It’s simply impossible to describe the career of Dave McKean with a few choice adjectives. He’s not only made an impact in popular DC comics as the artist on Black Orchid (written by Neil Gaiman, 1988-89), Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth (written by Grant Morrison, 1989) and those many covers to The Sandman (from 1989), but he has worked on notable Gaiman-written graphic novels such as Violent Cases (Escape Books, 1987), Signal to Noise (Victor Gollancz, 1992) and The Tragical Comedy or Comical Tragedy of Mr. Punch (DC/Vertigo, 1994), while writing and drawing his own longform comics, including Cages (Tundra/Kitchen Sink, 1990-96), Celluloid (Fantagraphics, 2011), Black Dog: The Dreams of Paul Nash (Dark Horse, 2016) and the recent Raptor (Dark Horse, 2021). Additionally, he’s illustrated album covers, book covers and children’s books, directed feature films and music videos, performed in music and theater festivals, and created narrative installations. The sheer breadth of McKean’s career would be difficult to conceptualize if it weren’t for the recent Thalamus: The Art of Dave McKean, a two-volume, 608-page hardbound retrospective from Dark Horse.
Thalamus is more than a simple archive of McKean’s work, however, with insightful commentary from the artist throughout. It’s also a place for McKean to document his process and creative philosophy, while offering words of advice from someone who’s seen his fair share of both the commercial and 'fine' art worlds. While some retrospectives look back with nostalgia, McKean stays very much in the present, anticipating the changes in creativity suggested by artificial intelligence. With good fortune, there will be much more to come from the legendary artist, but while we await McKean’s next project, we have the beautiful 10.5" x 14" Thalamus to carefully consider and give our every bit of attention.
I had the opportunity to exchange emails with McKean where we discussed comics, dreams, AI, creativity, puppets, intention, semiotics, aesthetics, and no less than the meaning of life.
-Jake Zawlacki
JAKE ZAWLACKI: Do you dream often?
DAVE MCKEAN: I don’t dream very much, certainly nothing I remember very clearly. I used to dream a lot more, and I tend to link dreams to anxiety - I’m just not that anxious these days. Well, beyond the impending eco-catastrophe, and wars and theocracies springing up all over the place, personally I’m managing my own sanity somehow. But the experience of dreaming has had a huge influence on the kinds of stories I’m drawn to. The way dreams tend to scratch mix elements in your life, detaching huge emotions in your life from their original contexts and applying them to mundane trivial things. The sense of dislocation, of being in a familiar and yet completely alien place at the same time. Adults going to school, my house sited on a precipice, my wife being two people, and being forced to choose between them - that last one stayed with me for days. Most of the dreams I remember are not Dali-esque tableaus, or anything approaching the fantasies of genre comics, they are small, everyday, focused and obsessive, I think that’s why Luis Buñuel and David Lynch get closer than most to actual dream logic. Also Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled.
You mention semiotics a few times in Thalamus, and I was thinking about that in relation to your distinctive aesthetic - one that, to me, seems to fit with what you just said about detaching emotions (and objects, if I may add) from their original contexts. Is it an intentional process? Intuited? Are you in conversation with artists and creators like Buñuel, Lynch and Ishiguro?
I think all the creators I admire have managed to evolve their own language and iconography of images, shapes, marks, figures, or ways of telling stories. Most of the directors I follow have a tone of voice that is apparent from the first shot. There’s an argument that a writer or director’s voice should be transparent, so that they don’t get in the way of the story. Personally, I’ve never bought that argument. Neutrally told stories are two a penny, I’m interested in the connection between the teller and the tale: why is this story, and not that story, so important to them to spend years of their lives articulating it? What is the unique quality that the creator brings to the telling of the story?
Something really powerful occurs when you hear both the teller and tale in your head. I remember seeing Willis O'Brien’s King Kong for the first time as a kid and being hypnotized by the film and fate of Kong. The CGI remake is a technical wonder, but I didn’t connect with it at all. Watching the original again, I realized all the flickering rippling fur over Kong’s body is not just the flutter of wind over his hide, it’s also the fingerprints of the animator. The creator’s hand is present in every frame, a decision made in every frame. So taking that even further and creating a language of form just heightens that connection between the eye and mind of the creator and the work. From the first shot of a Peter Greenaway film, or an Ozu, or Sokurov, or a Quay Brothers film, you know you’re having a conversation with a unique individual. Or in comics, the music-like work of Mattotti, Muñoz, Breccia, [Stefano] Ricci, so many, you immediately know you’re sensing a unique voice across the page. That’s what I admire in others, so that’s what I’ve tried to find in the stories I tell and the way I tell them. And as I’ve continued to keep sketchbooks and do a large amount of personal work, I use those completely open spaces to find the shapes and marks, colors and textures, signs and signifiers that mean something to me, and, I hope, connect to others.
You use the human body and its various parts throughout your work. Sometimes a body is missing pieces, sometimes it’s merged with different substances, and sometimes it’s a body part by itself. While I think this is certainly part of a larger aesthetic philosophy of removing objects from their contexts, playing with the uncanny and the familiar, I can’t help but think of Jean Baudrillard when he describes the process of segmenting a woman’s body into a series of objects as “the height of inhumanity.”1 He’s writing that in ‘68 within a specific context, but also speaking to advertising and other popular media. If I’m reading him correctly, I understand him to mean that it’s a failure to see a human body as a sum of parts where it should be an indivisible unit. How do you think your work responds to this claim by Baudrillard?
I don’t think you only need to have one response or opinion on something like this, that’s the trouble with ideologies of any kind, they tend to be blunt instruments unable to cope with context very well. Certainly reducing someone to a body part in order to sell a product is pretty reductive and inhuman, but there are so many ways of interpreting the use of the human figure in art as ways of expressing our multitude of emotional and physical states. The human face, our minds, and then our physical selves, are our primary sources of metaphor. Our bodies are, in slasher movies, just bags of blood, corporeal meat, yet they are also landscapes for other creatures, microbiomes, rivers of energy and electrical signals, intricate machines and the slowly shaped and compromised results of the process of evolution. Something strange happens when you take an object out of its everyday context—a tree, a pile of bricks, a urinal—and put it in a gallery. We are encouraged to think and consider its life, its aesthetics, its meaning with fresh eyes. The same is true for our primary metaphor; what would an image of a person with no fingerprints say to us about an AI future? What would a single eyeball filling a room say about the internet? Or Jan Švankmajer’s individual clay body parts finding each other in a room too cramped to house the body as a whole? Or Terry Gilliam’s huge Monty Python foot of god (actually a cherub) stomping everything when it becomes too ordinary? “If I only had a heart?” We use ourselves, and pieces of ourselves, as an endless index of ways of understanding ourselves, of shifting context and point of view, so we see ourselves anew.
