Dave McKean is one of the most influential artists ever to work in comics. His ground breaking painting techniques brought a new sensibility to comics. The Batman graphic novel Arkham Asylum had brought him wide acclaim, but in this interview he reveals his dissatisfaction the end result. 

McKean’s diverse talents have fed an eclectic career that includes covers for Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series, graphic novels including Violent Cases, Cages, and Signal to Noise, CD covers, book covers, children’s books, and directing the 2005 motion picture MirrorMask.

This Comics Career Classic interview was originally published in Comics Career Vol. 2 #1 in 1990. This was just before the release of the first issue of McKean’s mini-series Cages. 

Comics Career: How did Cages come about? 

McKean: It’s based on a collection of little ideas I’ve gathered while working on other writers’ projects. Writing ideas are gold dust. They come along very rarely, so it’s taken ages to actually get enough material together – enough things that I wanted to actually put down – to get a book out of it. 

I don’t really want to go into the plot too much. It’s broadly about why people believe in things and what happens when you believe in things. The nature of belief. It’s linked to my beliefs. I’m not a religious person, but I believe very strongly in creativity as a force to get you through life. So, it’s just about that really, and since it’s the first thing I’ve written, I wanted to stay on home ground and not bite off more than I can chew. 

Comics Career: How confident do you feel going into this as a first-time writer? 

McKean: I feel reasonably confident now that I’m actually doing it. Up until about four months ago I hadn’t got anything down on paper, so I felt nervous telling the people I talk to, like Neil Gaiman, about it and getting their feedback. It sounded all very grandiose and interesting, but actually putting something on paper was quite different. Now that I’ve actually got something down, I’m pleased with it, and that was the main thing since I really haven’t been all that happy with anything I’ve done for the last few years. 

Comics Career: You haven’t been? 

McKean: No, not at all. I just really wanted to do something that I was pleased with, something that I could stand up and defend, and be proud of, and show people, and say, “This one’s mine.” 

Comics Career: When you say you’re not happy with what you’ve done, is that in terms of material, doing superhero work, or a feeling that your own artwork wasn’t up to par? 

McKean: Pretty much everything. I was never happy doing superhero stuff because I’ve never liked them. And the more I did it, the more I realized that I couldn’t do it even as a job. I couldn’t get out of bed in the morning – couldn’t work up the enthusiasm to do it – because I didn’t believe in it. If somebody’s doing superhero comics, and they really love it, and it’s what they always want to do, fine, more power to them, but not for me. 

Comics Career: Was Arkham Asylum something of a breaking point? 

Continues below…

McKean: It was kind of a breaking point in as much as at the beginning of it I thought if could push it as far as I could in the direction that I wanted to go – this sort of very abstracted work and dense atmosphere. I tried not to accept any of the ground rules at face value. 

When Grant first came up with the story he didn’t know who was going to be drawing it, so it was a very traditional Batman story. But, it had Robin in it, and I didn’t like that at all. At one point he was Bruce Wayne, and I didn’t want that either because I don’t believe in the character as a human being. I like the idea of him being sort of a cross between man and an animal, and I think as a mythic story that’s kind of interesting. 

We chopped it and changed it around. It became sort of a symbolic play. We piled all this stuff on top of it, and dressed it up in its best clothes, and sent it out. Then I sat down afterwards and realized, “Why? Why bother? It’s such an absurd thing to do.” It’s like suddenly realizing the fact that you’re desperately trying to work around the subject matter – trying to make the book despite the subject, rather than because of it. At the end of the day, if you really love to do Batman comics, then that’s probably the best thing to do. Not liking them, and then trying to make something out of them is just a waste of time. 
 
Also, by the end of it I’d really begun to think that this whole thing about four-color comics with very, very overpainted, lavish illustrations in every panel just didn’t work. It hampers the storytelling. It does everything wrong. It’s very difficult to have any enthusiasm about it after that. 

Comics Career: So you really came to the point that it seemed like the art was working against the story? 

McKean: Yeah, definitely. Especially in this case. There was so little content there. I mean, it does nobody any good at all to realize that Batman is a psychopath. Who cares? 

Comics Career: There isn’t much world-shaking significance in the fact. 

McKean: Exactly. 

Comics Career: When you say that you realized that full-color, overly painted work was hampering the story, is that why Cages seems to be such a different approach to comics storytelling for you? 

