Dave McKean brought a whole new sensibility to comics in 1987 when he collaborated with Neil Gaiman on the graphic novel Violent Cases. In this McKean placed beautiful and precise rendering against raw, primitive mark-making and collage, creating a unified work out of these contradictory elements. He subsequently collaborated with Gaiman on DC's Black Orchid, Signal to Noise, and the covers of Sandman. He and Grant Morrison teamed up to create Arkham Asylum, and McKean is in the middle of his solo series, Cages, for Tundra, and a new graphic novel with Neil Gaiman, Mr. Punch. Interviewing McKean is Dr. Leo John de Freitas. De Freitas, a well-known historian of illustration and graphic design, met McKean when the latter was in art school. De Freitas recalls advising McKean then not to take up drawing comic books for a living. Despite this, they have remained friends.

DR. LEO JOHN DE FREITAS: Cages is your most recent and clearly most personal statement in comics to date. Tell me something about its development and where you think it might go.

DAVE McKEAN: Well, prior to this I've only really been working with writers as a collaboration, and apart from everything, it has taught me a lot about the mechanics of writing. It has also meant that I've been working in other people's worlds, really, and no matter how much of a collaboration it is, it's still somebody else's territory. And I'd reached the point with all my work — the music and illustration and photography and everything, where I wanted to try and describe my own world. And I think that's what I had always hoped comics would be for me: a place in which I could belong. I thought comics was it, but it has turned out not to be.

LJD: Why is that? Are these commercial reasons?

DM: Partly. I mean, I'm quite happy keeping my fingertips in the commercial arena, but I have to work elsewhere as well, the mainstream, for example. And by "commercial," I suppose I mean genre work, and by "mainstream" I mean general fiction, the books I'm doing for Gollancz, for example — Signal to Noise, Mr. Punch. Some people wouldn't draw the distinction between commercial and personal work that I do, saying they've never had to do "commercial" work, i.e. just for the money. I think that just means their work fits into the genre world, and as such, you can probably criticize its ambition but not its integrity in those terms.

LJD: I'd have thought that there was an inherent problem then in comics — just to divert for a moment — that most of the young people I know who are interested in comics are interested in them as an expression of a personal world, and yet it is a big marketplace, and there must be a mismatch for some people, but it needn't be a mismatch for everyone. They are not necessarily incompatible; you can have a personal view of comics and fit into the commercial mode too, can't you?

DM: Well, I can only really say that for some people, you can. From the visual point of view, this particular style that genre comics have developed over the years is very restrictive. And for me, all the things I look for in a good drawing are not there.

DM: Which is ... It's one of the main reasons why I realize I don't belong. When I'm talking to people, I realize we're talking about completely different things when we're talking even about even about something as basic as "good drawing." This slick line style has nothing to do with drawing as far as I'm concerned. It's one of those things I always thought was obvious. I always look for a degree of fight in a drawing. Somebody observing something or having something an mind and fighting to get the absolute ...

LJD: The essence ...

DM: ... raw essence of it down on paper, and you have a fight on your hands. And I look for those marks going down raw for the first time, not refined and formularized over a period of years, but going down directly and unrefined that first time. I thought that was obvious. Whether commissioned/commercial or personal, good drawing is good drawing. And the development of drawing in the 20th century has brought out certain defining features, like "fight" — like an emotional value to the line having some resonance with the emotional value of the content of the image; the abstract qualities having a direct relation with the image.

LJD: That's quite a rare quality in drawing, and it's something we associate with good art. Perhaps it's too much to ask in an industry like comics; perhaps it's too much to ask to see that as frequently as you suggest you ought to see it.

DM: Well I can understand why you don't see it often, because it's a bloody difficult thing to do. And it's for that reason that ... This word "art" gets slung around a lot, and I've never presumed to be an artist or what I do to be art ...

LJD: What do you see yourself doing?

DM: Well, I used to say "illustration," which I still do frequently — book covers and record covers and such. But the comics are hardly commissioned jobs, so at the moment I'm just doing drawings and paintings, and the moniker of "art" is something that has to be earned and is applied in retrospect. But the reason why I consider art as something to aspire to, as opposed to ... One definition, which is: everything that isn't food-related or sex-related or shelter-related is art. Which is quite nice and broad, but actually just takes any meaning away from the word ...

LJD: Yes, it waters it down too far.