We will certainly come back to AI, but I wanted to get your thoughts on narrative and storytelling. You’ve mentioned the importance of the creator being present in their narrative telling, but I’m curious what you think about “storytelling” in its current, more popular usage. Reading about your curated exhibits that encircled a narrative in Thalamus and your own philosophy about how narrative pulls people in, I was struck by how “storytelling” is now replacing traditional marketing. Brands now have “stories to tell” to help sell you things you don’t need; they use storytelling to help clean their brand names.2 Should we be on guard against narratives? What can we do about the power of narrative seduction?
Like most retooling of culturally important ideas like ‘storytelling’ by marketing departments wanting to shift product, I hate it, and refuse to go near it. The advertising world will degrade anything to make a buck. Of course there are many stories involved in the production of things, but the stories that are told remove the shadow side and only focus on the perceived positive. No story worth telling, or that honestly tells us something about humanity, can only survive in the light - bleached to death. Greenwashing is the latest miserable attempt to tell us all everything is fine, don’t worry, don’t think, go back to your screens. I don’t know what we can do to counter this tendency. Like ‘art,’ ‘story’ is being drained of meaning. We can only insist on a better interpretation of these ideas, and, as they say, not believe the hype. Storytelling in its usual cultural home is not faring much better, with story beats and templates, and pre-digested narrative arcs dominating so much culture. There are still difficult spiky voices out there, but it’s damned hard for them to be heard against the noise. Another tick for comics, that can theoretically allow much more experimentation since the comparative budgets are so low, with an individual in sole creative control. That’s why it’s so depressing to see so many comics that are basically marketing documents for potential TV deals.
So I remain committed to storytelling in its simplest form, as a way of allowing someone else to understand the way you comprehend the world. Story is very unfashionable in the art world at the moment, I think because that world is so evasive, uncomfortable with explaining itself in case we see how little meaning is actually there. I’m convinced this is a huge mistake, and that story is the basic way we pass on culture, ideas, and information, and lessons on life and how to survive it.
Very early in Thalamus, you write, “My ambition was always to try and elevate the standard of work in comics to that of the other art forms I love: film and television at their best, literature, art, illustration and cartooning.” How far do you think comics have come since you started in the medium?
I think comics have progressed enormously over the last 20-odd years. There was a lull after the explosion of interest in the late ‘80s, as there didn’t seem to be enough momentum to sustain interest from the press, or on the shelves of regular bookstores. And this wasn’t helped by cynical repackaging of old mainstream comics as ‘graphic novels.’ But since then a couple of new generations of creators have cultivated the seeds sown back then, and discovered for themselves, without any need for nostalgia, a powerful and personal medium to explore and use to tell their own stories. I’ve never seen such a healthy variety of voices in both text and image. And the fact that authors like Margaret Atwood, Yuval Noah Harari and Robert Macfarlane have chosen to write in comics form is significant, and acknowledges the power of that form. And I don’t think it’s just a matter of looking for sales, those authors don’t need to work outside of prose, they are obviously excited by the challenge of the comics form. So I think we’re in a golden age.
There are problems of course; there are so many books being published now, it’s hard to see how anything can stay in the spotlight for very long, but I guess online sales allow for a longer tail. There’s still a lot of middle of the road junk, and I don’t think the formulaic, and culturally very specific, clichés of manga are, on balance, a positive influence. There are far too many comics that are basically unsellable prose pieces with some added pictures. I think the huge impact mainstream comics have had on the film industry is only dreadful, but that’s just one of many problems facing that industry at the moment, and I just try and ignore it all. But with so many illustrators and writers getting their chance to publish, and more open-minded indies, as well as regular book publishers putting lists together, and the possibility of publishing online and reaching audiences directly without any gatekeepers or financial boundaries, there are so many great opportunities for new creators to prove themselves, develop, and find their crowd. Obviously all of this is only making things tougher for me to get any attention and remain visible in any way, but it’s also a great challenge to up my game and try and keep up.
You list a number of comic creators you admire in Thalamus and offer a bit of insight into their influence on your work. Did you have any you wanted to include but couldn’t fit?
Many, but I covered the main ones. I can find something interesting in almost anything, but there are only a few whose work has really stayed with me, and got into my bloodstream. I was more interested in suggesting that there could be an alternate history of comics, one that privileges individual personal creativity, rather than mainstream acceptance, financial success, or the usual underground story. I loved Mark Cousins’ Story of Film documentary, and its determination to put Hollywood, and other well-worn film history narratives, in their place as only a small part of the world of film. There are other ways of thinking about what makes a comic work. I was tempted to leave out references to any comic that is pencilled and then inked, as I’m convinced it’s a bizarre process that removes that crucial link between observation and making the mark - only in the wacky world of comics is a pencil drawing considered unfinished. The industrial process of comics becomes an accepted orthodoxy, rather than the most expressive way of representing something. Anyway, I was more pragmatic in the end and left a few in.
Are you reading any comics right now you’d recommend?
I’m not reading any series at the moment, I tend to just have a look round Gosh! in London when I’m there, or at festivals around the world, and see if anything catches my eye. José Luis Vidal & Jorge González’s Salitre [Spaceman Project, 2023] I just read and liked a lot. I just discovered the Polish publisher Centrala and picked up several of their books, visually glorious, writing less so. Since it’s nearly always the imagery that draws me in, it’s often the scripts that let them down. I’m sure there are some really well-written books out there I’m missing, just because the drawing doesn’t get to me. I realize you can make comics with stick figures, and maybe if you’ve got something crucial to say that can only be expressed in basic images, then maybe. Personally, I think if you’re not going to really work with the imagery, why bother making a comic? Write prose with diagrams.