McKean: Well, I suppose so. I don’t think it is, you see. Because the trouble is – and it’s taken seeing other people doing full-color work to make me realize this – what a lot people are seeing is the surface of what I’ve been doing. It’s all atmosphere and lush colors and texture and this kind of stuff. I’ve always thought that if there was any strength in my work at all, it was the basic drawings. Now, I go to conventions and people show me their portfolios and they’re full of tons of paint and texture and airbrush and, Christ, it’s got bits of watch stuck on it, but the basic drawing is – nine times out of ten – really poor or almost nonexistent. So it was really worrying. I’ve started to feel responsible for convincing people to just splatter it with paint and forget the drawing. 

With Cages, I really wanted to do something that was all drawing and as little flash as possible, so it’s all pared down to the absolute essential skeleton of the drawing. It’s probably still overdone. I think it works a lot better. Just through reading it, you don’t stop. There are no false stops. It just keeps you moving through it, I hope very easily. I’ve been pleased with the feedback it’s been getting. It seems to bear out what I was striving for.

Comics Career: You mentioned that you don’t want to do anymore superhero work. Does this mean that we’ll be seeing you do less work for DC. I’ve read that you’re drawing Jamie Delano’s last issue of Hellblazer. 

McKean: Yeah, I’ve done that. It should be out soon. That really came about because I’ve been trying to get together with Jamie to do something for ages, in fact, since I started doing the covers for Hellblazer, which was three years ago. He’s a good friend, and we wanted to do something, but Jamie, having done three years with Constantine had got to the end of what he wanted to do with that. Karen [Berger] suggested that I could do the last one, which was nice. Unfortunately, it was a bit rushed, so I didn’t have the time to spend that I would have liked. 

It’s pen and ink, but it’s much more crosshatched and much more tonal pen and ink, if you can have such a thing, than Cages is. Then I went over to Ireland and colored it on the computer by hand so that it looks like a full-color thing, but it’s kind of a halfway stage. 

Comics Career: So will there still be DC work? Will you keep doing the covers? 

McKean: Well, I’ll certainly keep doing the Sandman covers until somebody throws me off, really, because I love doing them. Apart from the fact I like the comics and like Neil’s writing a lot, it’s just a great, broad framework of subject matter to go in. He really worked out a little universe there that you can have anybody in. It’s really nice to work in such a free world. 

But in terms of doing books, I’ve by no means fallen out with DC. They’ve been very nice, and I know other people have had problems, but I certainly haven’t. Karen’s a great editor, and some of the other people there, like Tom Peyer, are really nice. I’d still like to do books for them, but the trouble is if you want to keep on moving forward in any sense, unless you’re left alone to grow at your own speed and just do what you feel is right you’re going to eventually hit the ceiling, you’re going to hit a wall where you can’t go any further. At DC you are very much a hired person; you’re working for them. If you want to grow at all you’ll eventually hit the wall. You just have to realize that that’s the case, and it won’t change. You can try to push the wall a bit and force them to change a little bit, but eventually you’ll hit that wall. It just means that you have to look around for other places to do your work. 

Comics Career: So do you see you doing your future work through more individual avenues like Tundra, which is almost a self-publishing situation? 

McKean: I think so. Tundra is kind of a dream of a situation. The very loose contracts they’ve got are absolute dream contracts. They’re very nice, personable people to deal with and you certainly feel like they are working for you inasmuch as they want to try to make the book its very best, and that’s first on the priority list. Even to have the thing about making money, the profit thing, as being second on the list is an improvement over the obvious first on the list with the big companies. 

I don’t see that there is anything I’m likely to do that Tundra wouldn’t want, unless the quality of it was obviously poor, which is only my fault. 

And the other place that I’m doing stuff is a book publisher in London called Victor Gollancz. They started as a science fiction book publisher, but now they publish all sorts of different things, and they’ve just started a line of comics. Again, a good editor, very easy people to work for, and it’s a good situation. I’m doing two books for them at the moment. 

Comics Career: Will those be distributed in the U.S.? 

McKean: They will be distributed in the U.S. We’re hoping to work out a deal, possibly even with Tundra. At the moment they’ve got two books from me and Neil, Alan Moore, Mike Harrison, and Ian Miller all doing for comics for them. It’s quite a nice little list they’ve got. And the books that I’ve seen are superb. 

