After spending more than a decade creating the brilliant Understanding Comics and its two sequels explaining what comics do and how to create them, McCloud returns to fiction. An immense challenge, the book reveals whether the writer/illustrator can walk the walk as well as he talks the talk. Of course, he can. David Smith's once-promising artistic career as a sculptor has hit rock bottom, and he's desperate. Then Death grants David a power far beyond those of normal sculptors, but the gift comes with a price. David will have only 200 days to use it, and then he'll die. David agrees—and then he falls in love. McCloud's mastery shows everywhere here, in myriad expert artistic touches, mostly unostentatious but rich in meaning. Beyond that, however, he deals with existential questions—the meanings of art, and life, and death in ways that are consistently surprising, riveting, deep, and messily, gloriously human. VERDICT An outstanding achievement, extraordinarily moving and memorable. With nudity and sex, the story isn't for kids, but it's highly, urgently recommended to absolutely everyone else. This is a work to stand with the greats.—S.R.

After previously explaining the art of making, reading, and understanding comics in his trilogy of essential guides to the medium, McCloud, in this gloriously romantic graphic novel, doesn't just define a genre—he exemplifies it. David Smith is a morbid, prickly New York sculptor tortured by the one-by-one deaths of his family members and his inability to make art, when he runs into his Uncle Harry, who just happens to be dead. Harry's Faustian offer is all the better for being delivered deadpan ("Trust me, it'll all make sense at sunrise"). In exchange for gaining the ability to mold any material into any shape he wants, sans tools, David is given just 200 days to live and achieve his dreams of greatness. But having this skill doesn't allow David to escape from his grumpy, rules-bound personality. Success and happiness don't come easily, even after a beautiful actress with a surplus of personality and baggage flies (literally) into his arms. The fractious love story and operatic swoons of despair play out against the harsh reality of a cutthroat art market and deftly handled flights of fantasy. Drawn in sharp, sure-handed lines that jump from intimate blocks of wry but poignant interactions with other characters to dramatically realized city scenery, McCloud's epic generates magic and makes an early play for graphic novel of the year. (Feb.)