You state that you hope the book is useful for artists and creators looking to live a creative life, and draw a comparison to Stephen King’s On Writing. What’s your understanding of creativity? Is it innate in all of us?
I think it is innate in all of us. We’re not born with the ability to play the sax, or visualize garden designs, or draw cartoon birds, we’re born with much more general tendencies and qualities that can be nudged towards these more specific activities. To a large degree, creativity can be taught, in that it can be encouraged, nourished, expanded. I don’t have a specific audience or aim for the book in mind, except that, over the years at festivals, signings, lectures, and in general conversation, I’ve been asked to offer advice for students or people wanting to do something creative, usually something specific, like making a film or a comic. And over the years, I’ve tried to find useful things to say, since we’re all different and really have to find our own pathways to those goals. So I hoped this book would be an opportunity to put some of those observations and suggestions down on paper. They won’t be useful for everyone, but I can only say they’ve worked for me, and in the essay about generating ideas, I still use those methods today. The book is called Thalamus for a few reasons, and a big one is that I’m fascinated by the way our brains work. I’ve tried very hard to be as aware as possible of how I’m thinking and what I’m doing as I’m working. What can I do to maximise the useful time, to make the process as open and playful as possible, to get the most out of a piece of work, to make something new every day, to surprise myself, to keep myself excited and interested, and to keep the object of what I’m doing in as sharp a focus as possible. It’s a bit like an athlete training every day, and noticing the way their musculature and organs are working to their best.
I was taken by the vulnerability of Thalamus - a rare aspect in our age of carefully curated social media, and how it allowed you to talk honestly about very big, existential questions. Early in it, you explain your reason for creating art as to contribute to a “better world.” You define that world as “more rational, engaged, and empathic.” How does this shape the kinds of art you make? Is there a social responsibility to it? A personal responsibility?
This question has changed over the years, or rather, it’s become more urgent and focused. When I started, I was very keen to not glamorize violence or dwell on human cruelty in my stories. When illustrating books by others that included violence, I wanted to make sure it was absolutely necessary for the idea of the story, and if so, I wanted it to hurt, not just be entertaining. I appreciate that people looking over my early work will find examples that contradict this, but I tried. I failed sometimes, but I tried. Also, I was keen to tell interior stories, to allow the reader inside my character’s heads, I think this is perfectly in sync with the internal voice of the comics page as you read it. And I wanted to be honest about attraction, love and sex in my stories. I never understood why violence is so common, yet most of us would rather it didn’t happen to us, and yet sex and love, as opposed to just porn, is so rarely at the heart of the stories we tell, yet most of us, I think, would be quite happy for that to happen to us. All of these ideals had to balance with making a living. Fresh out of art school I took what I was given to a degree.
I think around 2008, I decided I didn’t want to just make, what seemed to me, meaningless product any more. I stopped doing advertising work, I’d already packed in my cover work at DC, although I hung around doing Sandman book covers for a while out of some proprietorial sense of ownership, I don’t really know why, and I concentrated much more on my own work and ideas. Also, I was starting to feel that pure escapism was not as benign as I had thought. There seemed to be a link between disconnecting people from paying attention to how their elected representatives and institutions behave, and the sorts of pure escapist media we are being fed. It’s all so much more corporate than when I was a teenager, and I was disturbed by how complicit people are with that equation. I became much more interested in science and the real world, and felt the need to assert that there is reality and there is fiction, and that they are fundamentally different, and to know what is real is important. This all got weaponized by the internet, (anti-)social media and now AI, so I just felt if I wasn’t part of the solution, even as a tiny little dot of a part, then I was part of the problem. That’s shaped my choices very strongly over the last decade, from the community lifting work on Michael Sheen’s The Passion of Port Talbot (The Gospel of Us film), to working on an introduction to critical thinking with Richard Dawkins (The Magic of Reality), to reiterating that the freedoms we take for granted cost lives, and that war is always dehumanizing, as well as more personal notes, in Black Dog: The Dreams of Paul Nash, and so on. I still do the odd project for sheer fun and play, but the big ones, the ones that take years of my time, are usually towards some greater good, I hope. That’s the only way I can justify spending time on them.
You discuss your desire to make a mark on the world, to leave a fingerprint uniquely your own, but you also describe the unfathomable cosmos as one where the meaning of a human lifetime is negligible. Which takes me to where you talk about faith:
I have no faith, and no faith in faith, I want to know the unvarnished truth about the two worlds that exist - those being the shared actual, real, verifiable place out there that we all have to navigate and that doesn’t give a damn whether we’re here or not, and the world that I’ve created in my mind, as we all have, that is a version of the real one, but edited and distorted by our genes, experiences and prejudices.
It seems that doing any kind of creative work, pressing our fingerprints into the shore only for them to be soon washed away, demands an immense amount of faith if we’ve rejected the artist as narcissist. If art is to mean something—to matter in a much larger sense—can it ever be rationally justified? Or maybe put differently, and more simply, do you have faith in art? In comics? In music? In humans?
Not even negligible, one human life, the whole of human history, is a blink. But meaning doesn’t really work at that scale. It’s a bit like Newtonian physics appearing not to work at a quantum level, they are obviously related and interact with each other, but you need a different set of values to make sense of each. I think all I take from the cosmic level of existence is that there is no ultimate meaning outside of the meaning we choose to impose for ourselves, in relation to the world and people around us. I’m not a purely self-centred Randian. I think, rather than reducing the value of human life, this view gives us agency over ourselves. We’re not working for anyone or anything else, we are in charge, and therefore we have to take that responsibility.
