The Sculptor is Scott McCloud’s first work of fiction in
twenty-years and is a great display of the amount of thought that went into
creating this book. It focuses on David Smith who is a young sculptor that lost
his parents, has no money or job, and was recently dumped by his girlfriend.
One day, Death, in the shape of his great Uncle Harry, makes a deal with David
to give him his childhood dream: to sculpt anything with his bare hands. But
now David has only 200 days to live his life and create his artwork.
McCloud uses
the two colours of black and blue, and places his panels in a very unpredictable
layout.
From the first chapter of the book, it is
obvious that David is upset about something, but what exactly is causing the
sadness is explained throughout the book. Using a blue hue from beginning to
end only reinforces David's feelings and thoughts. In McCloud's other famous
comic, Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, he says, “the
differences between black-and-white and colour comics are vast and profound,
affecting every level of the reading experience” (192). Not only does the blue
tone reinforce David's sadness, it forces the reader to have sympathy for him and
makes him/her feel "blue". Also, McCloud uses the black to emphasize the characters
he wants the reader to focus on and uses the blue to make everything else seem
faded, like the example to the left.
McCloud rarely uses the strict 3X3 grid of
panels in his comic; his layout is very unpredictable. He uses the sporadic
layout that's on the right to give a feeling of uneasiness and confusion like
David is feeling at the party; this panel arrangement also allows the reader to
choose which reading path to take. According to Jess Cohn, "[w]hen comics
layout ceases to obey the rule of a grid, the reader's eyes become free to move
about in other directions ... Alternatively, some artists ... allow the reader
to choose multiple reading paths" (52). In this example, it doesn't matter
which direction your eyes go in because the panels don't tell the story in
any sequence.
It is clear, however, that McCloud
strategically places the panels on the page. In the example on the left,
McCloud uses a bleeding panel, which is "...when a panel runs off the edge
of the page..." (McCloud, Understanding Comics 103). If he didn't
put the third panel where it is, the sensation of falling wouldn't be felt. A
couple pages prior to this one, David was explaining a crazy dream he had where
everyone on the streets of Manhattan was an aspiring artist like him; the
ground was covered in ice and the city started tilting which caused everyone to
slide into a void of nothingness. Since McCloud put the third panel at the
bottom of the page and made it "bleed" off the edge, he created the
effect of the cartoons literally falling into the void.
- Kylie Jamieson
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Cohn, Jesse. "Mise-en-Page: A Vocabulary of Page Layouts." Teaching the Graphic Novel. Ed. Stephen E. Tabachnick. New York: Modern Language Association, 2009. 44-57.
McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics. New York: Harper Perennial, 1994.
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