The Sculptor
By Scott McCloud
Hardback, 496 pp, £18.99
David is giving his life for his art – literally. Thanks to a deal with Death, the young sculptor gets his childhood wish: to sculpt anything he can imagine with his bare hands. But now that he only has 200 days to live, deciding what to create is harder than he thought, and discovering the love of his life at the eleventh hour isn't making it any easier.
This is a story of desire taken to the edge of reason and beyond; of the frantic, clumsy dance steps of young love; and a gorgeous, street-level portrait of New York City. It's about the small, warm, human moments of everyday life... and the great surging forces that lie just under the surface.
Scott McCloud wrote the book on how comics work; now he vaults into breathtaking, funny and unforgettable fiction.
This is a story of desire taken to the edge of reason and beyond; of the frantic, clumsy dance steps of young love; and a gorgeous, street-level portrait of New York City. It's about the small, warm, human moments of everyday life... and the great surging forces that lie just under the surface.
Scott McCloud wrote the book on how comics work; now he vaults into breathtaking, funny and unforgettable fiction.
Scott McCloud
Scott McCloud is the award-winning author of Understanding Comics, Making Comics, Zot! and other fiction and non-fiction comics spanning thirty years. He began the international 24-Hour Comic movement and is a frequent lecturer on the power of comics and visual communication. His art and stories are available in twenty languages and on the web at scottmccloud.com.
Reviews
"The best graphic novel I've read in years. It's about art and love and why we keep on trying. It will break your heart."
— Neil Gaiman
"It is, quite simply, a masterclass in graphic storytelling... If Understanding Comics was the research, The Sculptor is the finished thesis – far more than the sum of its parts, and a wonderful testament to the power of comics."
— The Independent
"What a brilliant and gripping book. As absorbing as a Victorian novel in terms of character and moral ideas, it somehow manages to be both an inquiry into the subjectivity of art and a zippy portrait of 21st-century hipster urban life."
— The Observer
"Everything in these delicate monochrome panels has been considered; every angle calculated, every expression caught… There's a master at work here, and you can feel it on every page."
— The Telegraph