Scott McCloud's Sculptor

Sometimes we like the story that is told, but not the particulars of how it is told, and sometimes we like the way a storyteller tells a story without liking the particulars of the story all that much.  In a great work of art, you are able to have both.  For me, Scott McCloud’s The Sculptor is aesthetically fantastic, but the story itself falls flat for a number of reasons.

Let’s start with the cool things about The Sculptor.  I liked the very format of a graphic novel in the same dimensions of a regular book.  I liked the use of a bluescale instead of a grayscale.  I liked the drawings themselves, the way the characters and the world wer depicted in ink.  Moreover, McCloud does a fantastic job with pacing and composition.  The dialogue is good and McCloud’s preference for visuals over dialogue is wonderful.  Even when the drawings look a little simple, there is great charm in that simplicity. 

Now beyond this point, I am going to be spoiling plot, so don’t read any more of this review if you don’t want the story spoiled.  Whatever I have to say about the story isn’t all that important anyway since your tastes are your own.  Buy or borrow the book and read it for yourself—it’s a quick and satisfying experience—and then you can hear what I have to say and tell me what you have to say.

All good?  Good.

I’m not really a fan of stories about moping and angst-y protagonists to begin with, but that wasn’t my problem here.  I wasn’t annoyed with David because he was moping.  I was annoyed with David, because he was so incredibly self-absorbed, and still more, I was annoyed with McCloud because he seemed equally self-absorbed.  On the surface, The Sculptor is about an artist willing to die for his art.  He would rather have a 200-day life-span in which to make incredible art than a lifetime of regular human existence.  But outside of a few passages about David believing in “absolutes,” McCloud never asks what it means to be willing to die for art.  In fact, David appears to have little to say with his sculptures.  The art that he makes after a feverish three weeks of binge-creating is nothing more than a collection of snapshots from his past, moments from his life.  The only thing David wants to talk about is himself, but he wants to say it loudly and be praised for it with money and accolades.  McCloud did not create an arc for David’s character in which he discovered what it is that he really had to say, discovered what art really was or what about it was worth dying for.  His final creation, the one he literally died to make was yet another snapshot from his past (Meg holding the baby).  The extent to which David grows is to realize that he needs to make every second of life count.  McCloud seems to embrace the David we meet and seems no more critical of David, in the end, than David is.  McClouds’s novel is every bit obsessed with David as David is of himself, which suggests a lack of irony in his portrayal of David’s self-absorption.  There are no subplots, nothing that happens that doesn’t directly affect David, no character relationships that exist beyond its impact on David.

Meg, while she insists she is not, is really just a thing in David’s world.  While searching the internet this afternoon to determine what didn’t sit well with me about Meg, I discovered the trope “Manic Pixie Dream Girl,” a phrase coined by film critic Nathan Rabin describing Kirsten Dunst’s character in his review of Elizabethtown: “that bubbly, shallow cinematic creature that exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures.”  That is literally what Meg is in the novel.  She is fun and quirky and there for the sole reason to teach David his lessons about how to live life.  McCloud half-heartedly attempts to complicate that image by giving Meg a few fiery and feisty explosions and chronic bouts of depression, possibly suggesting she is bi-polar or suffering from some similar condition.  The treatment of mental disorders seems painfully simplistic and without genuine insight.  I would be very interested to hear what activists in the mental health community would say about McCloud’s portrayal of Meg.  Of that chronic condition, we only ever witness one bout; her moods, whenever they surface, quickly fade and she returns to her plucky optimistic self.

McCloud gave himself nearly 500 pages to explore the themes of his novel, but there appears to be very little exploration at all.  He is of course, perfectly in his rights to do that—he should tell the story he wants to tell, not the one I want to hear.  My disappointment with the way he treated his own subjects is on me.  He’s a very talented storyteller, and if he ever really delves into the depths of a story he is telling, I would eagerly read it.

Days of Fantastic Nonfiction

In Days of Destruction Days of Revolt, Chris Hedges and Joe Sacco illuminate what they call “sacrifice zones,” “those areas in the country that have been offered up for exploitation in the name of profit, progress, and technological advancement.”  As they say in their excellent introduction, 

We wanted to show in words and drawings what life looks like when the marketplace rules without constraints, where human beings and the natural world are used and then discarded to maximize profit.  We wanted to look at what the ideology of unfettered capitalism means for families, communities, workers, and the ecosystem.

The result of this investigation is a one-of-a-kind non-fiction book that is insightful, moving, and illuminating.

The book is cut into 5 relatively equal sections that look at the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota; the destitute city of Camden, New Jersey; the remains of the coal town of Welch, West Virginia; the state of migrant and immigrant farmers in Immokalee, Florida; and the gathering at Liberty Square by the Occupy movement from September 2011 to January 2012.  The politics of the book are clear (as you can tell from the introductory passage I already quoted), but what makes the book more than a political diatribe is how they present the lives of those affected by the forces of institutionalized corruption and greed.

The sections play out like a documentary in writing.  Every aspect about a subject—and Hedges and Sacco do a fantastic job of looking at a wide variety of these aspects in each and every section—is anchored by the tales of individuals living in the specific sacrifice zone.  There are no abstractions, because every effect is seen and heard in the lives of those interviewed.  Hedges gives extensive quotations from the various people he features, letting them speak for themselves, often capturing the speakers’ dialects to bring the spoken nature of their speeches to the fore.  The result is like having a voice-over in a documentary.  To add the visual element, Sacco provides drawings of the various speakers and landscapes instead of photographs.  In each section (except for the final one) at least one person tells his or her life story, and Sacco turns that into a 10-or-so-page graphic novel.  The result is a unique combination of essay and graphic novel that creates a world all its own.

The first four sections of the book are unassailable.  Hedges and Sacco bring the sacrifice zones to life and bring the reader face to face with the cost of capitalism in America.  The weakest section is the final section, mainly because it is the least grounded in the tales of those who were there.  As Hedges and Sacco say in their introduction, the Occupy Wall Street event happened as they were concluding their travels and their book, and they saw it as “the nationwide revolt” that had so far been “absent”: 

This revolt rooted our conclusion [that a revolution was the inevitable result of the sacrifice zones left in capitalism’s wake] in the real rather than the speculative.  It permitted us to finish with a look at a rebellion that was as concrete as the destruction that led to it.  And permitted us to end our work with the capacity for hope.

But of course, the Occupy movement did not lead to a lasting nationwide revolt, or at least not yet, and it’s hard to picture America, with its vastness and complicated government and economic design, yielding to  revolution in any way similar to the Eastern European examples given in the book.  In fact, living in a Post-Trump age, it’s hard to read this call to action the same in 2017 as I would have in 2012: 

We must stop being afraid.  We have to turn our backs for good on the Democrats, no matter what ghoulish candidate the Republicans offer up for president.  All the public disputes between candidates in the election cycle are a carnival act.  On the issues that matter, there is no disagreement among the Republicans and the Democrats.

Even with those final bits sitting at odds with my own experiences, the book is entirely worth reading and experiencing.  Even as a relatively educated and liberal man, there was a lot here for me not only to learn but to think about and consider.  Hedges is a fantastic writer who makes his political insights clear and compelling, and I will eagerly read more of his work, both his short- and long-form journalism.