To the comics fanatic, Scott McCloud is something of a hero. His pioneering works Understanding Comics, Reinventing Comics and Making Comics were invaluable in formalising the discourse surrounding graphic narratives, shifting public perception from (in his wife Ivy’s words) the "Pow! Biff! Bam!" of ‘kids’ comics’ to the expressive and formalistic capabilities of comics as an art form. Last month, over a decade since his last fiction work, McCloud released The Sculptor, his first work that can properly be considered a graphic novel.

Given the incredible opportunity to interview McCloud (and Ivy) ahead of his talk in Cambridge, my first question was why the ‘Aristotle of comics’ had waited until now to explore this form of comics. After swearing that he didn’t come up with that nickname, McCloud answered: "the story had been in the back of my head for a very long time, but you know, it takes a very long time to do anything in comics."

Simply opening The Sculptor is sufficient evidence of this. Over the course of five hundred monochrome pages and thousands of panels unfolds the story of David Smith, a struggling artist in New York City who does a deal with Death to gain the ability to create the "big, monstrous, beautiful things" of his dreams. Technically, the work is astoundingly complex; in one section of his talk, McCloud showed his audience a video simulation of how he meticulously revises and rearranges panels and pages, revealing the thought processes behind composing, not only a verbal narrative, but the precise "spatial and temporal rhythm" of the work as a whole.

This painstaking construction, aside from being an incredible feat in itself, reveals what McCloud calls the ‘aspiration,’ of himself and many of his contemporaries, "to see if the medium could accommodate the depth and complexity of, say, a prose novel." It is in the formal manipulation of features unique to comics that McCloud transforms an adaptation of the Faust myth into a narrative about art, love, death and the protagonist’s magnificent ego. A fundamental premise of the graphic narrative, as McCloud theorised in Understanding Comics, is the act of closure: the reader, faced with blank space between panels, instinctively fills it, creating a seamless sequence out of discrete, static images. Reading The Sculptor, however, it is frustratingly clear that the image gained by doing so is incomplete.

"As a storyteller," McCloud explains, "I liked the idea of creating a very subjective world, and so to me it was just irresistible not to get inside David’s head… throughout the narrative, doing certain things like dropping colours in order to differentiate what David was paying attention to, as opposed to everything else." Something David certainly doesn’t pay attention to is the character of Meg, whom some readers have criticised for being yet another reincarnation of the manic pixie dream girl – but this, says McCloud, is precisely the effect of being "inside David’s head". "There are some things David never fully understands, things that he never fully sees."

Though McCloud wryly comments that this probably means The Sculptor "runs afoul of the Bechdel test" (Alison Bechdel, incidentally, is a significant contributor to the ever-expanding genre of graphic memoirs) Meg’s deliberately flawed characterisation represents McCloud’s wider concern with inclusivity and diversity in the medium. In his 2000 work Reinventing Comics, McCloud theorised how the industry needed to evolve in order to facilitate comics’ integration into mainstream culture and academia; integral to this was the increased representation of women. In 2015, McCloud is confident that this particular ‘revolution’ is on track: "Certainly within the next nine years, we’re looking at a majority female comics industry, in terms of readership and in terms of the ones behind the drawing board." With artists such as Jillian Tamaki, Katie Green and Vera Brosgol currently producing hugely acclaimed work, this certainly seems like progress.

What about the other eleven revolutions? "We’re on track with nearly all of them," McCloud says, "but we’re still a bit pale on the diversity front. We made great pace with gender balance, and the diversity of genres, but not so much with ethnic and racial backgrounds. That needs some more work".

In terms of technological innovation, the industry has made important progress: McCloud cites the innovation of webcomics as encouraging more widespread production and consumption of the medium, although he does express concern about "the nature of the web itself, and the status of vital components such as net-neutrality". Commercially, too, McCloud comments that the industry is still "in flux". Despite these technical insecurities, McCloud is "not too worried" about the future of the art form:"‘we have made tremendous progress in the last fifteen years: in terms of institutional acceptance, literary worth, artistic expression and innovation."

Though academic institutions could certainly do more to embrace and encourage the reading of comics as a complex art form, McCloud’s talk at the Faculty of English was testimony to the fact that the discourse surrounding comics is thriving. The talk itself was hugely enjoyable. Amongst other things, McCloud analysed sequences of The Sculptor (including a significantly blank double page spread), lamented his "irony deficiency", read out one of his current favourite comics in its entirety, and managed to navigate the wonderfully bizarre Q&A offering of one audience member - "what would you ask yourself?" – generating many laughs along the way. Pure entertainment aside, McCloud’s discussion with John Lennard of the formal and technical aspects of comics was brilliantly informative. Though the audience seemed mainly to consist of comics fans, who were already familiar with the history and workings of the medium, McCloud sought to create – as he did in Understanding Comics – a window into the world. I wished I had taken some non-comics reading friends along with me.

It was on this topic that I was most keen to question McCloud. Though the industry has made huge progress in becoming academically recognised and more artistically diverse, the readership still reflects that of a ‘minority art form’. "A minority art form, yes, but not quite as marginalised," says McCloud. "We are seen as plugged in to a vital and interesting part of the cultural dialogue." Ideas of innovation, vitality and current cultural phenomena crop up all the time in conversation with McCloud; it is clear that he sees comics as a potentially pioneering mode of expression.

Where should someone who is looking to tap into this brilliant art form look first? "Start with a silent comic, because here you’re really confronted with the idea of image as text. A great one to start with is The Arrival, by Shaun Tan. Then try City of Glass, an adaptation of Paul Auster’s novella by David Mazzucchelli and Paul Karasik." Also recommended are The Nao of Brown and James Sturm’s Market Day.

At this point, Ivy sighs and shakes her head, saying "Oh, how Scott Pilgrim has fallen. He always used to be first on the list." McCloud reassures us that "I do really love Scott Pilgrim", and we spend the last few minutes chatting about Bryan Lee O’Malley’s beautiful new book Seconds. This was, for me and many audience members, the greatest part of being in conversation with Scott McCloud. He is undoubtedly our foremost comics critic: his knowledge, technical skill and insight into the medium’s cultural significance are awe-inspiring. But at its best moments, the day was about discussing our favourite books, and a brilliant medium, with the man who first pushed us to understand them.

The Sculptor by Scott McCloud is published by SelfMadeHero.