So how does that play out? Well, to have any kind of meaning in the choices you make, you have to be working towards something, and for me that’s a rational, empathic, sustainable, and equitable world. I try to make choices based on those principles, I don’t get it right all the time, I have my ethical weaknesses and compromises like anyone else. I think creativity is crucial to furthering that vision of humanity, I think it’s at the very core of our sense of ourselves, and I’m not just talking about people who make their living drawing or writing or doing other creative jobs, I’m not talking about the capitalist system at all, I’m just talking about the raw impulse in us to makes things, express things, share stories and ideas, test ourselves by trying new things. That’s how I justify art rationally: it is brain food. We eat and drink to keep our bodies running, we think and create in order to keep our minds running. I’m aware, in the grand arc of everything, this is as much of a belief system as it is any kind of rational argument, but, rationally, it is the way towards my stated objective for the world, the meaning I’ve established for myself. I can only look at the benefits of creativity in people’s lives, anything, cooking, gardening, mending a chair, anything, and the huge benefit of promoting creative endeavors for people wrestling with mental issues, for example. This is why I’ve railed against the AI evangelists and their casual trashing of the definition of creativity. And yes, obviously, this all sounds very grand and utopian, but as I also mention in the book, I can only control what I can control. My world of activity is small, local, trying to speak clearly and directly to my audience, which is small; but I’d much rather say something honestly, truthfully, uncompromised and personal to a small, engaged audience, than say something big, bland, commercially pre-digested and meaningless to a large audience that forgets about it 10 minutes later. And I’m afraid in a commercial world, it’s either one or the other. All my 30-odd years of experience has proved to me that that’s the case.
So to your final simpler question, I don’t have faith in humanity. I certainly have faith in individual humans, although I don’t think I’d put all my faith in anyone. As I mentioned in the book, my sense of self is entirely bound into my creative life, so yes I trust art, music and comics, and wine.
I wanted to ask about some specific pieces you’ve worked on, the first being The Blue Tree Exhibition. How was that work received in the community? Did you feel like a vandal in painting those branches?
I’ve lived in the same place now for 30-odd years, so the landscape, towns and people are part of my world of images; I quite like the fact that buildings, boats, birds and faces from the little towns nearby have shown up in books that have travelled the world. I did two narrative shows in Rye, on the East Sussex coast of England. The first [The Coast Road] was a journey around the coastline from the East side of Brighton around to the Thames estuary at Margate, following a woman who is in turn following sightings of her missing husband in the art and writing of others, a ghost wandering through other people’s creative lives and minds. It was an excuse for me to explore where I live. Blue Tree was set in Rye with roots going out into the world. At six in the morning I planted pre-painted blue branches all over the town, so I didn’t vandalize any existing living trees. Each branch had a little clear bauble attached with a word or two of wisdom inside. The imagery of the tree grew through the gallery, with a huge root ball turned upside down and painted blue, and tendrils travelling through each gallery.
I loved doing this show; I’ve never been that enthusiastic about showing my work in galleries. Most of what I do is for print, the book is the finished work, the pages or illustrations are just a means to an end. It seems to me to render them meaningless to take them out of the context of the book, a technical curiosity maybe, but not worth the wall space. But creating a story that is told in a gallery space, seemed to bring the context back. Visitors very quickly understood there was a linear narrative involved, and stayed and read it and interacted with it, for longer than they would usually stay in a white gallery room. And we had some wonderfully emotional reactions, especially to The Coast Road. The community seemed to enjoy it - it’s a bit of a schizophrenic town, politically very conservative, creatively very liberal, but these two worlds seem to rub along pretty well, both have a vested interest in conserving the traditions of the town, even though some of them are pretty pagan. Now it’s being invaded by Londoners forced out of an increasingly hollowed out city who seem set on changing it into a suburb of London, 27 kinds of coffee, and shops called Anaemic and Pöintless. Maybe there’s another story to be told about that pressure from the outside.
It reminds me of when museums commission public art pieces of street artists or graffiti artists to coincide with an exhibition opening. When does art most effectively break into the public sphere? While you didn’t vandalize anything, did you see the painted branches in conversation with more subversive public art forms like graffiti?
I’ve never liked graffiti, I love weathered stone and rusty metal too much. The elements make much greater imagery than endlessly spray-painted tags and recycled psychedelic logos, it’s really banal. It is, similar to superheroes really, American cultural empire building, bleeding out all over the world like a virus, or mold. You can stand in any major city of the world and see the same tedious stylized stuff, as if the world is one long downtown subway train. Yes, there are exceptions like Blu, but they account for less than 1% of the total amount of aerosol gases released into the atmosphere. So I thought of Blue Tree more like the Situationists, something unexplained and questioning, intruding one morning into people’s lives for a while. Objects placed in a gallery make you think about them differently, but they are kind of safe there, in their little white life support systems, away from the day-to-day world. I do like artworks that go out into the world and make the everyday strange and new. It always bothered me that comics in the ‘80s existed in a bubble of comics publishers, distributors, retailers, fans and press. I spent most of the ‘90s trying to get comics out into the world, to set them free to wander around bookshops, design, the music industry, fashion, restaurants and galleries.
I’ve always appreciated vandalism as speaking against power, going all the way back to the Greeks and Romans, but once it’s been sanctioned, it loses that intention. Your comics career started in the ‘80s, and I’d even lump Black Orchid into the “growing up” of superhero comics following shortly after The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen. What was it like to see all that “mature” storytelling disappear in the ‘90s? Did you see the shift to the direct market distribution model a big shift towards insularity?
Vandalism that truly undercuts power, like the work of Anonymous, or Extinction Rebellion maybe. I think Banksy is smart, his images appear to be whimsical and a bit glib, but he has a knack of finding just the right tone to stay in your head, and work his gently subversive magic on you, like an effective earworm. But generally most of it seems to me to be as much a part of a corporate culture of distraction as most popular music, films and games now.
I don’t really agree with your view of ‘80s superheroes, especially regarding Black Orchid. Although I think we all had an idea that comics, including mainstream superhero comics, could be more interesting if they had a little inspiration from other artforms injected into them, in the end I don’t think they grew up at all. Or at most, they shifted from about 10 years old, to about 13 years old, and then stayed there - sour, self-regarding/self-loathing, bad tempered teens. And honestly I’d say that was not a good move. At 10 you love the innocence of those stories, they have a simple purity to them. I think it all started to go wrong when superhero stories started to try and tackle social issues in the early ‘70s. I blame Neal Adams. No I don’t, that’s really unfair, he did so much good for the industry. But the idea that more apparent realism is better for something as essentially silly and childish as a superhero story started then. So I went along with this idea until it was blindingly obvious to me that I was on the wrong track. I think of those ‘80s comics, if I think of them at all, as a big bold Autumnal end of something, not a beginning. The ‘90s was a Winter wake, and then seeds sown started to grow in surprising new forms, in the Spring of the noughties.