LJD: I'd have thought you're the last sort of person to hesitate using the word "profound," really, because you are a thinking man's comic artist, and with Cages, a thinking man's comic writer. So let's go back to Cages as a personal vision. How did you get into that?

DM: Well, as far as the mechanics of it go, it came out of a number of writings, short pieces over the years. As far as realizing that they were all the same thing, that really came about through this need to create a world I could relate to, but also to anchor it to the real world. But my trouble is that I've had quite a plain background, really ...

LJD: You mean uneventful?

DM: It was pretty uneventful. I didn't grow up in a difficult family, or in a war zone or something, where these tremendous formative times can impact your work for the rest of your life, almost defining what you are — which, incidentally, I think can be dangerous. I had a very happy childhood in very neutral surroundings. But there was one singular event which mas catastrophic for me, and I didn't want to get obsessive or morbid about it, but I did keep returning to it, and that was my dad dying when I was fourteen. Just at the time when you need to start talking about things. And ever since then, I've felt very aware of death being around. And it's not a morbid thing at all — it's actually quite motivating.

LJD: But Cages isn't about death?

LJD: Right. So it's not autobiographical in a literal sense.

DM: No, the emotions are autobiographical. And my own questions as to whether I could ever make anything that was important went into the artist's story, so I tried to crystallize the hope and despair of doing anything creative into one man making one painting.

LJD: The artist is in some ways the central character, but you've created some quite memorable secondary characters — the old lady on her own, for example. I found that, and I mean it in a nice way, pathetic — one's heart went out to her in a way, and it's not dramatic or demonstrative, but God knows how many people live like that. I heard on the radio the other day, they think that by the year 2000, 50% of households in Britain will be lonely households. And I thought you'd dealt with that very sympathetically. These are observational skills, surely.

LJD: Are there more characters still to be introduced?

DM: Not really. They all have greater or smaller significance to the whole. Writing seems to be a real tightrope walk. I'm sure this old news to all the writers who do this all the time, but this is certainly news to me. Balancing between being obvious and opaque. How many threads to tie. How to keep the overall shape tense. I can only talk about writing in visual terms, really; the shape has to be an angular, tense shape, not smooth and even.

LJD: To give it interest.

LJD: Whenever I've done any writing, I find I'm often surprised when I get to the end. Have you experienced that as well?

LJD: Metaphorically. You don't have a flow chart up on the wall ...

LJD: Oh, you do have something mechanical like that?

DM: Yes, so these plot points are then in place. But exactly how I get from point to point is really left up to the vagaries of the moment. And since I've been on this thing for a year and a half now, the journeys between points have changed considerably.

LJD: It sounds like a definition of that saying, "It's not necessarily the destination that matters ..."

LJD: Yes, that's a good point. It struck me that the reader of Cages must make an effort in a way that with a traditional comic book they wouldn't.

LJD: So what sort of work do you enjoy at the moment?

LJD: What you seem to be describing is a state of intellectual curiosity. Intellectual/emotional. You get a gut reaction to something and say, "I must know more."

LJD: So what specifically are they?

DM: Well, there's a body of work that ... The best way to describe it is — there's this sax player called Jan Garbarek, comes from Norway. He plays a European, folk song-influenced jazz, and he says about his work, "You might say that I live in a spiritual neighborhood which is scattered geographically around the world." There are all sorts of people working with all manner of media — there's a filmmaker called Andrei Tarkovsky who, together with the Estonian composer, Arvo Part, act as the spiritual father figures of the neighborhood. Unfortunately Tarkovsky died recently, but I bumped into Part on a plane going to Berlin — I couldn't believe it. So, there's those guys. Other filmmakers like Theo Angelopoulos and Sergei Paradgenov, animators like the Quay Brothers, artists like Russell Mills and Janez Bernik ...

LJD: And how do you discover these people? Spending a lot of time looking and reading and listening?

LJD: A fellow feeling of spirit or soul, or formal solutions to the arts?

LJD: Is there romanticism which runs through this work?

DM: Yes, but not the sugary, twee, pre-Raphaelite romanticism which I really can't stand — endless knights and drapey women. It's much more of a raw, passionate human romanticism, even eroticism. It's certainly not very British.

LJD: But would, say, Turner appeal ...

