From KCRW Santa Monica and KCRW.com, it's The Treatment.

I'm Elvis Mitchell. Welcome to The Treatment.

So if you know the world of comics, and you should, in 1984, my guest Scott McLeod came up with, I thought, was a genre-changing comic called Zott, which took the action-adventure superhero genre and really didn't study it on his ear so much as it made it lighter than air.

He's used that approach in pretty much everything he's done.

He's brought air and

a sense of breathing to his dissection of comics being in his books, understanding comics or

reinventing comics or making comics. He's going back to making comics himself now after a pretty

long indirect him away from the business with his new first graphic novel,

a weighty but fun piece of writing called The Sculptor.

First of all, Scott, it's a pleasure to have you here.

Thank you, Elvis.

And something I said to you before, and I think it applies even to the sculptor, is that thing you do, even in your send-up of Beat-em-down superhero comics destroy, is that sense of one person being completed by another.

And I do wonder where that comes from of you, because it's been something that's run through.

We go back to Zott and the relationship between Jenny, a forlorn teenage girl who sees literally another world and finds it through Zott.

And one of my favorite issues of that is the issue where at one point she's afraid she's imagined the whole thing.

That idea of one person completing another, what does that come from for you as a writer?

Yeah, there's always some kind of dichotomy in my stuff. It's true.

And in Zod, that first series, it was

very much about hope and disillusionment. And I think maybe partially because I was a very hopeful

person, a very optimistic person, I started out with a lot of confidence when I was very, very

young. I mean, like, really, like 14. I was determined to make comics, but I also had this weird confidence that it was all going to go well.

So like maybe lurking way in the back of my mind was this worry that, no, life doesn't always go that way, you know?

...