Comics Career: Here in the U.S. we kind of have this vision of all the British creators sitting in one little community controlling our industry and taking away our opportunities. How contact do you have with the various other creators over there? 

McKean: It’s exactly like that. We’ve got a control room [Laughter]. 

No, we’re spread out all over the country. All the different people who are doing American comics are spread out from the top of Scotland and beyond all the way down to the Isle of Wight. It’s difficult to stay in touch, or even know everybody. There are certainly quite a few I haven’t even met. But, we all tend to know each other, and then there are the little groups within that. My immediate friends tend to be Neil and then a few guys like Mark Johnson and Mark Buckingham and Richard Rayner, and few more established people like John Bolton and Brian Bolland. There are other crowds, like the general 2000 A.D. crowd who I don’t really know because I’ve just never done any work for them. We tend not to see each other. 

Comics Career: I think there’s a perception over here that there’s a very marked stylistic difference between U.S. and British artists and writers. Do you see that, and what do you think the differences are? 

McKean: I kind of see the differences. Only talking about Neil, Grant [Morrison], Jamie, and Alan as writers because that is generally the work I look at more than anything else that’s produced over here, it tends to just not accept the restrictions. All of them are capable of doing anything they want. Neil has worked as a journalist and has written novels. Grant’s written plays. They’ve all done the work, and they’re all capable of doing the work, because at the end of the day, the skills of being a writer are pretty much the same. You have to be able to tell a story. You have to have an ear for dialogue and characterization. It’s the same with drawing. Drawing is basic skills. So if you can do it, you can do anything. Maybe you can do some better than others, but the skills are pretty much the same. 

I tend to feel that the skills in American comics have become so specialized that what you actually have to do to write an American superhero comic has become so dictated and constricted that it’s not surprising that it tends to be very samey. That’s the main stylistic difference. I think the reason it’s there is because of two reasons. One is that guys I mentioned are not fans. They’re all enthusiastic about comics, and love doing it, and want to keep pushing, but are also extremely critical of comics generally. I know for a fact that for whatever criticism they’ve got for their respective books, they could write far better criticisms, because they’re so critical. 

I’m the same way. There are very few comics I like. I can count them on one hand, simply because you almost have to be that critical if you’re going to be motivated, if you’re going to keep pushing forward. You have to, even when something comes out from somebody you really like, you have to sit down and think, “What is there in here that isn’t working? How can you improve on this?” That’s a strong motivation. 

Plus, the other thing is the geographical part of it. It’s essentially British stuff. Where in America you’ve had very much a limited amount of genres to work in — it’s primarily superheroes and a few other small genres. It’s pushed Bill Sienkiewicz, Frank Miller, and a few others, to really try to absolutely stretch those thin genres out to their maximums, so it’s produced some interesting work because they have to push like crazy to actually get anything interesting. In Europe, they’ve been able to do anything they want — comics about absolutely anything they fancy doing at all. But, conversely, it’s produced a smaller range of styles because the storytelling is often very similar from one European comic to another, although the subject matter is very wide. So, stuck in middle here, in this little island, we can pick and choose from America and Europe, and hopefully come out with something that is the best of both. 

Comics Career: You talk about the diversity of the writers, what diversity is there on your part, in terms of a variety of art experience and background. It’s obvious that you’ve done work beyond comics. What sort of things have you done? 

McKean: Apart from comics? Well, it’s about half and half. I still do tons of illustrations for book covers. In fact, I’ve just won an award for best album cover of the year. 

Comics Career: Congratulations. 

McKean: Thank you. I couldn’t believe it. I thought they’d made a mistake. 

I’ve done an audiovisual installation for a museum in Carlisle. I’ve worked as a production designer on a movie in Hollywood for a short while. 

Comics Career: What movie was that? 

McKean: It was all preproduction work on a movie called Ecotopia, and it’s all still in preproduction, so you probably won’t even hear of it until 1992. I’ve done music for videos. At the moment we’re doing a play, a collection of readings by some science fiction authors here, and I’m doing all the music and painting the backdrop and doing some theatre for it. All of that stuff feeds the comics, and all the aspects of comics that you don’t get from just sitting down and sketching stuff — like storytelling — feeds the rest. The ability to work with a writer and capture what the writer had in mind in the script, obviously feeds into doing an illustration for a book cover because you have to sit down and imagine what the writer would have on his book cover. It all cross feeds.

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