Scott McCloud, 2015

I first encountered the work of Scott McCloud in 1993, during my senior year of college, when, on the way to see a performance of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame at the Berkeley Rep for a philosophy class I was taking, I passed famed comics store Comic Relief at its original location on University Avenue.  In the window was a huge display for a new book called Understanding Comics, billing it as a groundbreaking analysis of how the medium works: how readers mentally fill in the gaps between panels, how they react to more realistic vs. more iconic art, how text and artwork interrelate, etc., etc.  More or less on a whim, I decided to pick it up.  And in a way, it changed my life!  I had missed that year’s deadlines to apply to grad school, and really had no idea what I wanted to do after I graduated in the spring.  Take a fresh crack at writing the novel I’d been making failed swings at since high school?  Get a teaching credential and try to land an AP English class at a public high school somewhere?  Go to film school and see whether I could try my hand at writing movies?  But once I read Understanding Comics, I felt much more inspired by the idea of a life in academia, spending years gathering expertise in some specific type of literature and then writing a dazzlingly clear breakdown of what goes on under the hood, as McCloud had done.  And… I mean, I didn’t say it changed my life for the better.  It turned out that I wasn’t ready for the level of commit­ment needed to succeed in grad school, not when I was 21.  I spent time in a couple of different Ph.D. programs and didn’t stick it out in either one.  But even though picking up McCloud’s masterwork turned out to have led me astray, if anything my experience only deepened my appreciation of what McCloud had achieved.  Decades later, I did end up making the jump to teaching high school, and I have taught Understanding Comics every year.

And every year I’ve also taught Zot!, the series McCloud was known for before turning his hand to non-fiction.  I actually didn’t get around to reading Zot! until 1999, when a new girl­friend encouraged me to give it a try, and I was wowed by its evolution from an adventure comic for kids into an experimental superhero comic and eventually into a slice-of-life exploration of adolescence.  (I wrote an article about it… ulp, more than fifteen years ago now!  Yipes.)  The character studies were not neces­sarily the deepest I had ever read, but they were very good, and every issue contained at least one perfect moment that had me on (or beyond) the verge of tears.  So I looked forward to seeing McCloud return to fiction.  But, other than a slim experimental story called The New Adventures of Abraham Lincoln that attempted to marry very cartoony figures to instantly obsolete computer-generated 3D backgrounds⁠—“a noble failure”, McCloud now concedes⁠—no major works of fiction were forthcoming.  Apart from a few short pieces on his web site, McCloud stuck to the non-fiction niche he had carved out for himself, following up Understanding Comics with Reinventing Comics in 2000 and Making Comics in 2006.  And then, for nearly a decade, nothing⁠—unless you count speaking engagements, workshops, and a promotional piece for Google Chrome.  So I was quite startled in 2015 when I happened across an announcement that McCloud had just released a graphic novel⁠—his first, in fact, after more than thirty years working in comics.  Five years in the making!  Nearly five hundred pages!  I snagged a copy right away⁠—and then, like all those movies from 2015, didn’t actually get around to it for six years.

spoilers start
   here

As magical as this power is, it’s actually no panacea: all it does is help David work faster.  He still needs a vision that will speak to people, the skill to give that vision physical form, and the oppor­tunity to secure a showcase for his work.  So while in a way his dream does come true⁠—he blazes through his sketchbook, turning each page into a major granite sculpture until he has dozens upon dozens of pieces ready to show⁠—the critics turn up their noses, the gallery reps pass, and he’s actually worse off than before.

Life imitates art?  While I did eventually find some positive writeups as I clicked onward to the second page of results, the first few hits to come up when I went looking for reviews were pretty scathing.  (Apparently McCloud’s payment for the Chrome promo did not include a thumb on the scale when it came to search results.)  I would like to discuss four of the most common objections I found.