But there were some interesting, and genuinely mature, steps taken in the ‘80s, and it was a shame to see the majors decide that allowing writers and illustrators that degree of free rein was not what they wanted to support after all. It’s always the way, the lunatics can only run the asylum for a while before the guards take back control. I didn’t pay much attention to changing distribution models. All I know is that for a while I could self-publish projects and the distributors would pre-order half my print run, putting me immediately into the black, and making it possible for me to try all sorts of things. And then it stopped. What happened there? I never really pursued it. With so many shops closing, online being fiercely weighted in the vendors' favor, so much product, marketing shifting from actual marketing to useless grey anti-social media nonsense, and in the UK, the tearing up the net book agreement, it’s so much tougher now. Although I should say, it’s much tougher for me, but not if you were born this century and find yourself in a world that allows direct contact with your readers and the ability to bypass all gatekeepers, so long as you’re willing to endlessly dance in public like a performing bear, while anonymous strangers abuse you in 140 words or less.
I guess I’m referring to “growing up” as part of this larger rhetoric scholars and critics of comics will use to talk about the changes in the medium. Christopher Pizzino’s Arresting Development looks at this rhetorical phenomenon of discussing comics as “growing up” and how a lot of scholars and critics point to Watchmen and TDKR—and Maus, while certainly different than superhero comics—as a perceived shift in maturity of the medium. Pizzino also shows how the reading of a medium through the lens of maturity is probably because comic scholars feel like they need to prove comics are legitimate objects of study in English departments where they weren’t/aren’t taken very seriously. So, I’m certainly generalizing when I’m putting Black Orchid into that mix, but I’d guess I wouldn’t be the only one. Arkham Asylum might be included in there too as an example of this “growing up,” but this would all be coming from a critical lens. What were you interested in while working on those two books then, and how do you understand them today?
I haven’t read Arresting Development but it’s a great title, since I would definitely characterize the change from ‘80s to ‘90s as ARRESTED development, while also being arresting in, certainly Alan Moore’s, ambition. But I’d see Maus and Watchmen on very different historical paths; as I say, I see Watchmen as the end of something, I think once you have Watchmen and Alan’s Miracleman, you can see how fundamentally faulty the notion of adult superhero stories are. To me, they’re like adult fairy stories or adult Tom and Jerry cartoons, the internal logic of those stories relies on a child’s view of the world. Maus is very different, and is genuinely grown up, belonging to the history of underground and subculture comix and the crossover with outsider art and American art/pop culture. I’m sure there are other elements in the mix there as well. In the UK we have Raymond Briggs and his book When the Wind Blows, which also occupies a place outside of the usual history of British comics. I haven’t read much, or any in fact, scholarly dissertations on modern comics, I’m afraid that’s another phenomenon I’m happy to give a wide berth.
This is no good, I’m sounding like a very grumpy old bloke now, and I hope that’s not the overall tone of my book. I still love to draw and paint and make books, and tell stories using the unique qualities of comics, I just have no time for all the flimflam around the edges. Looking back on those two books to try and find examples to include in Thalamus, I was reminded of all the ideas that went into them and my state of mind and ambition for comics generally at the time. In Black Orchid I wanted to reset the way people are observed and drawn, how they behave in comics. If you look at early Jack Kirby or Lou Fine or Alex Raymond, there’s real observational drawing going on there. Sure, the stories are fantastical adventures, but they were keen to learn from life. That observation had been watered down and styled and overstylized for years. I just wanted to look at real people again. I wanted the book to have an ending that wasn’t just a big fight. Actually the opposite, I wanted the main character to say ‘no,’ I’m not going to resort to violence to solve this problem. Okay, the rest of it’s rubbish, but it was something of a start.
Doing the digital remastering of Arkham reminded me that I had improved over those couple of years, and the atmosphere and strangeness of some of the scenes are strong. I wanted it to have the handmade textural feel of a Jan Švankmajer puppet film, and it does have something of that. But it’s a Batman story at the end of the day, I can’t get past that. And don’t get me wrong, I love it when people like those books, or anything I’ve done. My taste is my own, it’s not mediated by the success or not of something when it’s out in the world, [where] it takes on its own life. So it’s great when readers find them and extract their own meanings and pleasures from them. Very often, my feeling about any given project is related to how close the final thing is to the version I had in my head when we started. Or how much I got out of it, maybe more than I originally thought was there. So most of my feelings about my own work are very personal and are surrounded by the process of making them, and feelings about all the push and pull of trying to make something that works. I just listened to a podcast with Steve Coogan who said, ‘for a film to be good everything must work, for a film to be bad it only takes one thing not to work.’ I really understand that. I seem to be constantly drawing and redrawing pages and panels of my books recently, trying to keep the standard at a decent level. It’s slow progress.
It’s also worth pointing out that your Arkham Asylum was the main inspiration for the award-winning 2009 Batman: Arkham Asylum video game. Your work in video games dates back to the point-and-click adventure Synnergist (1996) and is as recent as being adapted for VR in The Wolves in the Walls (2018). What was the degree of your involvement in these? Have you played them? And what are your thoughts on VR as immersive storytelling?
I haven’t seen any of them. I think I realized very early on that gaming would suck all the time out of my life and give me nothing back except a score.
VR is much more interesting, and is obviously where we’re heading, although it’s so complex and so data-heavy, it will take time to become as truly involving as a great film or book; I think you’re just too aware of cumbersome tech at the moment. I didn’t really think the Wolves one worked because as usual, they tried to push a square story into a round form. VR is exploratory, not narrative. You can have pieces of story, or time, in it, but the essential nature of the form, I think, should be an exploration. I’ve tried a few extraordinary artworks in VR form, a journey through the human bloodstream, and becoming pollen in a forest, drifting through the leaves and watching the flow of energy through the sap of trees. They are almost transcendental experiences, I think there is a whole new territory there waiting to be explored, but not by buying existing properties and forcing them to be something they are fundamentally not meant to be.
