1997 Comics Journal Interview

DAVE McKEAN: I was looking at all sorts of things. I have always picked up comics, and as a kid, I think, I was given comics initially. And they'd be run of the mill stuff. In England, you used to get reprints of American comics so there'd be those. There'd also be Warren magazines like Creepy and Eerie and stuff like that. Which would print all kinds of bits and bobs from around Europe and from South American artists.

There's never been much of an industry in England. There's always been one or two comics. I was never one to pick up 2000 A.D. or any of the English comics. I don't know why. They just never appealed. And I've always sort of bobbed around a bit. I mean, as a kid I liked traditional sort of, I suppose Marvel Comics they were at the time. And then just bobbed around. I remember picking up odd things like E-Man. And I remember picking up Haunted. There was a place that sold — what would they be? — Charlton Comics, or something like that. Then I found Heavy Metal and more European comics. Again, I'd stay with them for a few months and see what else was around.

DM: No, not at all. No. Everything was some reprint package or another. So the first I saw was Heavy Metal. Umm... and then later on, trips to Europe, I'd start to see odd things. Very little, to be honest. There'd be one or two newsstands in England, little news agents, together with the newspapers and magazines who would have a bottom rack of assorted stuff. Often discounted and, I mean, bulk shipped; I got the feeling that this stuff was shoved in packing boxes around the important stuff, you know. It ended up on the bottom shelf selling for sixpence.

DM: Yeah, they were beaten up. So that was it, really. And I had no idea which comics belonged to which company, none of that. It was just "stuff." And I never really knew what was going to be there the next week.

DM: I have odd memories of it, really, because I don't have some sort of abiding memory of one thing or one character or one artist that I followed at all. Unlike film, where I do remember seeing a film or something on television that really stayed with me. My attitude has changed to them, but I still love some of those films. So, you know, film and television stuff has really stayed with me in a way comics haven't... you know, I really wasn't paying attention to artists' names, so I wouldn't know if the next week's comics were by the same guy. They were very sort of ephemeral. They just came and went. And I loved them with that sort of ephemeral passion that you get at that age. It's the best thing you've ever seen that week. And then you move on to the next thing.

DM: No, I'm talking about like seven, eight... nine... By the time I was in my teens, I was more involved in music rather than art. So I was playing in bands, and doing that side much more. I always drew. All the time. And would always pick up the odd comic. But by then, I guess I was more interested in music.

DM: It's very hard to say. I really was all over the place, you know? I couldn't give you such a specific answer until I was at art school, really, when I really started to pay attention and draw connections between things and noted what people were doing and why there were doing that. Before that, I really was all over the place. I don't know many people that weren't. I guess most people of that age, if you see it, you like it; if you like what you see, that's that. You don't really question it much. And my family is not from the art world. They're not from the arts at all. These things just appear like magic. I remember my mother not even thinking that this stuff was drawn by people. It's not that she thought it was done by some other method, it just never even occurred to her that people would sit behind drawing boards and draw.

DM: Yeah. It was just never really questioned, really. Films, I guess, are more obviously made by people because there are people in them. There is that sort of connection. But this stuff, newspaper strips, they just appear. People don't actually... and write them? My God, people don't write them.

So, you know, that just wasn't part of my background at all to think about things like that. The stuff that I saw and liked would be all over the place. I remember liking — oh, what would it be? — surrealists like Max Ernst. I remember seeing some Max Ernst paintings. God knows where. And I really liked those. I couldn't explain why. You know, this stuff just hits. Or it doesn't.

DM: No, not really. My father played piano and loved jazz. So that's where that came from. And that's about it, really. There were certain rites of passage I remember as a kid, being allowed to stay up late to watch certain films. Being allowed to watch King Kong and that sort of stuff. So they obviously meant something to my parents. It's tricky, really. Because I've only really talked to my mother about it. Because my dad died so long ago.