“Meg is a Manic Pixie Dream Girl”

Meg is an aspiring actress who takes David in when he is at his most suicidal; he instantly falls in love with her, largely due to the circumstances of how they first meet (which I won’t spoil).  After a few weeks of sternly insisting that they are just friends⁠—virtually strangers, still⁠—Meg begins to return David’s feelings, they become a couple, and David finds that the art career he has sacrificed the last fifty years or more of his life for suddenly feels like a much lower priority than spending time with the love of his life. 

And the New York Times, and National Public Radio, and The Comics Journal, and Paste, and many other publications all pointed and howled, “Manic Pixie Dream Girl! Manic Pixie Dream Girl!”  And while we’re probably all guilty of this sort of thing from time to time, I gotta say, there may not be an aspect of discourse that annoys me more than the use of reductive labels to replace actual argument.  Like, okay, “Manic Pixie Dream Girl”.  Noted.  So… what is the objection?  Here are three possibilities that spring to mind:

“I don’t like her personality!”  Okay, totally valid!  Having to spend time with characters you don’t like is an eminently understand­able reason not to like a story, and to be honest, I wasn’t a huge fan of David and Meg either⁠—to the extent that I am defending The Sculptor here, it is not because I really liked it (I’ll probably end up giving it a nine), but just because the negative reviews struck me as intellectually shoddy.  So, what is it about Meg’s personality that qualifies her as a “Manic Pixie Dream Girl”?  “She’s clinically manic,” says the New York Times review, without offering any evidence of this; in the story we’re told that she’s been prescribed medication, but not what diagnosis prompted the prescription.  She doesn’t act manic or go off on the flights of whimsy that characterize the “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” trope: there’s no “Let’s go ice skating! I know it’s July, but we could take a plane to Patagonia!” or anything like that.  The best evidence I could find was this passage: “Meg works part-time as a bike messenger. It’s scary how fast she goes. She’s careless, but I envy her guts. She goes into bad neighborhoods at all hours. Strikes up conversations with crazy street people. Eats weird street food on a dare.” Does riding a bike fast qualify as manic now?  Or eating chapulines?  But let’s put a pin in that⁠—what qualifies her as a pixie?  “She’s beautifully childlike,” says the Times review, again with no proof.  In what way is she “childlike”?  She doesn’t doodle pictures of dragons, or collect Bratz dolls, or wear rainbow unicorn onesies (or even a bow in her hair).  The NPR piece at least offers up some evidence that Meg is the “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” it accuses her of being, namely that she once worked at a repertory movie house and that she lets homeless people crash on her couch.  It does not, however, provide a warrant to go with that evidence⁠—i.e., it doesn’t explain how these things make Meg either manic or pixieish.  It just says that they are “highly suspect characteris­tics”.  And again, there’s nothing wrong with thinking so.  I have a whole pattern (number 22) about how I rarely click with older movies, so that’s an interest of Meg’s that doesn’t speak to me.  And my mother used to invite in homeless guys, several of whom stole stuff from her and one of whom killed her dog, so Meg’s repetition of that pattern is a red flag for me too.  But the NPR piece offers no such explanation for why Meg’s behavior is “highly suspect” to its author.  Gibbering “Manic Pixie Dream Girl! Manic Pixie Dream Girl!” is not an explanation.

“She’s an unrealistic stock character!”  Part of Nathan Rabin’s objection to the “Manic Pixie Dream Girl”, when he first coined the term in 2007, was that she “exists solely in the fevered imagi­nations of sensitive writer-directors”⁠—that such a character might be a product of wish fulfillment, or might just be a recapit­ulation of clichés from earlier stories, but could not be based on the sort of insightful observation into real people which forms the basis of good characterization.  The NPR piece defines the “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” as “improbably adorable”; the Times article says that the relationship between David and Meg might work if they were “an artistic teenager and his devoted 10th-grade girlfriend”, but that for an adult woman to behave as Meg does doesn’t “make sense”.  But then the Times author has to make a concession that short-circuits everything that came before, noting that Scott McCloud says flat out in the afterword that Meg is a very thinly disguised version of his own wife, Ivy.  Both Meg, in the story, and Ivy, in the dedication, are called “The Girl in the Hat”, and McCloud lists other parallels.  It’s interest­ing⁠—I’m used to people asking me, “Hey! Why did you have my character do such-and-so?”, and having to explain, “What? That character wasn’t you! It was a composite informed by my own psyche and many people I’ve known through the years!”  Then here comes Scott McCloud saying, “Oh, yeah, that character? That’s Ivy, circa 1981 to 1988. Not an aspect of me, not a compo­site, just Ivy. Thank you, drive through!”  I’m sure that there are drawbacks to trying to capture a real person, unalloyed with anyone else, in a fictional story⁠—and to confessing to it⁠—but it does seem like the sort of thing that should inoculate an author against the charge that his character lacks realism.  “Hey, Joe Klein, you know that character you wrote? You know the one⁠—the womanizing, overweight southern governor with the endless speeches about centrist policy proposals who runs for president in 1992? So unrealistic!”

