Sculpture is the branch of the visual arts that operates in three dimensions. Traditionally, sculptural process have focused on carving and modelling, generally in stone, metal, and wood, but since modernism shifts in sculptural process have led to an almost complete freedom of materials and process. The Western tradition of sculpture began in Ancient Greece, and Greece is widely seen as a producing great masterpieces in the classical period. During the Middle Ages, Gothic sculpture represented the agonies and passions of the Christian faith. The revival of classical models in the Renaissance produced famous sculptures like Michelangelo's David. Modernist sculpture moved away from traditional processes and the emphasis on the depiction of the human body, with the making of constructed sculpture, and the presentation of found objects as finished art works.

Materials may be worked by removal such as carving; or they may be assembled such as by welding, hardened such as by firing, or molded or cast. Surface decoration such as paint may be applied. Sculpture has been described as one of the plastic arts because it can involve the use of materials that can be moulded or modulated. Found objects may be presented as sculptures.

Scott McCloud (born Scott McLeod on June 10, 1960) is an American cartoonist and theorist on comics as a distinct literary and artistic medium. He is most notable for his non-fiction books about comics, Understanding Comics, Reinventing Comics and Making Comics, for which he has been called the "Marshall McLuhan of comics".

McCloud was born in 1960 in Boston, Massachusetts, and spent most of his childhood in Lexington, Massachusetts. He decided he wanted to be a comics artist in 1975, during his junior year in high school. When it came time to look for a college that fit his career goals, the one that offered a program closest to his career goals was Syracuse University's Illustration program. He selected that school and area of major, and graduated from Syracuse with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1982.

McCloud created the light-hearted science fiction/superhero comic book series Zot! in 1984, in part as a reaction to the increasingly grim direction that superhero comics were taking in the 1980s.