Scott McCloud explores love, art and death in graphic novel

Scott McCloud's new graphic novel "The Sculptor" casts a modern view on some ancient artistic dilemmas.

At its heart is a crucial question: What is an artist willing to forfeit in return for art?

"It's a very young man's story about a young man who makes a deal with Death," said McCloud, best known for his book "Understanding Comics" on the theory and artistry of cartooning.

In "The Sculptor," the Grim Reaper gives a struggling sculptor the power to mold rock, steel and other materials with his bare hands. He can create a piece in minutes that would take someone else months or years. The possibility of becoming a great artist is literally in his grasp. The catch: He will die in 200 days.

"And then he has the misfortune to meet the love of his life with only so many days to live," the author said with a laugh. "And now he has to choose what to use those days for." McCloud will discuss the book at 4 p.m. Sunday at the John B. Davis lecture Hall at Macalester College — in a reading sponsored by the Rain Taxi Review of Books.

The story's premise came to him three decades ago, when he was trying to make it as a comics artist and determined to create realistic stories.

"I wanted to move away from the guys in tights and all," McCloud said from his home in California. "So, the fact that this had that kind of a superpower almost in it, meant I put it on the back-burner for many, many years."

McCloud went off and honed his craft working on his comic book "Zot!" and a series of best-selling books on comics theory. Eventually he decided to return to the story of the sculptor.

But at nearly 500 pages, "The Sculptor" took a lot of drawing.

"Well, it took me about five years, working about 11 hours a day seven days a week " McCloud said. "Except for the last year, when it was more like 13 hours a day."

McCloud, who is now in his 50s, found he wanted to approach the story differently.

"As a young man I would have seen it as a story about, you know, struggling to fulfill your vision and trying to be remembered," he said. "But in the end it became much more a story about that terror that we have about being forgotten which is a little bit different. And this is a story in many ways in learning to accept that we all get forgotten."

McCloud sets the graphic novel about artistic struggle, love and mortality against the politics and intrigues of the New York art scene. That created a challenge for the West Coast-based McCloud. He traveled repeatedly to Manhattan on research trips as he drew his epic work.

"I took probably over 10,000 photographs, which I then tagged with all these complicated tags," he said. "So if I needed to find a picture of a wide shot in a building, at night time, in the rain, I could do that very quickly."

He also videoed friends acting as models for his main characters. Using slow motion and freeze frame he was able to find perfect movements and gestures to draw in the thousands of images he needed for the book.

For McCloud, the processes he used in writing the book all spring from the craft of a comics writer: Artists combine drawing and a host of storytelling techniques. If they get it right, he said, no-one should notice.

"We figure out what we want to say, we figure out all the tools we need to say it, and then we bury it all in the sand until all that greets the reader's eyes is story," he said. After working in non-fiction for so long, McCloud found that "The Sculptor" allowed him to rediscover the joy of writing.

"I just came to that stage where all I was doing was just clearing away everything that didn't belong," he said. "Everything that wasn't part of what I wanted to say through the story and that was a really exhilarating process."