“She’s defined solely as a supporting character in a man’s story!”  This charge, when true of the collected works of a literary culture, should absolutely get the klaxons blaring: if only men have the social capital to be able to get their stories out into the world, then that culture needs to change, posthaste.  Specifically in the realm of education, if it is only through male voices that students encounter representations of women, then that curri­culum needs to be radically reworked, unless the course is specifically about exploring and critiquing a sexist culture.  But on the level of a single story, I think this accusation fizzles out.  Why is Meg written as a supporting character in David’s story?  Because, in David’s story, which this is, she is a supporting character!  To say that “There are no supporting characters! We are all the heroes of our own stories!” might make for a nice quote for a daily self-affirmation app, but the fact is that we are all both.  I thought enough of myself as the protagonist of my own story that I wrote a novel that drew heavily on autobio­graphy, but I am well aware of the fact that to the vast majority of the people I encounter, I am just a background extra: “briefly glimpsed dweeb in loud shirt”.  Perhaps more to the point, one of the reasons I love the movie Summer Hours is how well it cap­tures our double status: we see glimpses of what Hélène Berthier would have considered the defining preoccupations of her life (her art collection, her relationship with her uncle), and then we see how all of this is lost when she dies, demoted from a living person in the world to a supporting character in the memories of her adult children⁠—literally suppporting, as to them, her role in life was to nurture them to adulthood and then quietly step into the background.  Meg’s role in David’s story is to be similarly nurturing⁠—both to save his life when he is suicidal and then, yes, to serve as the live wire who revives the spirits of a brooding young man with her joie de vivre.  We do get hints of Meg’s life outside of her relationship with David⁠—more than enough to fend off the charge that she has been created ex nihilo to teach David a valuable life lesson and do nothing else⁠—but they are the hints that David picks up on, because, again, he’s the focal char­acter.  So if that’s insufficient, what did the critics want McCloud to do?  Rewrite the story so that David and Meg were given equal weight as lead characters?  It’s obviously possible to tell a story with more than one protagonist; I am currently taking a break from the classroom in order to try to make more progress on the Photopia novel, and I’m perfectly comfortable writing chapters filtered through the perspective of Alley, Wendy, or any number of other people who don’t appear in the interactive version of the story.  They are very different characters, but they are all deeply rooted in my own sense of self.  But Meg is not a prism refracting aspects of Scott McCloud.  She’s Ivy, or at least Scott’s sense of Ivy.  So her story is not really his to tell!  Which is not to say that a writer can’t tell the story of a different person.  But at that point the project, by definition, begins to leave the realm of self-expression and step into the world of journalism.

