Comic Thoughts: The Sculptor by Scott McCloud
Email to a friend. Not spoiler free.
This was recommended to me by a friend's wife at some point. Cannot say the premise of the story interested me, nor did the story interest me for about 3/4ths of the way through.
Art wise, I always struggle with western comics because their insistence on using square and rectangular panels for literally everything always makes me feel stifled. (I'm aware that some Seinen manga do this too and I have complained about this before to you.) My shoujo sense is too strong for this.
That said, the art does do some interesting choices, such as often positioning word bubbles so that the words get cut off by the frame. This is effective for stuff that the character isn't really listening to. There was some interesting uses of negative space, most obviously when David gets a taste of what death is like, which is "nothingness" that the brain can't even conceive of without Death's help. That was very smart. The other major use of it is the fact that the last page ends with a single panel in the upper left with just the words "You're alive," said to an extreme side character. This is also very smart because it underlines the themes that being alive and connecting with people is the most important thing in the end. There is no more art to fill the page because this goes beyond the importance of art, and being alive is actually quite a small thing. Yet it means everything.
In other words, the ending of this comic was pretty good but the rest of it was steeped in extreme heterosexuality.
The protagonist is basically a dude with OCPD. He's got literal rules that he remembers and refuses to compromise on to his own detriment and believes that he has to "make it" on his own terms and that people have to see the beauty in his art for what it is without all the fake stuff (money, politicking). Due to his bad people skills he's instead met with failure after failure and as all his surviving family is dead he ends up spending a few nights on the street. It's notable that he is upset that there's another, more famous art world "David Smith" (an extremely common name) than him, and that he is ultimately survived by another David Smith, who is the side character that gets the final words spoken to him (and who is not an artist but a cop, oops). From the beginning, the protagonist is fighting a losing battle in the realm of recognition — and even his own death is initially misattributed to the cop David Smith, which again leads to the final words being spoken by that David Smith's wife over the phone. This is all very clever and one of the things I think the comic set up well.
But, well. Meg. His angel girl from the sky. Sigh. He meets her because she was pulling an elaborate performance stunt that involved using wires and a crowd to engineer an incident in which a random miserable guy is bowed down to and greeted with a female angel, who tells him everything will be all right before kissing him. There is nothing I can say about this besides that this is just a heterosexual man's dream of having a mommy-GF, much akin to Mari falling upon Shinji in the Evangelion Rebuilds. If Meg were not actually his love interest and ultimate muse I might've even found this funny as an illustration of how pathetic his dream of being important is (like, others literally kneeling for you?), but of course they're being for real. More cringe-worthy is that when the team reveals to him how they set it up, the director for the thing is asking him what he thought about the knee socks they had as part of Meg's outfit. Did he like them, the guy asks, some of them were going back and forth on it because they thought it was too fetishy. Of course, David at the moment is mortified and throws up on this guy's laptop, but far later on, during his first penetrative sex event with Meg, she dresses up in a similar outfit to when they first met and is there with the knee socks and all. So yes, it is fetishy. Yes, he did like them. As a viewer who hates female objectification I can only sigh. (David also thanked Meg later because he thought the stunt she pulled was kind. All I can say is that if something like that happened to me I would seriously be wondering if I was having a psychotic break, so doing that without consent is actually quite cruel depending on the person.)
The narrative tries to insist that Meg is a real person and not a manic pixie dream girl by giving her her own moments of emotional weakness or insecurity and what is likely a bipolar disorder, but it never really sticks. Meg is still the object of his desire and though interiority is hinted at, it is never fully satisfied. There's a part where she tells him that she's feeling objectified, and he says that people are objects, though — and then at the end when she's dead 3 days before his time is up and he's holding her body in his arms, crying that he's sorry and that she wasn't just a "thing" — and this is supposed to be fighting the idea of the female objectified for men. I get what it's trying to do and it simply isn't enough.
Take her design — Meg always wears small side braids in her hair. You know what this is? Anime. This is a hairstyle that almost no one wears in real life and certainly not this often. (It is a hairstyle that I loved to have my pretty girls in but have never made actually work for a real fleshed out OC.) Paired with the knee socks all I can say is that part of her sexual appeal is this girlishness that is leaning towards fetishy. There's also a lot of talk about her sexual history for some reason, with a character commenting that all of her sexual history can be seen in the kitchen right at this very second, which is just a stupid ass thing to say. Her past mostly serves as experience that she can thus give him through a good sexual encounter (which is like when male love interests in female-oriented love stories have more experience while the girl is a virgin). There's multiple times where Meg makes statements about how "men" are, caring about sex foremost and whatnot, and then there's David's friend, "Please tell me he's getting laid," + Meg before their actual first sex times realizing that David is a virgin in terms of sticking his dick in a vagina and laughing and saying that it explains so much about him. Blah blah blah, people who are rigid don't have sex lives or whatever, and he hasn't been truly realized as a man because of this and this is something she can give him (with her knee socks and all). Sigh.
