A panel from Scott McCloud’s The Sculptor.
Say you're a cartoonist. With only your drawing hand and a bit of imagination, you can conjure anything you like into being. Your art knows no limits: You're constrained by no budget and no laws of physics, because everything's drawn, everything's handcrafted, and you dictate everything that happens on the page.
Which is to say that, despite its blunt title, Scott McCloud's new graphic novel might not be so much about sculpture as it is about cartooning. His character may sculpt towering marvels, but McCloud's the one drawing them on every page: One man's statuary is another man's doodle. This sculptor is cartooning by proxy.
McCloud is certainly no stranger to meditations on the cartoonist's craft, having made his name with the indispensable Understanding Comics. The book's conceit was pure genius – an essay/textbook about comics, executed in comic-strip format – but it's become a phenomenon in the two decades since its release thanks largely to its theoretical insights. McCloud's clever cartooning serves as a model for how to organize information and solve storytelling problems, proposing tenets adopted by everyone from software designers to semioticians and screenwriters alike. A couple of ambitious but digressive and curious sequels followed, Reinventing Comics and Making Comics, which proselytized for the kinds of digital experiments McCloud conducted in his own brief forays into fiction (a webcomics novella remains unfinished; 1998's The New Adventures of Abraham Lincoln now looks like a fascinating artifact of the Netscape era).
McCloud returns to fiction in a very big way with The Sculptor, a 500-page tome about love, art, death, New York and other grand themes. The story is cast in the familiar Faustian mould: Ambitious, naive young David Smith makes a deal with death, giving up the rest of his life except the next 200 days in exchange for the chance to excel at his craft. This David Smith is not, as he is constantly reminded, the famous sculptor of the same name, but some other anonymous aspiring smithy, crafting objects that galleries spurn and patrons ignore. Now, granted the supernatural ability to freely shape any material with a bare touch of his hand, David uses his newfound gift to the fullest – curling lampposts into spirals, palpating brick walls and pulling out statues, filling a whole Chelsea loft with his oversized whimsies. His art knows no limits: He mocks up new sculptures like a cartoonist sketching. Yet all he seems to create are overearnest failures and sophomoric kitsch – artworks that one of his critics derides as "Polynesian gift shop" tchotchkes.
He's not far wrong. Readers will differ as to whether they believe David's art is inspired and heartfelt, or shallow and cornball. ("Everything I make seems too earnest and emotional," David frets, trying to please his detractors, "or too dry and academic, or too literal or too obtuse.") The present unfeeling critic leans toward the negative estimation, which creates an interesting friction in the story. If the sculptor's art is irredeemably bad, then his bargain with death is a scam, and his impending demise is a dark cosmic joke: David is gifted with artistic hands, but deprived of any artistic vision. What if the world's most powerful artist also had the world's most terrible taste?
The book, however, rarely maintains this kind of ambiguous distance from its portrait of the artist – Stephen Dedalus he ain't. Instead, readers are asked to empathize with David's plight, especially once he falls in love with Meg, a manic(-depressive) pixie dream girl who first appears to David as an actual angel, descending from heaven. Having orchestrated this elaborate meet-cute, McCloud nicely undercuts it: Meg's merely an actress in a street-art performance, but now David's prepared to defy death for her anyway. Still, something about their foredoomed romance seems similarly staged. McCloud draws out their diffident courtship, lovemaking and quarrels in fervent suites of panels or beatific portraits meant to stop the heart and swell the emotions, but their relationship seems passionless and purely formal. When it's revealed at one point that their love has been sexless as well, it seems somehow unsurprising.
This isn't love, in other words, it's mooning, a chaste teenaged fantasy that McCloud pulled off better in his 1980s superhero saga Zot! (collected recently in another thick brick of a book). That capes-and-tights genre often lurks beneath The Sculptor's adult exterior, in another parallel between David Smith's art and comic-book concerns: Having gained unspeakable powers, David's out to show the world what he's really made of. Despite its putative grounding in real-world concerns such as relationships and rent, the story gradually devolves into generic grandstanding, with the mysterious hero (The Sculptor!) pulling off capers and monolithic feats in his race to secure artistic immortality. Say you're a cartoonist, and your art knows no limits: must it necessarily detour into bombast and bloat?
Nevertheless, the book certainly has charms. The banter throughout is lively and sharp, aided by McCloud's quick pace and intuitive timing. His characters are attractive, their aims commendable and their yearnings familiar. But because of that familiarity, The Sculptor lacks definition. The book's armature – its comic-strip structure, from panel to panel – may be sturdy and strong, but its people, its artworks, its story all seem soft as putty, improbably shaped. McCloud has handcrafted something with great zeal, but little more.
Sean Rogers is The Globe and Mail's comics reviewer.