“McCloud gets bipolar disorder wrong”

The New York Times review declares that Meg is “in fact, bipolar”, while NPR sticks with an earlier generation of termi­nology in stating that she is “in fact, manic-depressive”.  That both these sources use the phrase “in fact” in announcing their diagnoses is a bit odd, considering that Meg’s condition is not an established fact in the world of the story.  Nevertheless, one of the articles in The Comics Journal fumes that “even though McCloud gives Meg bipolar disorder, his treatment of her illness betrays a total lack of understanding of mental illness or how to portray it. It’s just one more thing for David to bounce off”.  Well, yeah⁠—it’s one more thing for David to bounce off because it’s David’s story!  It’s not about a young woman’s struggle with mental illness⁠—this portion of the story is about a guy whose crush finally returns his interest, only for her to abruptly turn sullen one evening, disappear into her room, and mutter darkly about how he doesn’t care about her when he tries to find out what went wrong.  Is that somehow not a permissible story to tell?  It certainly resonated with me.  I’ve had almost exactly the same experience: I started talking to someone online and then on the phone; the conversations turned from tentative to friendly to flirtatious; and then, a few weeks in, she disappeared into the ether, and I suddenly found myself spending all my social time talking to her roommate about what was going on and how to deal with what by her roommate’s account was a recurring pattern.  Watching McCloud hit all the same beats, it sure seemed to me like he had quite a bit of understanding of that situation and how to portray it!

The notion that there is a single correct way to “understand mental illness or how to portray it” is an eye-roller.  I mean, I also have some experience with this sort of thing from the inside.  When I was younger, I would frequently find that some minor setback, or sometimes nothing at all, would suddenly make me feel like I was physically plummeting, as though the floor had disappeared from under me, and in moments every­thing would suddenly seem bleak and hopeless for days or weeks.  Less frequently, I would feel as though I were suddenly soaring, and the giddiness might last for hours or days.  I once went to a therapist during this period and, having taken a few psychology classes, I asked whether I was bipolar or perhaps just cyclothymic.  She quite sensibly replied that, since I had com­municated my experience in some depth, what would a label add?  Or consider another label that has been applied to some of my tendencies: “obsessive-compulsive disorder”.  Here are some manifestations.  Can you guess which ones are among mine?

As it happens, I experience (B), (F), (G), and (I).  I do not experi­ence (A), (C), (D), (E), or (H), though other people do.  How is it useful to say that we all have OCD?  What does it really commu­nicate, if you can’t predict from the label what behavior you’re going to see?  The critics complain that Meg’s bipolar behavior is portrayed wrong, but how is that even possible when that condi­tion can also manifest in many different ways?  If I had written this book and had given Meg my personal experience in order to provide the inside perspective that McCloud’s book has been accused of lacking, would that be enough for The Comics Journal, or is my experience wrong too?  And, again, McCloud never says she’s “bipolar” in the first place!  This is fiction⁠—Meg’s behavior can’t be wrong, because it is whatever the author says it is!  Why can’t we just let behavior be behavior without applying a reductive label to it?  It feels like a lot of people these days won’t let you go out for Mexican food a lot without sagely diagnosing you with Repetitive Burrito Acquisition Syndrome.

“David’s art is bad”

“The book’s message is inane”

These were going to be sections three and four, but I discovered that I couldn’t really talk about them separately.  But let me expand upon each in turn.  There have been many works in all media about the lives of great artists, setting forth the story behind that majestic symphony, the psychological tumult that led to that classic album, the grand romance that inspired that cele­brated play.  A few mischievous sorts have turned this formula on its head, delving into the stories behind what is widely consi­dered to be very bad art: the films of Ed Wood, the “big eyes” paintings of Margaret Keane.  One element of The Sculptor that seemed to leave the critics flummoxed was that it doesn’t fit into either category.  It’s not about a guy who cares so much about art that he sacrifices his life for it, and creates towering works that lead people to proclaim him a genius; it’s not about a guy who cares so much about art that he sacrifices his life for it, creates brilliant sculptures that capture a heartfelt personal vision, and is stymied by critics at every turn; it’s not even about a guy who cares so much about art that he sacrifices his life for it and then creates what is clearly meant to be trash.  Instead, it’s about a guy who cares so much about art that he sacrifices his life for it, and… creates a body of work that the author is agnostic about.  Maybe you like it, maybe you don’t.  The guys at The Comics Journal sure didn’t: one wrote that David’s culminating work is one “that’s meant to inspire but that provoked laughter”, while another goes so far as to call it “a work of monumental kitsch that would have warmed the cockles of Adolf Hitler or Joseph Stalin”.  (Hey, you don’t have to be a Stalinist to think that the art from his era wasn’t all bad!  Vera Mukhina’s Workman and Collective Farmwoman is great stuff.)  The Times article chimes in that David’s art and The Sculptor itself strike “a blow for humanist storytelling”, as even David’s most abstract pieces are meant to reflect moments from his life, but concludes that when critics within the book accuse David of an “irony deficiency”, the charge is damning.  The culminating “realist sculpture” that The Comics Journal complained about, says the Times article, “brings David closer than he could imagine to his bête noire, Jeff Koons”.  I guess that’s at least a step up from Hitler!