In my answers so far, I’ve probably given the impression of being anti-fantasy, but actually what I love is a kind of reimagined reality, the use of the imagination to see the world with fresh eyes. The essence is the real world and real lives; I don’t see the point in not dealing with that fundamentally, but I just finished Werner Herzog’s new memoir, I think he is the most important director working, and he speaks of moments in his films, not as spiritual or fantastical, but as ecstatic reality. VR could really unlock that in us. I’d love to develop a VR project, I got close a couple of times, and I think I found some interesting ways of dealing with imagery and emotions in that form, we’ll see.
“Ecstatic” is an interesting term. It seems different than “transcendental” because you’re fully immersed in a setting or with an object instead of rising above it. I think that fits with “sublime.” In working on the introduction for this interview, I’m finding it difficult to describe your body of work in any meaningful aesthetic terms that don’t narrow it in some way. What do you think of me using “ecstatic” or “sublime”? How do you describe your work?
I liked Herzog’s use of the idea of ‘ecstatic reality’ because it has nothing to do with the supernatural, or some spiritual exterior force, it’s about the state of mind of the person in the midst of that experience, and/or the viewer - it’s rooted in the reality of brain chemistry, the astounding variety of the natural world, and how much wider and deeper our experience of it can be if we let it.
I try very hard not to have to describe my own work, partly because it’s a bit all over the place, which has been creatively very fulfilling, but a hopeless way of conducting a career. I would have probably been more sensible to stick with one thing, but that would have been very boring for me. I’m reminded of that line in Le Carré’s The Russia House, Barley Blair is asked how he lives with himself, and he says, “I don’t, most of the time, I try to give myself a wide berth.” So not sublime, that’s too self-indulgent. And I can’t really nick Herzog’s either. You’re on your own, sorry.
In flipping through Thalamus, the variety in your career really is quite astonishing. What do you consider to be your magnum opus? Do critics have a go-to? Do you agree with them?
I haven’t done a magnum opus, I think Cages is close and still very important for me. It taught me how to draw and tell stories in a way that I still follow, trying to be inside the action, not, as I think a lot of comics do now, have a piece of text that is perfectly understandable without images, and then just break that into a bunch of panels that are lazily following the text, they’re not really needed. I think the script is the key to a good comic, but I think the story should be told in images primarily, at worst it should be 50/50. And obviously dialogue is part of it, but, like good acting, we should be reading the character’s facial expressions and body language in the drawing as well as just the content of the balloons. I said in the book that I wanted it to have a happy ending, and by that I meant that I wanted to have done a good comic and a good, in my judgement, film before drawing a line under this body of work. Black Dog: The Dreams of Paul Nash is my best book I think. And Luna is a film that completely represents me and my view of the world, my feelings about grief and why we carry on, I’m very fond of it even though very few people saw it.
Critics come from different places, comics critics usually want to talk about Sandman or Arkham which is completely understandable, they were both very successful, but I’m happier talking about Mr. Punch, Signal to Noise, Cages obviously or any recent work, I feel much more confident about the work I’ve done in the last 10 years than my early tentative, only just ex-art student stuff. Having such a chaotic career means I still get clients who know my album covers for FLA [Front Line Assembly], and then, a couple of years later, are surprised that I also did those old Sandman covers. Or people who know my kids' books and are surprised to see my work at the Fat Duck restaurant, or on a mural at Gatwick Airport. Knitting all these disparate areas of activity together was the point of doing the book really.
Black Dog is an incredible work. Did you know it was going to be such a powerful story when you were first contacted about doing a commission?
Thanks Jake, I’m very happy that you liked it. It was an extraordinary, life-changing six months for me, and came along at exactly the right time. It was a phone call out of the blue from Julie Tait at the LICAF [Lakes International Comic Art Festival]. They were working with the Imperial War Museums and the 14-18 NOW foundation, commissioning artworks through the years 2014-18 to commemorate the First World War. They had commissioned films, theatre, poetry, artworks, events, and wanted to publish a graphic novel. They asked me to pitch, and I immediately wanted to see that experience through the eyes of one person, and I thought that person should be creative in some way, because as reticent as they might be to talk about their war experiences, everything would be apparent in their work. I think Paul Nash is the most powerful of WW1 war artists, not necessarily the best painter or draughtsman, but his story seemed embedded in that time. He went into the war a rather delicate, poetic, wishy-washy young man, loving Blake and drawings of angels, and became a tough, direct painter of visceral mindscapes, angry and socialist, and determined to tell his complacent countrymen exactly what war is about.
The whole project was such an adrenaline rush, I didn’t have much time to think about what it could or should be, I just had to respond to it and find it. I pitched in October [2015], had my idea accepted in November, I was already reading everything I could get my hands on, I started writing early December, and got the first few pages done by the end of December. I had to finish the whole thing, including some performance version of the project, which turned out to be a multimedia song cycle and an hour’s orchestral score, in time for a late March premiere. It was full on, but it gave me a chance to enact everything I’d learned when working with Bill Mitchell at the Wildworks theatre company, immersing myself in the time, Nash’s life, his circle of friends, the war, the testimony of soldiers, and leaving it all open to improvisation and play until the last minute. It was exciting and dangerous and everything I’ve ever wanted from a working experience. And somehow it all came together, I found the end of the book in the final week of working on it. The music came together as I was drawing the pages, the poetry in the words became lyrics. And then we performed the show at the Tate in London during Nash’s retrospective, and at the Holocaust Memorial, centenary commemorations of Ypres, and at festivals in Canada, across Europe and Mumbai. And it reconnected me with my absolute love of comics and what they can achieve. This whispering, powerful, personal voice in your head as you turn the pages, and get hit by the impact of image making in narrative form. It is a very beautiful medium. Black Dog set me up for another, I don’t know, 10 years of work? I’m very grateful for the opportunity to make it.
It’s such a powerful and moving portrayal of war. I’m always struck by just how large of a paradigm shift WWI was for the idea of “progress.” It’s this moment where you had Apollinaire lauding the heroics of war like a Greek poet, and other artists creating Dadaist and Surrealist works to display the absolute brutality of mechanized warfare. It’s also when modern psychology really took off in treating shell shock and other disorders. And you can see Nash in the middle of all of that. I wonder what he would think of the current global situation...