LJD: When I mentioned romanticism, I don't just mean the positive side, but also the attraction to the darker side, the gothic side. You mentioned Tarkovsky ... I was thinking of Solaris. In a way, there is that haunting quality which, personally, I found quite erotic — waiting for any moment for something sensual to happen; even though there's a fearfulness in that emptiness, it was charged with energy.

DM: Yes. Also there's a refusal to produce what I've noticed recently in comics, these perfect patterns that fit together like jigsaw puzzles. And they have the attention span of a jigsaw puzzle in as much as for a few hours you're absolutely bloody obsessed with the bloody thing to get it done. And then when it's done, you put it up in the attic for the next ten years. All this work I'm describing refuses to fit together so neatly. If you ask Tarkovsky what this particular image means in one of his films, he doesn't know. He says, "I don't know, but the conjunction of these elements feels right to me. It means something to me and all I hope is it affects other people." I'm making it sound like a club, and it's not like that.

LJD: Well, it can be.

LJD: It's not excluding anybody.

LJD: What must the person who wanted to enter that world, what do you think their mindset should be to appreciate or ... can you identify that?

DM: Well, there's an element that's important, I'd say, and that's making that jump from appreciating literal qualities in drawing — "Does it look like it?" — to the abstract qualities. Not just does it look like it, but does it feel like it? Would the lines which describe it, if they were taken out of context, still be filled with the emotion of the subject? That's probably the most important element, this connection with the abstract qualities. Not just in art, but in everything.

LJD: You're talking about a very subtle world to enter. And I'd personally think it's the most rewarding world, ultimately.

LJD: Yes, but what I'm leading to is, in a way, Cages has this subtlety, and this seems to be in direct contrast with so much comic book art and text. The comic book has come out of whatever closet it was in — adolescence, fantasy, whatever — and yet I feel it's yet to come of age. It still hasn't delivered. In fact, I almost feel there's been a regression, looking at recent comics. It has yet to fulfill the promise it seemed to offer, and one of the reasons, I feel, is it's failed to engage with the subtleties of life, which is to say, the mature side of life.

LJD: Barefoot Gen ...

DM: Yes, I'd agree with you. It's probably another reason why I feel excluded from the comics world. I feel that comics have been misused for the last 50 years. The action/adventure genre is far better served by Hollywood these days. It's a far more visceral experience — sitting in a movie theater with hundreds of other people, being hit by such a sensual experience. It's very difficult for a comic to compete with that, and most importantly, there's no reason why it should, because the intrinsic qualities of a comic would lead in entirely the opposite direction. There's nothing more intimate than a comic. It has the direct one-to-one relationship with its reader that a novel has, but also a visual intimacy, especially when the drawings have the simplicity and directness of a postcard or handwritten letter. This describes a medium ideally suited to very introverted ideas.

LJD: In this context, comparing comics with other media, there was a debate around a year ago that comics had no boundaries. There was no reason why any thought couldn't be handled by the comic book. Do you subscribe to that?

LJD: Do you? You don't have reservations like I do, that perhaps there are certain explorations of life that can't be handled by a comic book?

LJD: It's just not subtle enough.

DM: You'd have to define what a comic is. If the definition refers to the style of the drawing, or the text, or the word balloons with little arrows pointing down, then I'd agree with you, and you don't even have to head out for the rarified atmosphere of human explorations — just look at any attempts to be serious with superheroes to see the limitations. They just come off as silly and pretentious. But that's a definition of comics I don't subscribe to. I see comics as a unique art form when it fuses static images, so it doesn't rely on film for its vocabulary, which I'd have to say Cages does, to a large extent, and narrative. When these two basic elements complement each other, comics become another quite separate language. Unfortunately, it's still the art form with the stupidest name.

LJD: [laughs] Well, even accepting your definition of comics, which I do, I think I still have reservations until I see this exploration of comic book language. And I think, like film, it's going to have to come from personally committed creators, even personally financed maybe ...

DM: Certainly. That's something in comics' favor — they're relatively cheap. Anyone can photocopy — even desktop publish — a comic, but it has to be absorbed into the culture at a significant level somehow. It's true that a Wim Wenders movie plays to a fraction of the audience of a Schwarzenegger movie, but it is accessible by most people; the distribution and audience is there.

LJD: Yes, I would also say that there is critical debate in film, which doesn't exist in comics or in illustration generally. There's only a handful of books, aren't there?