DM: No, not so much. I do remember going through a period like that. I think it was a period when I suddenly realized that people did make a living at doing this. And maybe I could possibly do that. Suddenly I remember looking at comics and trying to draw like that. But that wasn't until much later. I mostly remember just drawing people, really. I loved football, so I used to draw, you know, footballers and stuff. I loved films, horror films. I remember drawing movie stars, and that sort of thing.

DM: Yeah, drawing from photographs. We lived quite near the river, and we spent a lot of time on the river. I remember drawing from this little boat we had.

DM: Yes. Completely. It was encouraged by my parents. My father could draw very well, but he was never encouraged, so he was quite keen to encourage me. My teachers have always been great. My teacher in school was terrific. Very, very strange chap, but a brilliant teacher. I once saw an exhibition of his constructions, it was the bizarrest stuff.

Yeah. In fact, all the way through, I happened to come across really good people. Good teachers. Not necessarily great artists or draughtsmen. But it's quite a different discipline to be able to teach.

DM: Yeah, yeah. And to generate that kind of inquiry is a skill all its own. I've just been fortunate to come across people like that.

DM: Well, simple enough really, I could either go the music route or the art route. And I certainly didn't have any intention of going any other route. I mean, I did fine with school generally up until the last couple of years, where I gave up on it, really, and there was no choice. It was either going to be one of those two, and the rest was just getting in the way. Literally getting in the way. Because I started playing in bands in the evenings, so I was very tired in school during the day. And then we'd go off and record stuff. And I'd miss exams and things. And I'd have to... the teachers would obviously say, "You honestly think recording music is more important than your exams." And I'd have to say, "Yes, it really is." So I kind of gave up on school. Not a good thing, I think. But it just happened that way.

And music school seemed to be not really the kind of music that I wanted to do. I had no information to go on. I had nobody advising me. If I had, maybe I would have made a different decision. But as it was, art school seemed to be the right thing to do. I could go to art school, I could do that during the day. I could keep music going in the evening. And, hopefully, find something.

DM: No. It was... at the time, there was a big sort of jazz-funk movement in England. Which is not really something I listen to much anymore. But at the time it was the sort of musician's equivalent of punk. Inasmuch as it was very "street-level." It was small labels, it was musicians just getting up on stage and jamming. It was musically-based rather than socially based, but it was very much... we're sick of having music dictated, in jazz's case, by big established American labels. And "You have to be American and black to play jazz." And just get on with it. Treat jazz as an attitude and not as a place, and just find some sort of Englishness to it. And it was great. It was really... it was a wonderful little scene... and it was only three years, I guess. But it was very energetic. So that's what I was right in the middle of.

I was not playing in big bands, but they were pretty decent bands. We played regularly several times a week. It was just good fun. It was a good grounding. And it was great for me, because I always liked being around older people. I was always the youngest in the band. I was 14, 15, playing with 20-odd-year-olds, 30-year-olds sometimes. The percussionist was 50, I think. So it was just a whole other education as well. It was great fun.

DM: Yeah. I have no pretensions about what we managed to do. It was very basic stuff. But it was the spirit of it that was important. I mean, a lot of the people that were really playing great then have gone on to be some of the best composers and players in England now. It really was a hotbed.

DM: No, they were a nice balance. I think when I was at art school, at least for the first couple of years, I struck a pretty good balance between the two, and there was not much time to pursue anything beyond my required studies for the day and then playing in the evening. Besides, the art school, and the teachers that were there, were basically about breaking down the preconceptions that you went into art school with and starting you from scratch.

I remember my first drawing class, everybody in the class — you know, you're used to being the best drawer in the school, and then you find yourself in a class with people who were also the best drawers in their respective schools. All drawing away, assuming that they're doing really cool stuff. And the tutor just wandering around looking at everything and saying, "Great. We're all obviously having trouble drawing straight lines. So let's start from scratch." And you think, well, "Whoa. Hang on a minute. This isn't what I signed up for." It was a real shock. It was a great shock to everybody. And so just coming to terms with that took a while. I argued incessantly for years there, because I had very set ideas of what I thought I wanted to do. And why wouldn't they just leave me alone to get on and do it?

