FOG! Chats With Cartoonist SCOTT McCLOUD About 'THE SCULPTOR' (interview PART 2)

Interview conducted by Clay N Ferno

In 1984, Scott McCloud established a name for himself with his creator owned series, Zot!, receiving a number of Harvey and Eisner award nominations.  He brought Zot! to an end in 1990, after 36 issues.

McCloud returned to comics in 1993 with his book, Understanding Comics, which established him as a comics theorist, presenting a definition, history, vocabulary, and methods of the medium of comics in the form of a graphic novel.  He went on to write two additional books on theory including Reinventing Comics and Making Comics, as writing several Superman Stories and a graphic novel, The New Adventures of Abraham Lincoln.

Last month, Sony Pictures acquired the movie rights to Scott McCloud’s newest creation The Sculptor, his first full length graphic novel.

The Sculptor tells the story of artist David Smith, who makes a deal with Death to sculpt anything he can imagine with his bare hands.  After learning that he only has 200 days to live, and suddenly discovering the love of his life makes the decision of what to create harder than he thought.

The comic book scholar and auteur, McCloud, took some time with us to talk the comic creation process beyond his books in the Understanding Comics and his creator owned Zot! series.

Scott also questions the carbon date of The Golden Age of comics. Was that in the past or are we living it today?

FOG!: Thank you so much for joining us to talk about your book. Your books have formed my college years and were part of my curriculum and really helped me understand the language of comics and even more-so, the possibilities of what comics can be. Thanks for giving us the tools and the language to talk about comics like that.

Scott McCloud: That’s encouraging to hear because it has always been about potential.

Even since I was very young, about what comics can do. That has loomed a lot larger for me than what they have done.

I have always hoped that we had greater things in the future than in the past.

A lot of people are very nostalgic about comics, for them it is about celebrating the wondrous Golden Age — I don’t know, I think The Golden Age is now.


It is always good to be looking at the present and to the future for sure. Did you grow up here (Boston, MA)?

I was born in the area, Lexington, MA. I lived there for the first eighteen years of my life. My family had that house for six years when I was born and had it for another 6 or 7 after I left.

How did you get into comics? Were they always part of your life when you were growing up as a kid and that fostered you into wanting to be a creator?

I was a real snooty little kid. I read real books and I turned down my nose at comics.

People are going to be surprised at that!

At the age of 12 or so, I thought I was too old for comics. I had seen some superhero comics at friend’s houses and it just didn’t do it for me. I was sitting there reading Arthur C. Clarke or Tolkien. I was into Ben Bova at one point, Asimov. Stuff like comics seemed to be crudely drawn. I just wasn’t into that stuff.

But I was friends with a guy named Kurt Busiek in middle school. Kurt and I played chess and billiards. He would come over after school to escape his father who kept giving him pointless jobs to do.

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INTERVIEW: SCOTT MCCLOUD ON SUPERHERO POWERS, COMMUNICATION, AND RETURNING TO COMICS - EARTH PRIME TIME AT DIGBOSTON

INTERVIEW: SCOTT MCCLOUD ON SUPERHERO POWERS, COMMUNICATION, AND RETURNING TO COMICS

Scott McCloud defined the language of comic book creation and critical thought with his lauded 1993 tome Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. In advance of his appearance at Brattle Theatre in Harvard Square on Thursday, February 5, I got a chance to talk with him about his latest 500 page graphic novel, The Sculptor, and his glorious return to comics.
 
What can readers expect from The Sculptor?
 
For starters, it’s big. It’s just under 500 pages long and it is a story about a young sculptor in New York City who had a taste of early success and is now contemplating his life as a loser when he gets an opportunity from a visitor to have everything he needs to succeed — at least physically — but he has only 200 days to live. It’s a traditional Faustian bargain, [but] this time the supernatural visitor is Death, not The Devil. I’m not too keen on devils and Hell, being an atheist.
 
The real challenge [for the main character] is an internal one because as soon as he has power to mold anything with his bare hands, he runs up against his own artistic limitations and desires, and finds it isn’t so easy. When all the other obstacles drop away, there are still those internal obstacles.
 
Then he crashes headlong into this romance at the eleventh hour, and the question of how to spend one’s days becomes critical for him.
 
It is a race against the clock in a way. He has a superpower and it’s about how he deals with having a finite number of days. He can also be penalized if he makes certain decisions, he then has less days. I was seeing these as very much comic book ideas.
 
Yeah, and this is something I had to come to grips with myself, because I was going around for decades talking about how comics can be more than just superheroes. Then I have an idea that I love but it has that superhero quality to it. This is one of the reasons why when the book starts we see that this wish of his in part grows out of the thing he did as a kid. He made a comic where he had a power sort of like this.
 

You are working with these huge archetypes. How did you go about laying out this whole story over 500 pages, incorporating superhero ideas? Was that all there at the beginning?
 
Part of it was, the idea of Death was there. The conceit of what appears to be an angel at the beginning came to me [during] the actual making of it. There were a few decades before I started in earnest working on the project, then there were the five years that took me to make the thing.
 
Is what prompted so many revisions was wanting to try different things out?
 
It was more that the story was starting to come to focus in my mind. The first revision was about fixing things. With each revision, it became about excavating what was below the crap. Seeing the shape of the story of what it wanted to be and pull that story out. Occasionally I would have a neat little bit, something that works with comics or was interesting, and then I would realize that while it might be nice—it didn’t really belong. It didn’t really have anything to do with what that story was ultimately about. If you can pull it off, if you can have the parts reflect the whole, that’s hopefully a book that feels like it has a breathing heart, [that] breathes when it is on the shelf at night.

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