DM: Well, I don't know about the books ... I'm sure the editors of [The Comics Journal] would probably take issue with you — I think they would assume the role of critical debate and I think they do. It's the one magazine that does.

LJD: But it's not on the bookshelves.

DM: No, and even this one is only one voice. This magazine has a particular editorial stance which I have a lot of sympathy with, but I also feel excluded from. It's an American magazine, so it doesn't cover most of the work I value in comics. It takes as its basic principle the idea that most of the worthy comics around now have evolved from the American underground scene, and are now being cultivated by the Manhattan art scene, neither of which I have any contact with. I'm English, European, and of an age where underground comics don't mean anything to me, beyond a historical context. I like RAW and a few others, but most of it doesn't affect me to any great degree, so I feel excluded from this magazine as well.

LJD: So you're isolated not only by your feelings about what comics should be, but also culturally. Comics are not accepted on equal terms with literature and art and even thought some exceptions exist, like Maus, my fear for that book particularly is in dealing with its subject matter in the way it does — I think it takes on a novelty dimension.

LJD: I'm thinking in terms of extending the awareness of what comic books can do. Those that are on the edge will only be attracted to it through its novelty value.

LJD: I agree. So as for a perception of comics-goers, what particular problems do you face working for comics? How do comics help or arrest your development as a creative person?

LJD: Are you talking about Arkham Asylum?

LJD: Well, teaching in art schools as I do, Arkham Asylum is well-respected by art students, and I know that you are less than excited by your contribution to it, and when I tell the students that, they are unbelievably shocked by it. They can't believe it.

DM: Well, I've become very aware that what I saw as the qualities in the book — the turning of everything into a symbol and away from the literal, and some of the storytelling ideas — are largely ignored; and the excessive illustrated content, the least important part as far as I'm concerned, was being focused on. So I took that as a fault in the book, really.

LJD: But you are a comic illustrator. Why is that the least important part?

DM: It's the most distracting because of the amount of time it takes to make the images, compared to the amount of time you should spend reading them: it was so far apart. What you get is a series of full stops, rather than in Cages, an easy flow from one image to the next. Plus it's a Batman comic. It has too weak a foundation to withstand all the fancy clothes and clobber we put on top of it.

LJD: But Arkham Asylum was an attempt to broaden out the Batman theme.

LJD: Right. So do you think Cages is entirely opposite to Arkham Asylum in its intention? Do you think you've explored all the areas between the two?

LJD: They're not? I mean, on the one hand you've got a superhero, albeit a damaged one, and on the other, a group of very ordinary, very understandable people.

LJD: And drawing?

LJD: Without the color.

LJD: It was Clare Leighton, the English wood engraver from the 40s, who would talk about black and white being the intellectual dimension and color the emotional dimension. She thought that an artist would have to work much more carefully in order to evoke emotion in black and white, and so it also demands more of its audience.

DM: Possibly. I really think it just comes down to the amount of time it takes. Simple direct drawing, when it's good, seems to allow comics to work at their very highest levels. Now, I'm not saying that's what Cages is doing. I think the cinematic element in Cages is maybe not something to concentrate on in the future.

LJD: Visual as well as verbal?

DM: Perhaps both. There are a few novelists who have been influential, but it's mostly been good movie and television writing, as well as observation of dialogue around me, that has informed Cages. I don't know what the ideal form of text for comics will turn out to be for me.

LJD: That's interesting. I know in children's book publishing at the moment, there's plenty of good illustrative talent around, but they're looking for texts. Is it the same for comics?

LJD: And have something to say.

LJD: Okay, so what are you working on currently? Cages still, presumably?

LJD: But that's quite old, isn't it?

DM: It was originally serialized in the Face magazine in 1989, but we've added new material in order to try and deal more with the internal world of the filmmaker at the center of the book, and also try to evoke that elusive "Chinese whispers" quality of a mind turned inward.

LJD: It seemed that you have quite a difficult task with that book in dealing with the element of "noise," since the unimportant or unintelligible parts of a work are usually dismissed by critics and audience as excessive or pretentious, yet these elements, by the nature of the book, had to be dealt with.

DM: Exactly. Elements of the book were there specifically to act as signal for some people, and noise for others. What it has proved to me, talking to people and seeing reviews of the book, is that people don't like noise. It goes back to that work I was describing as being "half-seen," or emotionally understood rather than intellectually understood. As long as something is emotionally compelling, I'll live with aspects of the work being unresolved quite happily. People seem to want answers in art rather than questions or experiences.