Why do straight men and women interact with each other like they're truly from different planets? Truly frustrating.
Anyway, Meg's secret dream is to be a mom. Groundbreaking stuff for your female lead, I know. She has troubles conceiving though so she doesn't use protection and then he ends up impregnating her which is like the end to his whole artist dreams (oh no!) but also he realizes that he wants to be there for her but can't because he's going to die. But then she dies before him and with her their unborn child and this is so upsetting that his final sculpture with his superpowers is a giant version of her, naked, holding a baby. All right. This is so heterosexual, man.
The main thing I keep thinking about is how much this story simply would not work if they were gender flipped. Some angel actor guy dropping from the heavens and kissing a girl on the street in front of everyone... Well, maybe it'd work in a female-oriented romance comic where the point is that the man is so dominant and sexy that he can come on as hard as he wants to the protagonist and she secretly wants everything he does. But if we're trying to have any sort of realism here, it is something that would be classified as sexual assault. The fact that none of this is even considered and it is viewed as something intimately beautiful is specifically a function of the fact that he was a boy and she was a girl. Similarly, most people would be warning a woman not to just stay over at a man's place just because he has a kind soul and a habit of helping the homeless. And can you imagine a story structured around how angsty a woman is because her sculptures aren't getting recognition, sculptures which also include stuff about her first orgasm? The ending, where except of a naked woman holding a baby, it's a naked man holding a baby? That the man's dream was to be a father but he was struggling with infertility?
I think at the very least women as a minority group are less likely to have nonsensical ideas that their art can simply be recognized and revered simply because it is good. Which is the main struggle for David, but notably another extreme side character whose art he even recognizes as better than his own, a South Asian woman named Mira, is passed over immediately in terms of exhibitions because of the politicking. Justice for Mira
Anyway, for all of that struggle I am glad that ultimately the point was that Meg spent her life in a more fulfilling manner than David did because she was actually present at each moment. Him saying to her dead body that she had 3 days less than him but spent it better was good. Him giving up on having his art exhibited "properly" was also good. Him then going out and vandalizing structures and turning it into his art so that people basically had to look at it was, eh. Making a giant Meg + baby at the end in a way that no one can ignore it is his last triumph but it is also kind of copium because it gives him everything he wanted (art on his terms that has to be acknowledged by people), even if initially he wasn't into his celebrity status because people weren't valuing the art simply for being amazing art. Ultimately though, the fact that people are staring at it awestruck is. Well, not great for the themes. Also real people do not have the power he did so we can't exactly go do that. We can try via graffiti, for sure, but look at how well that's accepted.
This is the limit of stories that talk about art just for the sake of art. Just as a pursuit of ultimate beauty and desire for recognition. It's not truly ready to accept that a lot of us will get exactly none of that, and that isn't even necessarily representative of our skill level. And it sidesteps the actual talk about the politics of art and the perspectives of marginalized creators.
But other good moments include Meg telling him that everyone will be forgotten and that he has to accept that. But that while you can't choose what other people remember, you can choose what will be forgotten by giving something, like a secret, to someone to keep that will then die when they do. That the world doesn't have to know. That's taking a bit of the control back.
Not so good moments include him telling Death that Life is actually winning because it keeps springing up in new ways even when Death takes them away. This is again, copium, because ultimately the universe will explode and all Life will 100% be dead then. No necessary guarantee of another universe with life coming after that, either.
So anyway. What did I learn from this. I want to free artists from the need to be recognized, but that'll probably never happen because attention and resources are always limited and people are always comparing. I want to be free, myself, though. While most of this comic was not for me the idea of choosing yourself what gets forgotten is a nice sentiment. Even though it's actually not completely true either since there have been writers who asked their friends to burn their unfinished stuff after they passed and said friends did not do that! Which is honestly a violation of trust. But whatever. Those works will be forgotten in the end also, it will just now take longer than they wanted.
The main thought I've been having from this and seeing the comic talk about an unending chain of people that led to where you are now, which reminded me of Kaba saying that your lifetime is not the timeframe at which movements happen, is that I want to increase my scale. I think that's probably the solution to my need to be doing the right thing at every moment or so someone smite me. I'm afraid that increasing the scale at which things are important though (to like generations and whatnot) will mean that I stop caring about what is happening to people in my actual lifetime that I can affect, because what will all mean when we're dead eventually, yada yada. I think it's hard to keep those things together simultaneously. That this is not the scale at which we should be considering for our efforts that try to slowly push things in another direction, but that the people we influence day by day are also very important and we should care about suffering in the moment.
I guess though when I die in obscurity I will have been glad to at least have had someone to throw all my thoughts at and to feel faux important in the moment while doing so. So I guess there's that. Maybe that's all there really is.