Feb 07 2015

Scott McCloud at Politics and Prose

Published by at 2:27 pm under sketchbook

Scott McCloud, author of Understanding Comics*, has a huge new book out called The Sculptor, and he’s on a 14-city tour promoting it. Last night I went to see him at Politics & Prose, in conversation with Michael Cavna of the Washington Post. The conversation was wide-ranging, and offered great glimpses into McCloud’s applied philosophy of comics storytelling. I’ll say more about the new book, but first some sketches:

(I found Scott’s likeness a bit hard to capture, so I’m afraid most of these aren’t great likenesses. Michael is easy though.)

The Sculptor is massive in scale, and ambitious in its goals. Scott hits the big universal themes: love, life, death, and art, and digs into each one pretty deeply in the course of 500 pages, bringing the story together in an appropriately big and dramatic climax and a complex ending that encourages several re-readings (of at least the ending, if not the entire book). I recommend it highly.

*Understanding Comics, if anyone isn’t aware, is the preeminent work about the medium of comics, written in comics, and is very accessible and interesting to anyone whether or not they read comics. If by chance you haven’t read it, you really, really should. Here, I’ll make it easy to get started:

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