So what does he do? He makes a deal with Death: in exchange for his life, David receives the ability to sculpt with his bare hands. David Smith, the story's protagonist, is a talented sculptor, but like many other artists in New York City, he's not achieving the level of recognition he desires. The Sculptor is essentially a modern take on the old Faustian bargain. His newest book bears out his twin love of cartooning and theorizing. In short, he dissected comics with both the eye of a scientist and the heart of an illustrator. He theorized about why humans are drawn to simply sketched cartoon faces.

He analyzed the space in between panels, called the 'gutter.' He pieced together an elaborate history of comics. 'I wasn't so much defining comics,' says McCloud, 'as un-defining comics.'īut he didn't stop with his (un)definition. What McCloud was trying to do, on the other hand, was to open up the form of comics, to free it from the limited way it was often understood by readers. To define something is to give it a boundary to enclose it. īy saying, ‘This is comics,' Scott is really saying: ‘This is what comics should be it is what we should value most about them.' On the other hand, he's also saying what comics should not be, and, by implication, what we should value less about them. McCloud's definition was, in some sense, idealistic, as Dylan Horrocks noted in Comics Journal. It doesn't exactly roll off the tongue, as McCloud admits, but he wanted to give a precise, almost scientific definition of what Will Eisner termed ' sequential art.' His first task in Understanding Comics was to define the medium, which he did, like this: 'Juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or produce an aesthetic response in the reader.' McCloud's deconstruction of comics could have made him an outlier - but his industry took notice. McCloud has been nominated for over a dozen Eisner Awards, winning one, and won a handful of Harvey Awards. Though there are plenty of academic tomes published about comics today, in the early '90s, comic writers didn't enjoy much academic respect. Following that success, McCloud published two more books, Reinventing Comics and Making Comics, that offered further thoughtful analyses of cartooning.

In 1994, McCloud wrote a book called Understanding Comics, a game-changing publication that broke down theories of cartooning for popular audiences. His answer? Make comic books about comic books. 'What does a scientific mind do in the arts?' asks Scott McCloud in a TED talk that has been viewed almost 800,000 times.

Scott mccloud making comics