'The Sculptor' Doesn't Shape Up

For all its merits, it is unfortunate that “The Sculptor,” Scott McCloud’s first foray into adult graphic novel writing, is less than satisfying. McCloud is justly renowned for his nonfiction works about comics—“Understanding Comics,” “Reinventing Comics,” and “Making Comics”—which are themselves so cleverly written in comic book form that they are likely to make readers wish theory on every subject were illustrated by McCloud. As one would expect from such works, and from its author’s background as a popularizer of comics theory, “The Sculptor” shines on a panel-to-panel level. Yet while it demonstrates much technical skill, it ultimately falls short as a work of fiction. McCloud’s evident desire to convey complex insights is commendable. However, the embodiment of these insights remains disappointingly basic, and McCloud’s strengths as an explainer of theory become his weaknesses in this new context of storytelling.

The overarching narrative and its protagonist suffer from an excess of purity and a lack of complexity. In the novel, young, washed-up sculptor David Smith makes a deal with Death: unlimited power to sculpt any material with his hands, but only 200 days to use the power before he dies. David is a perfectionist and sentimental to the point of being at times annoying. He has made 36 promises to himself and to others, ranging from not shopping at D’Agostino to not telling Meg, the recently discovered love of his life, that he loves her. And, as his best friend Ollie puts it, “David refuses to believe he lives in a random uncaring universe.” There are few moments that have the potential to offer a deeper understanding of why he has these traits or his unique manifestations of them. The reader glimpses into his past, in which David’s family members passed away one by one, but the essence of these relationships and the effect of their loss lack depth and nuance.

That being said, though the book’s characters are only superficially defined, they are tenderly flawed in a way that suggests McCloud’s sensitivity. He treats David’s sexual inexperience, for example, not as a gimmick but as an expression of his perfectionism, though the issue is only briefly grazed. McCloud’s gentleness with his characters is particularly evident in Meg and Ollie, whom he is careful to flesh out. Meg isn’t just the love interest and Ollie isn’t only the best friend; they each have problems of their own. Ollie and his boyfriend take advantage of each other, and Meg has mood swings and abandonment anxiety. Nonetheless, the reader’s windows into these complex psychologies remain foggy, and scenes tend to take a turn for the cheesy when David is there.

Aside from a sparse smattering of deep moments from Meg, Ollie, and occasionally David, the insights the book has to offer are for the most part rudimentary. “If [my art] was all worthless... how would I ever really know?” David laments to his friend Ollie. “Relax…Nobody ‘knows’ anything,” Ollie replies. This struggle with the impossible search for absolute truth and validation is an interesting start, but it’s packaged and presented to readers as simple exposition. It is exactly what Scott McCloud does so well on the close-up level—showing and not telling—that is missing from the big-picture narrative.

Some areas that McCloud begins to explore dissolve into the ether as the book goes on. For example, the novel seems to be concerned with one of the art world’s ongoing discussions: the question of irony versus sincerity. David’s friend Ollie, who works for a gallery, says jokingly that David has an “irony deficiency” and tries to tell him that the critics and collectors won’t understand his art, meaningful though it is to David himself, and that they “want to see a focused, coherent, singular vision.” The artwork of David’s that the reader sees is indeed sentimental. Each work represents a memory—of his sister who’s passed away, “Beth Dudek’s tube top,” or his first wet dream. David’s work, saturated with self-expression and technical mastery, hardly seems to belong in the postmodern era. But this issue loses traction almost as soon as it begins to develop. David is strangely untroubled when his newfound power makes sculpting effortless, and the matter is consequently dropped.

“The Sculptor” is most successful at close-range storytelling. When David gets drunk, for example, McCloud depicts the scene with pictures that don’t quite fit in their panels, in panels that don’t quite fit on the page. He represents David’s experience only visually—and with a dose of cleverness to boot. Later David, afraid of his Russian landlord, hides when he hears two pedestrians speaking Russian. In the first panel the speech bubbles are filled with Russian text, but in the next panel McCloud has provided translations in brackets: the couple is talking harmlessly about party invitations. The gesture is charming, a little joke to the readers, and exemplifies McCloud’s fluency in the language of comics.

“The Sculptor” may just be the case of an intelligent, creative author who is only beginning to delve into a new genre. While it is likely to be a disappointment for some of McCloud’s fans, this is not to say the book bodes entirely poorly for McCloud’s future endeavors as a graphic novelist. “The Sculptor” demonstrates that Scott McCloud is full of good intentions and is talented at translating real-life situations and interactions into comic book scenes.