As for the message: the Times article concludes that the book is about “the contradiction between a taste that puts representa­tion of people and faces first, and a life that rejects people in favor of art”.  That’s not bad!  It’s certainly more insightful than what a lot of the other critics managed to find.  The NPR piece guesses that it’s either “Go back to first principles” or “You’ve got to follow your heart”, while the Paste article sneers that it’s “life needs to be lived and cherished, man”, “You have to make every moment count”, and “#YOLO”.  Reading these conjectures reminded me of teaching the first reading comprehension passage in the Ivy West SAT manual, back in the ’90s.  It made a fairly sophisticated argument about how it was counterproduc­tive to argue for environmentalism on economic or utilitarian grounds⁠—“We might find the cure for cancer in the Amazon rainforest, so let’s not burn it down!”⁠—because preserving the environment is intrinsically good, and making an argument about its instrumental value undermines that principle.  Stu­dents, as the manual writers expected, tended to say that the message was “Save the environment”, or worse, “Save the environment because we might find the cure for cancer in the Amazon rainforest”.  They were saying what they expected the passage to say, repeating other messages they’d heard over the years, rather than digging into what the passage actually did say.  So let’s put the pieces of The Sculptor together.

I did say there’d be
   spoilers

With supernatural immortality out of the picture, how can we live on?  One of the routes the death figure offers, as noted, is to have children, making it probable that a subset of your genes will survive your death, and more importantly, so will a memory of you.  David is 26; his children might well live to the year 2100.  If he has grandchildren who remember him, it’s within the realm of possibility that someone with a firsthand memory of him might see the year 2150.  And then, nothing.  He’s a name in a genealogy app, or whatever the 2150 equivalent of such an app might be.  But David promised his father that he would make a name for himself.  And if he wants to be remembered for who he was, for what he had to say to the world, then art is the way.  And if he can make sufficiently great art, then he might well be immortal.

The bar is high!  David laments that Jeff Koons “belongs to the ages now”, but knock on a hundred randomly selected doors and ask the person inside who Jeff Koons is, and I’d be shocked if counting the correct answers required a second hand.  It might not even require a second finger.  Even fame on a much wider scale is fleeting.  The most famous musicians of the 20th century were the Beatles, but Paul McCartney isn’t even dead yet and his fame has faded enough that Zoomers regularly get “Who is ‘Paul McCartney’?” trending on Twitter.  David would have to make it up to the tier of artists like Mozart and Michelangelo to achieve what we tend to think of as immortality.  Except that doesn’t really work either!  It might seem as though humanity has collec­tively created a corpus of works that will last forever, but as Prince astutely pointed out, that’s a mighty long time.  So David wants to “make a name for himself”?  The oldest person whose name we know, Kushim of Uruk, is only 5500 years old.  That’s a pretty good innings, but it’s an infinitesimal fraction of true immortality.  His name will have to be remembered for another billion years or so to make it to the point that the oceans boil away and a hundred trillion to the point that the last stars burn out.  And that’s still counting down to failure⁠—likely candidates to serve as points when “eternal” fame will have been lost, not secured.  That finish line is likely to occur a lot sooner: you can’t be remembered if there’s no one left to remember you, and Scott McCloud himself is on record putting his estimate of the likeli­hood that there will still be any living humans in the year 2100 at thirty percent.  A resource war prompted by climate change in an age of nuclear proliferation may very well turn out to be an extinction event.  And once we’re all gone, so are Homer and Shakespeare, Newton and Einstein, Jesus and Muhammad.  If their hold on immortality is insecure, what hope does David Smith have?

