Feb 11 2015 62 mins 1
The phrase “those who can’t, teach” runs through my head pretty
consistently when I sit down in front of a blank page in an attempt to
flex some creative muscles. It’s the curse of the critic, the curator,
the teacher — anyone on the outside looking in who assumes their work,
perhaps rightfully, will be subject to that added level of critique when
they finally unleash it on the world. That, no doubt, is a large
part of why it took Scott McCloud so damned long to bare himself in
such a way. The artist has, quite literally, written the book on making
comics — three of them, in fact. For decades, his work has been largely
regarded as the gold standard for making and interpreting sequential
art, a watershed moment in the academic approach to the form. Like
so many on that side of the creative process, however, McCloud’s
bibliography has long lacked a major, self-contained narrative work. In
the 80s, the artist produced Zot, a manga-influenced light-hearted take
on superhero books, but until The Sculptor,
McCloud has never given himself a long-form opportunity to put into
practice the rules he’d first committed to paper in the early 90s. A
half-decade in the making, the new book shockingly lives up to the
hype. It’s a masterfully constructed and pitch-perfectly paced take on
the Faustian archetype with creative roots that reach back well beyond
the publication of McCloud’s earliest work. I sat down with
McCloud in a colorful room at First Second’s Flat Iron Building offices
ahead of his speaking engagement at the 92nd st. Y to discuss The
Sculptor, thinking critically about comics and the frustrating notion of
the effortless artist.