LJD: Are you finding any answers in terms of trying to define comics for yourself with these books?

DM: Well, I'm doing a book of short stories called Pictures That Tick, or short "pieces," I should say, experiments with the medium, and a few more ... a few straight short stories, but told in ways I think comics work to their best advantage. I'm also doing another book with Neil called Mr. Punch, which is shaping up well.

LJD: That's as in "... and Judy"?

LJD: What do you mean?

DM: Well, I see the words working in counterpoint to the pictures, and the whole book is structured like a canon, you know? A theme is illustrated in pictures, and then picked up later in words or whatever, but these counterpoint rhythms are built up. I'm glad I'm not seeing these things in cinematic terms so much now. At the moment, though, I'm really just interested in developing the avant garde. I think comics have little credibility because there isn't an avant garde. They rely for their visual language on other forms, usually other commercial forms, illustration and T.V., pulp fiction, etc. Comics are several stages removed from where the ideas they use originate.

LJD: I think I'd take issue with you that illustration doesn't have an avant garde.

DM: Well, illustration is generally more interesting. There are a few who have managed to blur the distinctions between their work. Russell Mills is an obvious one. Sue Coe. But nearly all illustration and all comics, with the honorable exception of RAW, rely on appropriating the avant garde art world for its ideas.

LJD: But painters rely on other painters for ideas. It's constant development; nothing's created in a vacuum.

DM: True, but the development in painting takes place many years ahead of its commercial parasites. I really feel for people like the abstract expressionists who absolutely single-bloody-mindedly committed themselves to a view of art and life that nobody wanted. They were fanatical about their ideas. They weren't even particularly tolerant of everybody else. We're right, you're wrong. And you almost have to be that selfish. That's what I'm trying to do right now, rejecting elements I don't think work, concentrating on ones that do.

LJD: Right. So what you seem to be suggesting, in a way, is that there may be some a priori form for comics that people like yourself are trying to discover. You may be surprised to find it's an obvious art form. Winsor McCay was breaking it in 1904, that sort of thing.

Take McCay as a case in point: if you go back 20 years in Britain to Ally Sloper's Half Holiday, you can definitely see that McCay is a comic book artist. The illustrators of Ally Sloper's Half Holiday were an amalgam of caricatural printmakers, illustrators, quasi-comic book ... and it was a mess. Formally it wasn't working. McCay was one of those early ... I'll give you a case in point: when I put up a slide of Winsor McCay from 1904, and I ask students to date it, usually they're about 30 years out. The most adventurous will say the 30s. To say the 50s or 60s is not uncommon. No one can believe it's 1900.

There's a parallel here. The French historian Lucian Febvre said in his book, The Coming of the Book, that one of the most fascinating things is that printers got the aesthetics of the book right on the first 50 years of printing. And these books do look beautiful. They're a tremendous example of form following function. Then we spent 400 years fucking it up.

LJD: And you wonder whether the comic format got it right early on. And the fact that it was basically a graphic medium, as opposed to what you're suggesting is going wrong with comics at the moment, that they've become too illustrative. There is a built-in problem with most art forms and most artifacts when they gather momentum and become successful, to keep out of the clutches of over-refinement.

LJD: Yes, but don't you think this is perhaps where you can despair about our audience? At the end of the day the audience is supporting this trend.

DM: Maybe. I can't help feeling that if you make something that is direct and honest, people will respond. And not just that, but they'll be the things in their lives that they most treasure. Most people enjoy fun, escapist movies, but the ones they consider to be lifetime favorites are often the ones they discovered themselves and have found important truths within. And if they've had to work at it and have found a doorway into understanding it themselves, so much the better.

LJD: That's right. There's an amusing bit of Portnoy's Complaint where that happens to a girl, a character who considers herself quite dumb, and I think it's Portnoy himself who reads a poem and explains it a little bit and she goes bananas. She's understood a poem! When you recognize that emotion in something ... Huckleberry Finn really took me by storm when I read it as an adult. It's correct that Hemingway and Kerouac should admire that book because on one level it's a simple adventure story; on another it's a profound philosophical study of a boy who believes he is damned because he's helping a slave escape. He's breaking every convention, every value of the community out of which he comes, and yet he feels what he's doing is right. Even though he knows what he's doing is wrong, he feels what he's doing is right. And that war between the intellect and the emotion is what we're always about ... And why the hell are we on to Huckleberry Finn?!

