If you want to read ambitious comics and graphic novels, you have many choices, but if you want to learn how to read them, you probably have to start with Scott McCloud. The writer and artist first got noticed for a teenage superhero series, “Zot!” (1984-91), then broke through with “Understanding Comics” (1993), an exegesis, in comics form, of comics form. McCloud drew himself as a friendly, bespectacled guide, demonstrating why “cartoony,” stylized faces (as in “Peanuts”) help us identify with characters; and how comics can tell many sorts of stories, whether or not there are superpowers or family traumas involved. “Reinventing Comics” (2000) predicted broad uses for digital platforms; “Making Comics” (2006) showed potential creators how to use the pen-and-ink and electronic tools we have.

“The Sculptor” is McCloud’s first book in nine years, his first graphic novel since 1998 and his first long, complete story with adult main characters. Easy to follow, replete with expressive faces, snappy transitions, close-ups, cutaways and countless variations on the standard nine-panel grid, “The Sculptor” reflects McCloud’s decades of interest in how to design and draw sequential art. McCloud’s fans — and I’m one — should read it for those reasons. But that doesn’t mean we’ll like all we find.

McCloud’s plot is easy to summarize: It’s the Faust legend. A sculptor named David Smith has washed out of the New York art world. Dealers once called him “the other David Smith,” to distinguish him from the eminence at Storm King; now they don’t call him at all. Penniless and despondent, he encounters the ghost of his granduncle Harry, who asks, “What would you give for your art?” David answers, “My life,” and so it is: The ­Devil-as-Harry offers him the power to shape anything — concrete, steel, flesh — with his bare hands, and “200 days to use it — before you die.”

David accepts, but his dealer rejects the results. Drunk, seemingly friendless, he nearly throws himself under a train. Then a bubbly, generous actress named Meg saves him and takes him in. “You’ll be selling sculptures again in no time,” she says, though he has kept his powers secret. She models for him — “clothes on, mind you” — too. But the intense, awkward, sexually inexperienced David wants more. Though she rebuffs him at first, the two fall in love, and David must choose how to spend his remaining days: with Meg, or with art? Can his Faustian compact be broken?