It was the era when a revolutionary spirit and a new definition of art as personal expression, met the most seismic of eras to provide the content. You often see that pattern in the work of an individual, when their personal growth happens to coincide with a life-changing event, and you saw this with Paul Nash. The war made him, both the positive and negative of that. It gave him his voice, his energy, his anger and purpose, but it also hung a shadow of despair and depression over his work and life. I have no idea what he’d think about our current state, he was obviously of his time. But I think he would be as pessimistic as at any other time. The values he fought for and invested in have dissipated, the country is crumbling and schizophrenic: a long-delayed, deep grief over the loss of its empire, and its place in the world.
This intersection of experience that deeply impacted Nash’s art reminds me of a passage when you talk about your father. “My dad died when I was twelve and that coloured my view of the world for a long time and probably still does - I always had that sense of death being in the present.” How does this sense of death in the present alter your perception?
For me, it’s been, after the shock and grief had passed, a hugely important and energizing force in my life. The knowledge that all things end, and the arc of that life or era or piece of work is a beautiful, meaningful story. I love reading biographies and autobiographies, probably most of all the prose I read. That sense of realizing the grand story of your life is endlessly inspiring to me. That shadow is always with me, and keeps me focused on getting the most out of the present. The times in my life I’ve been actually knowingly happy, have been those moments when I recognize the beauty or harmony of the moment. This all sounds very hippy trippy, but it’s certainly true that the people I’ve met who are the most serene are the ones that live most of their lives in the present, not worrying about the future or dwelling on the past.
It goes back to that “leaving a mark” part earlier. Our existence leaves a mark no matter what we do. So we all might as well make some good comics.
I don’t have a segue for this, but I wanted to ask about The Tragical Comedy or Comical Tragedy of Mr. Punch. My knowledge of puppet-making and puppet theater is very limited, but there’s something about puppets that seems to be a natural fit for your work. In Thalamus, Paul Gravett talks about a one-man show in conjunction with the Komikazen International Reality Comics Festival hosted at the MAR museum in Ravenna, Italy, where a puppet theater was created for a Punch and Judy show. Were you involved with that? How much had you worked with puppets before this collaboration?
No, I wasn’t involved in putting on the puppet show, but it was inspired in part by the book. Puppets are so resonant: the animation of life, the control of another, the disappearance of the performer as we start to believe in the puppet, the fact that we become so aware of the smallest body language and signal, since the more obvious facial expressions are missing. Back to Willis O'Brien and the sense of his fingertips over the fur of Kong, the transference of creativity through these gestures. I love puppetry where you see the puppeteer on stage with the puppet. We know how it’s done, yet we still sense agency within the puppet. It is a clear example of cognitive dissonance.
In Mr. Punch, the boy picks up a comic, and I was thinking just how rare that would be today because of cost and availability. Comics on the whole are doing great in bookstores and children’s book fairs, but seriality seems to be a dying medium. Should we be nostalgic about that?
Everything has its day, I think so long as the medium survives in a way that allows new and interesting voices to remake it, then that’s fine. I was never wedded to the serial form, just as I rarely ever get into TV series. I like the shape of a story told, I like novels and films and albums. I know there’s a lot of love out there for characters and endless plot development, and I realize there are plenty of exceptions, but I always find them repetitive and suffering from the law of diminishing returns.
It seems that AI may be soon having its day. Early in the book you tease a reason for Thalamus finally coming about and mention an “emergency final page.” When we get to the end, you offer a very honest experience with using Midjourney, and how you felt you needed to accommodate AI in your work, or quit. To start, how do you feel about someone typing in “Dave McKean style comic book cover” into Midjourney and using the result?
I had completed the book by June of last year, and had written that last page as a much more positive paragraph with walking anecdotes and bird pictures and a sense that I’d never felt more professionally fulfilled and personally happy as I did at the time, partly because I really enjoyed putting the book together and revisiting so much stuff that I determinedly had not looked back at for decades. But then the Midjourney thing happened and suddenly the book took on a whole other meaning for me, it was literally the end of my era, from now on my life is pre and post AI.
To start? I consider that action to be theft, the final image will be trained on my work without my knowledge, agreement, or any reimbursement. It’s fraudulent, because the user will consider it their work when my name is in the prompt, surely no simpler paper trail has ever existed for a fraud court case? So then it also makes a difference to me whether this is just one person at home having some fun with a new tech toy and not taking it any further, or someone selling that image, and there’s a greyscale of uses in between. The legal side is a minefield, and we really haven’t caught up with the implications. And finally, and most importantly in this case, the people I’ve talked to who are enthusiastic about AI actually believe this is a creative act. Typing a few words into a bot, and they will tell you how much they thought about the exact words to use, and tweaked the prompt 20-odd times, but this is essentially typing a few words into a bot and waiting a minute. This is such a denuded idea of what creativity is, they are only fooling themselves. There will always be artists who will use it as a tool and be very clear and thorough about staying on the right side of perceived moral lines, but I think they are hypnotized by the shiny new thing. They will be the Trojan horse that wrecks the notion of art, something which has carefully evolved over tens of thousands of years and helped shape the best of us, trashed by glorified predictive text. And you have no idea how sad it is for me to hear artists justify this work with the sort of evasive, relativist art-bollocks that has corrupted the contemporary gallery market.
The students who write their theses using AI are only fooling themselves. Okay, they’ll get an increasingly irrelevant C or D grade pass, and they will have learned absolutely nothing. It is delusional thinking for a delusional world and I really fear for our children’s and grandchildren’s future, this on top of all the other horrors we face. The final black hole of AI corruption is the generation of an infinite amount of false information and fake imagery to completely destroy the notion of truth. The story of our love affair and betrayal by anti-social media will repeat itself in AI.
I’m afraid my view has hardened in respect of the AI invasion into our imaginative lives. AI, with its power to analyse patterns and predict possibilities using vast data sets, will help in areas of science, virology, climatology, urban planning, all sorts, but I believe it has no business in our imaginative creative lives. I initially wanted to understand and play with it, to see if I could fold it into my work, as I have done with so much tech in the past. I’ve always been an early adopter of new possibilities, from Quantel Paintbox to Photoshop to CG and Maya, computer-created fonts, VR, anything. AI is unlike any of these; there is no comparison. It is quantumly different in its implications. It is a tool, but certainly not just a tool, any more than anti-social media is just a noticeboard.