LJD: I've got a point here that I must ask you because I get asked the question frequently myself: What advice would you give a young person who contemplates a career in comics?

DM: Well, maybe now there's a new generation of people whose interest in comics is developed after childhood, maybe at art school for instance. But still, most of the people I see at conventions are fans in varying degrees from childhood. I was myself. I read comics as a kid. And so I'd always say, go to art school and put the comics to one side, if only to take a step back, because there's something about things you love as a kid that blind you to their actual qualities and faults. So, I'd say try everything else.

LJD: In order to broaden your base.

DM: Yes. The more knowledge you have, the more you have to draw from. It's common sense. And I think the skills you need to do comics are certainly related to all the things you'd do at art school. Comics may require a peculiar arrangement of those skills, but they are related.

LJD: And you place great emphasis on drawings?

DM: I suppose that's quite a personal thing. I place huge emphasis on drawing, but some would say that cartoonists don't need to be able to draw. They work out a simple direct code with which to communicate their ideas, and it's the ideas that are important. But for the comics that I'm interested in doing, the visual observation is as important as the conceptual observation, so I need the drawing to be sharp, and that's my definition of drawing. Remember, I'm not talking about style or technique or even often literal accuracy. I'm talking about emotional accuracy. And the problem is the amount of drawing skills you can learn from existing comics is tiny. They are restrictive and self-referential and there are seminal places to get the information outside comics, even if you want to draw like someone else who works in comics. So just absorb everything. Play. You've got four years without commercial pressure, so play.

LJD: Yes, but I know you were a hard-working student ...

LJD: Well, compared with other students, you were.

DM: Well, I got to the end of the course — literally the last few weeks — before something finally happened. And as I walked out the door, as they were handing me my bit of paper, I was saying, "Hang on, I know what you were talking about now!" But it's too late. So I left the course in exactly the right frame of mind to start it.

LJD: But you had to work at it. It's not simply an act of osmosis, is it?

LJD: [laughs] So a degree of humility is needed.

LJD: And you'll be able to penetrate, from what you were saying earlier about being uncritical about what you like, after this period you're going te be able to go back and be critical ...

DM: Yes, and if you're going to spend your life in a particular discipline, you have to be ruthlessly critical. You're not just an audience anymore, you have to dissect not only the stuff you liked as a kid and now mostly dismiss, but also the work you most admire. I mean, at the moment I most admire Lorenzo Mattotti, Art Spiegelman, Richard Sala, Kent Williams, Raul Fernandez, a handful of others, but even these I have to pull apart and decide what works and what doesn't.

LJD: And that's the learning process. I've never understood why students are often critical of the fact that when I like something I analyze it. To me, I can't understand why, if they like something, they don't want to know why it works. There just might be ... there just might be the key to the meaning of life in there. That's my optimistic view. If something really gets to be and operates at a gut level, I'll bring intellect in to rationalize why this gut is responding so wonderfully to this thing. And one's always hoping to find the key to the universe, an explanation of life.

LJD: Absolutely.

DM: "I just want to do it." And all the people in the audience who also can't articulate what it is they do or aspire to cheer at that, "Great, we just do what we do. We don't have to think about it." And, "We don't have to take responsibility for its effects, either."

LJD: That's right. There is an "irresponsible" or "uncourageous" stance in taking that view. The courageous person, like you were saying about the abstract expressionists, stood by what they wanted to do, and they explained to themselves and to others, they didn't just say, "It works, I like it, man," you know? You've got to feel that the only real forward moving progress is going to be in the hands of those who are able to honestly face up to the sharp light of questioning of what they do. So anyway, what you're saying is build up a broad framework of skills and experience, build up a critical framework, and then in all honesty, still in support of the comics medium, come back and analyze it.

LJD: And not necessarily find it easy.

DM: Not necessarily. Me and Neil were lucky in the respect of our timing. Alan Moore and friends had opened a lot of doors that we, and others, gladly entered. But, I hope, Neil could write, and I could draw. Those opportunities are still around, but you have to be able to act on them. I said before, I'm in rather a fortunate position just at the moment, having cultivated a small audince for my work, hopefully beyond genre or anything else. I'm very envious of someone like Woody Allen who has this "long-term" relationship with filmmaking. The financiers put up the money every year. They don't ask what it will be. They just trust him. None of them make a loss; some make a small profit, some larger. His audience goes up and down, but basically trust him, so over the years it's a long-term investment in a single person's imagination.