David comes to much the same conclusion.  He spends his final days working on his magnum opus, a giant sphere made of a latticework of five different materials, impossible to sculpt via conventional methods, with a world of figures visible, one piece at a time, through the tiny gaps between the braids.  And… even Meg gets bored with it after about ninety seconds.  But David isn’t torn up about the fact that his bid for immortality through art seems likely to land with a thud.  By this point in the story, Meg has told him that she’s pregnant with his child.  It’s the Plan A the death figure had offered him at the beginning of the book: they’ll move upstate, she’ll get a job working retail, he’ll work on his art… in his spare time… if he has any… though, of course, it’s not really the Plan A, because he’ll be dead within days.  But David has had an epiphany, starting with an arresting panel in which he sees Meg, and her mother, and her mother’s mother, and her mother’s mother’s mother, on and on in a chain stretching back to the dawn of life on Earth.  It doesn’t matter that your descendants won’t remember you, he realizes, if you identify with that chain rather than with your individual, ephemeral self.

And then Meg is a little too cavalier biking through the city, darts in front of a UPS truck, and is instantly killed.  David will die in, at most, three days, childless, virtually anonymous, and mourning of the love of his life.  It is in the midst of this despair that, on the spur of the moment, he creates his actual final work, magically refashioning a construction site into a sculpture the size of a skyscraper depicting a nude Meg holding a baby up to the sky.  It is of course David’s lost love and his lost child, but it’s also an echo of a moment, a couple of days earlier, when Meg, holding a baby to keep him safe during a protest in front of a church (“LOOK TO HEAVEN! HEAVEN ABOVE!”), confides to the baby that there is no heaven.  “Nothing to see up there,” she says with a smile.  “It’s all down here.” 

To characterize this theme as “#YOLO” strikes me as a little callow.  In fact, all this casting about for a “message” reminds me of Rod and Todd on The Simpsons asking, “That’s all well and good for sheep, but what are we to do?”  To me, the big takeaway of The Sculptor is not advice about how to live your life and it’s not an uplifting mantra⁠—this is not a self-help book.  Its central theme is observational.  In Understanding Comics, Scott Mc­Cloud set forth the proposition that one of the defining attri­butes of art is its uselessness, i.e., the fact that it doesn’t directly contribute to survival or reproduction.  He then backtracks and concedes that art does have a number of uses: providing relief from boredom, offering opportunities for serendipitous discover­ies, and above all, affording the artist a means of self-expression and consequently emotional balance.  Still, he concludes that the true artist says to the world, “I didn’t do this for the money! I didn’t do this to match the color of your couches! I didn’t do this to get laid! I didn’t do this for fame or power or greed or anything else! I did this for ART!”  This is why the question of whether David’s artwork and his final sculpture in particular are good or bad is irrelevant.  McCloud has engineered things so that his protagonist has reached a moment of maximum futility.  He’s lost everyone important to him.  He himself is going to die before the week is out.  There is nothing waiting for him after death, just endless oblivion.  His work will be forgotten.  Even the monumen­tal piece he’s about to create is likely to be torn down in a matter of days.  If it survives, it won’t be understood⁠—his attempt to communicate something to the world is hopeless.  And yet he makes it anyway.  The article in The Comics Journal takes it as a given that this is meant to be inspirational, which suggests to me that the author of the article read the story he was expecting rather than the story McCloud actually wrote.  Because, to me, it seemed clear that McCloud was simply observing that this is an interesting thing that humans do even though it does nothing to change our bleak circumstances.  That some of us do, anyway.  We make stuff; it reaches only a handful of people; most of them either get nothing out of it or get something very different from what we intended; soon enough that work is forgotten; then we are dead and forgotten; then our entire species is dead and forgotten, with no one to remember us.  And with that in mind, we start in on our next project!

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