I’ve heard the same arguments from tech evangelists saying that typing in words to a language model is in fact creativity, but in thinking through your response, and talking to friends who are non-creatives but pro-AI, it seems that we’re completely losing the ability to discover new things for ourselves. If we’re always using predictive models to look for trends, there’s no chance of the out-of-nowhere discovery, no room for curiosity to lead us into unrelated and undiscovered areas. What advice would you offer to young creators on the fence about using AI?
My concern is slightly different; the sheer vastness of the data sets used means that the end results are often surprising, and are pretty convincing mimicry of new ideas, but my concern is that they don’t mean anything. Because there is no sentience there, no context, they are empty, and once you start digesting a lot of these images, it’s a bit like living on a diet of donuts; we all like a donut, but if you eat nothing but donuts for a few weeks, you feel really ill, they are not nourishing.
Every mark in a drawing is a human decision, you can track it back through the background, education, life experience of the person, it represents them and who they are, it is meaningful. That is essentially what is missing from AI imagery - everything that I value.
I can’t really offer advice to young creators on this, it’s a completely different world from the one I grew up in. They will have to find their own way through, and construct their own ethical framework for it, as the fundamentalist tech evangelists will never see the need to do that since they believe all technology is by definition, good. Governments can’t keep up and have no real interest in doing so, they’re too busy with other crises, so it’s down to us to stay sane and, I believe, the right side of the ethical line in the choices we make. Do I care that if AI ‘creativity’ was banned here, other less scrupulous countries would carry on regardless? No, let them trash their own cultures, see how they get on with that.
So, advice? I guess, play with it if you want to, it’s important to know what these things can and can’t do. I’m sure there will be some who actually find ways of folding AI activity into their work in an ethical way that keeps the human in control of the end result. Don’t be fooled into thinking that tapping away on a keyboard is any kind of equivalent to going out into the world, observing, and understanding things about other humans and places, and using your hand, eye, and mind to express that in your chosen medium. They are opposites really.
As you’ve said, it’s not only the presence of the human hand, but the intention. That they’re inseparable, really. Do you think the shift away from paper consumption to digital consumption of media, be it comics, literature, or interviews like this one, have shifted how we understand the human intention and presence behind their production? I wonder if this digitization has primed us, removed us even further away from Benjamin’s “aura” of the object,3 perhaps, so we’ve become conditioned to accept the empty mark of an AI on a faux painting or comic as “real.”
That shift from analog to digital is interesting, and one that has only taken a few decades. In the history of mankind, and how we think of culture and the sharing of ideas, it’s very sudden, and again, accounts for our bewildered state at the start of the 21st century. It’s probably a good shift, since we have to stop making so much stuff, using so much energy. But then the energy needed to keep the data alive, huge life support systems buried underground and offshore, is no less harmful. And when the power goes off, that’s it - if it’s not backed up, or if the backup fails, and they all eventually fail, it’s gone. The Mona Lisa will still be gently knowingly smiling. It’s a strange shift of awareness of things.
Going back to semiotics, the physical symbols of books are powerful. The smell of the ink and paper, the touch of the surface, it was living wood. The staples or binding, automated but based on human ingenuity solving problems, the act of turning pages, folding time, the clear sense of how far through the life of the story you are, measured across the width of the book, and the fact that it sits on my shelf and as I glance at it, it reminds me of those days reading it, the lives in the book and the life of the writer, that time in my life, where I was, what I did, who I loved, what music I was listening to, all in a glance. My bookshelf is my alternate autobiography. So then the digital signification of everything being just binary code, 1s and 0s, infinitely cloneable, yet strangely insubstantial, as if it doesn’t really exist, or count, or mean anything. AI-'created' things are the ultimate expression of that. I’m sure that feeling is a product of the time I’ve lived in, and future generations won’t have this attachment to physicality, but will they also not have the same attachment to reality? My kids’ generation values experiences over things. That’s a nice shift, and seems to have a deeper connection to cosmic time: we’re here for a good time, not a long time. But I will miss the physical expression of the human imagination; again, choosing between fantasy and reality, I will always choose reality. If we don’t start doing that as a species, we’re lost.
Well, you’ve left us a very real book in this beautiful two-volume retrospective. When you were piecing it together and looking back on the many projects you had worked on, was there a sense of nostalgia? Was it strange condensing all of your work into those 600 pages?
I started it as a lockdown project in 2020, so it’s taken a while to go through everything. I don’t like looking back really, but I had to do that for this book, so yes, it kicked up a lot of memories, a lot of things I’d put to the back of my mind, another reason for the title. I think mostly it softened my extreme positions on things. Projects I’d regularly dismissed as completely worthless, I was happy to see some good youthful struggle within, and some good seeds sown for later work. Others that I remember as being successful, with a little distance, had their own problems, so rather than my more chaotic sense of what was going on at the time, everything was tempered and moved towards a developmental line over the years that was quite easy to see. I tried to include examples of everything, even my old art school work. There are a handful of things I left out completely, but even projects I’d be happy to scrub from my CV are represented by something. Some days I couldn’t find anything I wanted to include. Other days I could have gone on for another few hundred pages.
It is unsettling to see your whole working life go by in one book. I’m not sure what it all adds up to really; certainly only a small amount of it really represents me and my view of the world, I’ve managed to up that percentage a lot in the last decade. It’s pointless having any regrets, as everything taught me something, was enjoyable along the way, and led on to other things. I remember that my wife used to say that my work was my family, but that’s not true. My family is my family, and the work is something else, a parallel life, it is my therapy, my place to put my obsessions, passions, anger and questions, I feel very lucky to have that. It is a grand distraction from the darkness of life; I have a depressive side, so the work keeps that at bay. I tend to dwell on the mistakes, the bad experiences - I remember the bad reviews, and instantly forget the good ones. So the forgotten emotions were mostly very happy ones, I had a great time making almost all the work in the book, I laughed a lot, enjoyed the company of my colleagues a lot. It’s important not to forget that, or take it all for granted.
* * *
- Baudrillard, Jean. The System of Objects. Translated by James Benedict, Verso, 2006, p. 108.
- Salmon, Christian. Storytelling: Bewitching the Modern Mind. Translated by David Macey, Verso, paperback edition, 2017.
- Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings. Edited by Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, Oxford University Press, 1999, pp. 731–51.