LJD: And that, you feel, is where you are at, too?

DM: That is what I hope I have now, and what I hope to cultivate in the future, and what I'd wish for anyone hoping to get into comics. I'm most interested in seeing what these people have to say, seeing what ideas they have and how they can illuminate the world. I'm fascinated by getting inside somebody's head, so I'm hoping they can get to that stage, where they will have an audience that will support them. That's all I hope for comics, generally, really. As an industry generally, everyone will win in that situation. It's an all-win situation, because it's the marginal, minority, personally-committed work that inspires everyone. It's Real World, Peter Gabriel's record label which promotes folk and traditional music from around the world, that fires Gabriel himself, and allows him to multi-million selling records. It's a mutual all-win situation.

Scorsese and Coppola and most of the rest wouldn't have this passion for the cinema if it weren't for personally committed small-scale filmmaking outside of the mainstream commercial world. Coppola himself sees one of the greatest hopes for the future of quality filmmaking as being the widespread availability of cheap personal videocameras.

LJD: Right. Well, I wanted to end with something that could probably take up the rest of the evening, but anyway ... Despite a conservative and sometimes reactionary mindset of many powerful Western cultures during the past decade or so, we may, I think, be experiencing an assault on the accepted values and ideas of culture. Now clearly the new comics are part of this assault. I wondered do you have any thoughts on this? Do you think it's good or bad? Do you think there are dangers in the broadening of what constitutes culture? I mean, there are those that would say that if you lose the boundaries of the "novel," "opera," etc., and you try to bring "Hollywood film," "comics," you're fragmenting culture.

LJD: In Greek times, yes.

LJD: That's a nice analogy, talking about it broadening and broadening, but the fear seems to be that what starts out as a popular art form is appropriated ...

DM: I think justifiably so. I always think it's more worthwhile constantly questioning something rather than just giving up and making a statement yea or nay. This is another main thread in Cages, my feelings toward religion. I find organized religion elicits exactly that response. It must be appealing to wake up one morning and say, "I believe." I don't want to talk about it anymore. "What happens after I die?" Who cares? "What's it all about?" Forget it, I believe! Doesn't that seem to be a great weight off your mind? But the weight seems to take the mind with it when it goes. You have to keep your brain working, keep reassessing.

LJD: So what you're really saying is it's not so much we shouldn't have any fear about the broadening of culture. There's no danger there. Where there may be danger is if it's an unthoughtful, knee-jerk reaction to creating anything. There's got to be reflection, there's got to be a statement.

LJD: Yes ... novelty.

DM: At least you're able to answer that person in his terms. I may not like most of the highly conceptual art that's being hung in galleries at the moment, but I feel I need to understand it and give it the benefit of the doubt so I can answer it in its own terms. It's a problem I have with friends of mine who are illustrators and feel they'd like to make the step to being painters, or "artists" ...

LJD: Why don't they feel like they're artists now?

DM: Erm ... I think we all have our own different reasons. I don't think I am because ... well, I'm interested in the avant garde primarily as the place where the ideas are. I think that the commercial work, illustration, whatever, then appropriates those ideas and refines them and very occasionally even uses them more eloquently, but they are not originating those ideas, that language. I think comics are capable of originating a language. Maybe, if push came to shove, I actually prefer Marshal Arisman's illustrations to Francis Bacon's paintings, yet Arisman relies heavily on Bacon for his visual language. Maybe the factor I prefer is him. Maybe I prefer Arisman as a person to Bacon as a person, and that's the element that makes the difference...

LJD: Again, we're talking about a concept of integrity, or perhaps not just integrity alone ... Clearly in Arisman it is the person as well as the artwork which matters, and it's probably a good note to end on, because again, it's a humanist note. We've been talking about art, illustration, almost in danger of divorcing it from the human experience, and it isn't. That which we would both agree, even if it's different artworks, that which we'd agree had meant something to us has had a relationship with life. Not just with the painting or canvas or media, but with life. It has some meaning. It helps us make sense.

1993 Comics Journal Interview

interview by Dr. Leo John de Freitas, from The Comics Journal #155, January 1993