It's funny: I've taught in art schools since and there is always this little pattern of people, there's always the two or three great ones, they come in great, they get better, and they leave, and you know they'll be great. And there's always a few at the end who you wonder what on earth they're doing there. There's no drive, there's no reason to be there. They don't know what they're doing... there's no hope.

And there's always the great mulch in the middle, who if they work they'll make it, if they don't work, they probably won't make it. And within all that, there's also lots of other little groups. And I was in a recurrent group that is the "I know damn well what I want to do so leave me alone" group.

DM: Well, I was very literal. The stuff I wanted to do was very literal. It was very detailed. I valued things looking right. I tried using an airbrush, and all this kind of stuff. And my pencil drawings were very neat. I just had a very specific idea. I thought literal accuracy was God. And, you know, literal accuracy teaches you a lot. Hand-eye coordination is important. But there was a whole world of other qualities in drawing and everything, really, that I just hadn't touched. I hadn't rejected them. I just hadn't ever been opened up to them.

And so once I started to open up... it took the teachers' persistence, but most of all it took just seeing a few artists' work that I really thought, "Well, this is achieving much more than my stuff is." And initially, quite often it was the violence of it. It was the anger and the powerful emotions that made you think, "Well, this person is really getting to something that you just can't achieve with these very slick, literal pictures." So it took something like that to sort of kick me and move me off course and on to other things.

DM: Sure. One of the first I looked at was a New York artist called Jim Dine. The things that I really liked were his drawings. He just draws. There are a few people, a few painters, artists like Giacometti and Dine who really have just spent a life looking. And they often, well, I mean Dine is a good example, continually draw self-portraits. Endless self-portraits. And it's simply because he's got that face in front of him every day, and he just re-looks and every time there is something he'll see and every day he feels different and you always see that in the drawing.

And also for me at the time he was terribly visceral and he sandblasted, he gets these huge pieces of very, very thick paper, watercolor paper, and sandblasts the surfaces, and makes them very, very rough and ragged and almost wears the paper through in places. He's very, very unconcerned about taping bits on and scratching it away and pulling the paper surface about. Tremendous energy: you really feel like the man is almost sculpting it. I had never seen anything like that before. Turned me around completely.

And then also others like Ralph Steadman, you can't escape in England. His stuff is everywhere, and absolutely wonderful. Terribly funny, and terribly violent. You know, I think he's an object lesson in how to draw. Every line is doing a job. He never makes a line that isn't fully needed to describe something. It's full emotional weight. He's done a book of dogs, and every dog, every line on every dog is telling you something about the nature of that dog. It's full of feeling, full of all kinds of information, not just literal information. So he was great.

And others as well. Francis Bacon as well. And others.

DM: Yeah.

DM: Yes. In art school, particularly, I liked Klimt. And then the further I got through art school, starting to work two or three years after leaving art school, I preferred Schiele. I still loved his landscapes a lot. But,the very, very decorative gold-leaf stuff, I've gone off it to a degree. I mean, it's wonderful, and he's an incredible draughtsman. But the more I looked at Schiele's stuff, the more he seemed to communicate. His state of mind I was fascinated by. His line work is just haunting. I can't really think of words to describe it. You have to look at them. I don't know anybody who draws better, ultimately. Through art school and since, I've looked at anything and everything I can get my hands on and you know, looking at those drawings, I just have never seen better. Just extraordinary.

It's very hard, really. It's very hard when you see something like that. And you think, "Well, that's it, really. He's done it." Part of what I do is drawing things, and here's this man who's made these perfect drawings. It's hard to block that out. It's hard to deliberately find something else, when you know damn well it's not going to be as good. Or, that's what you feel. So he's hard to shake.

