harry
admonishes, “and no crime fighting either!”
McCloud characterizes David through these moments. David’s deep love of his family and his close
friend, Ollie, are revealed in Ollie’s recognition of moments from their lives
in David’s sculpture. Ollie’s abusive relationship with the upstart
trust-fund-baby-cum-artist Finn develops David’s artistic aesthetic, the heart
of his need to create. David’s promises (the “thirty six” of them are almost a
character) both characterize him and drive the story. And David’s life is full,
there are few cracks left unexplored.
Seemingly unrelated events reinforce the verisimilitude that grounds the
whole work: when one David Smith is shot, another David Smith calls to reassure
his family that he is alright; friends worry that their recipes are not well
received at a parties; life surrounds David.
These details, dovetailed into his two hundred days fill every nook and
cranny with experience, and David learns what Meg knew, and he didn’t: Every
minute is an ocean…let them in…let them all in. David does, defining himself,
his art and his legacy in a startling climax.
Beautiful. Just beautiful.
