David Smith is a young and somewhat tortured New York artist. Once upon a time, he was hip, having been taken up by a big-time investor. But now he’s down on his luck. His King Midas has dumped him, and he is broke, disillusioned and thoroughly blocked; reduced to flipping burgers, he may soon find himself homeless. Even his closest friend in the art world, a gallerist called Ollie, looks like giving up on him. He has fallen for one of David’s most despised rivals, a wannabe called Finn who cruises through life on the back of a fat trust fund. Next time Ollie curates a show, David fears, it will be Finn’s work that he showcases, not his.
But then, something weird happens. In a diner, our hero meets Death, in the unlikely form of his chess-playing but stern-faced Uncle Harry (David knows it’s him because he has the superhero comics he drew as a boy stuffed in his overcoat pocket). Uncle Harry offers him two scenarios. In the first, David leaves the city and moves upstate, where he becomes a teacher in a community college and lives in a little white house with his wife, kids and a labrador; in this version of the future, he’ll always wonder what might have been. In the second, Harry cuts him a deal. He will give David a new power – I won’t say what it is, for fear of spoiling the big reveal – after which, assuming his “nephew” is pleased with his new capability, he will have 200 days to use it to create some truly great art, and then he will die.
If it’s predictable that David chooses the second option, nothing else is. After this, things only get stranger. A mysterious girl with angel wings takes David in, and they fall in love – though he is forbidden to tell her about the ticking clock that now follows him wherever he goes. Meanwhile, in secret, he works on his art, not always wholly successfully. Frustrated by the critics and collectors, he becomes a kind of Banksy figure, his sculptures appearing in public places in the dead of night. Will he make it? Will he convince the world of his greatness before it is too late? Or will inspiration elude him even as he faces the grave? Desperate to find out, I could hardly turn the book’s pages fast enough.
The Sculptor is the work of Scott McCloud, a cartoonist who has also written two classic books of theory, Understanding Comics and Making Comics – and you feel his expertise on every page. 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. Plus, it’s a super classy homage to all things Marvel. Quite how McCloud pulls this off, I don’t know. But if you love reading David Mitchell, this is certainly the graphic novel for you.
The Sculptor is published by SelfMadeHero (£18.99). Click here to order it for £15.19
