"In comics, past, present, and future can exist together on a single plane."

The Sculptor marks the long-overdue return of Scott McCloud to the graphic novel. A 500-page epic on artistic inspiration, reputation and such trifling matters as love and death, it's a winning combination of 19th-century novelistic ambition in hipster clothing. The sculptor of the title, David Smith, is given the power to sculpt anything he wants with his hands (a superpower of sorts) by the grim reaper. But in return he must give up life in 200 days. Is that enough time for him to become the new Jeff Koons? And will falling in love cloud the issue? Scott McCloud, who is best known for his books Understanding Comics and Making Comics, is firing on all cylinders here. He took some time to answer some questions for Graphic Content.

It's been a while Scott (not so much a question as a statement I know)

Yeah, I'm not the fastest artist in comics by a long stretch. Maybe that's why I started the 24-hour comics challenge for myself and for everybody else back in 1990. Sometimes it's important to remind ourselves how much we can get done in a short amount of time. But at other times it's important to get the job done right no matter how long it takes, and I guess that's what I did on this book; that's why it took five years to write and draw!

The Sculptor is a hugely ambitious book. Did you know quite how big - in every sense - it was going to be when you started?

I figured it would be maybe 420 pages, but in the end it grew to nearly 500 pages despite constant trimming of everything in the book that didn't quite belong. And it was always going to be about big ideas and big themes; I came up with the basic story when I was very young and that's what young men tend to write about; but in the end, it was the little things that I think make the project worthwhile and make it a better reading experience. That's what the older me brought to the table.

The Sculptor tackles the idea of reputation and fame in art? Do cartoonists have the same fear of being overlooked by the culture as your title character?

Cartoonists definitely have the same fear of being overlooked and forgotten as any other kind of artist. But we have the double whammy of worrying that our entire art form gets overlooked. Fortunately, that's improving in this day and age, but as individuals, we're always going to be looking over our shoulder, wondering if anything we make will really last, really have any significance for coming generations.

There's a wonderful "life flashing before your eyes" sequence near the end. It's a perfect example of one of the unique qualities of the comic strip form. Is travelling in time the comic strip's ultimate superpower?

Comics have a special relationship with time. We're drawing a map of time whenever we compose a comics page. We're not so much travelling in time as allowing the reader to rise above it, to look down on that landscape and appreciate it. All other art forms place the audience on a narrow conveyor belt where it's always now; where the future is just anticipation, and the past is just memory. In comics, past, present, and future can exist together on a single plane.

So what do you really think of Jeff Koons's work?

Fun, ballsy, inconsistent, ridiculous. I don't hate him the way my protagonist does. Some of his stuff is pretty delightful. But from my admittedly outsider perspective (I'm hardly an expert here, just a cheerful, compulsive museum-goer) he seems like the end product of a process that's maybe 30% art and 70% social engineering. The interesting question where Koons is concerned might be whether that social engineering was a fully conscious process or just a lucky accident. I'm sure I'll never know!

The Sculptor, by Scott McCloud, is published by Self Made Hero, priced £18.99.