DM: Yeah, I was in art school from '82 to '86.

DM: It was in England. The Berkshire College of Art and Design. It's just outside London.

DM: I was on a design course. Which involved a year of play, and doing anything: drawing, painting, photography, printing... conceptualizing as well as advertising and marketing and very commercial things. And then the second year was more of the same, but trying to hone down and decide what you wanted to do for years three and four. And I ended up staying and doing design, although I actually ended up doing very little design. I did illustration more, and video, and audio-visuals.

DM: I am surprised you say that, really. My impression of, especially illustration teaching in American art schools, has always been that it's almost completely grounded in figure drawing and basic drawing skills. It's only been in the last few years that I've noticed more and more conceptual illustrators coming along.

In England, there's still a big hangover, really, from pop art. A lot of the tutors and, I think, my tutor was certainly one, were in the pop art movement in the '60s. And so there was less importance placed on drawing, and much more emphasis on ideas. When I was going through art school, the designer was God. And the illustrator is just wallpaper, really. So they tried to convince you of that. "If you want to be where the ideas are, if you want to have some sort of conceptual control over your work, you have to be a designer." And if you want to spend your life as an illustrator, you will always be working on other people's ideas. Which, to a point, I can see. I certainly have friends who learned that to their cost. Being a craftsman is great and admirable, but after a while, there's this huge frustration that you don't have that much control over what you are doing. And you're relentlessly being asked to do something over and over again, because pigeonholing is the easiest thing to do. So no, there was a good foundation in conceptual work.

As it happens, again, I have to come back to this, I've really been very lucky with the bunch of people that I've come across. I happened to have a really good design tutor, who was big on ideas, and big on heavily conceptualizing everything. And I had a very unusual drawing teacher, inasmuch as the two subjects that he taught were drawing and semiotics. So on the one hand, there was this sort of primal love of basic looking and understanding and putting down a mark and the beauty of the mark, and just explaining a body. These very basic, basic qualities. And these semiotic classes, which would just be nuts. He was a heavy Hitchcock fanatic, and either we'd just go off into the realms of well, fantasy-land — and we all loved it, because we all thought... suddenly the world is filled with layers and layers of meaning. And that's a great state of mind to take away with you. And it makes you very rigorous with your work. It makes you, no matter what you draw, no matter what you put down into a piece, you have to explain every line of it. Why is that there, why did you make that piece of blue there? You have to be really vigorous about it. You can't say, "Well, I don't know." You'd get raised eyebrows. And you have to think on your feet. If you just put it there because you liked it, you have to come up with reasons.

DM: Yes. That's basically my background. Everything is full of meaning to the brim. And it's not only full of the meanings you intended, it's also full of the meanings that others extract from it. It's part of your job to be as aware of those possibilities as you can. But ultimately you have to realize that you're only providing 50 percent of the experience and the other 50 percent is up for grabs.

DM: Yeah.

DM: I suppose the basic attitude was skeptical to a degree, although Malcolm did actually like comics. We just never saw eye to eye on the sort of comics that should be done. I think he had a pop art view of comics. And he liked English comics like Dan Dare and stuff like that, not necessarily — well, partly for their own intrinsic values. But partly as markers of their time. And using them as raw material. Lichtenstein and all that. But I just thought that seemed to be permanently leaving comics as just a sort of raw material to draw on to make high art, rather than being any use in itself.

DM: So I was really trying to do that. The stuff that I did in art school was dreadful. But it was important for me to try. And it was just terrible, terrible stuff. But towards the end — and it really was right at the end, it was literally the month I was leaving — I finally managed to do both some illustration and some comics that seemed to hint at something. Something better than what I'd labored over the previous three years.

DM: Um... it was quite a bit like Violent Cases. I remember I could never crack this problem with these stilted line drawings. At the time, I was starting to pay more attention to what was going on in the comics world, because I was getting to the point where I'd actually have to leave art school and get paid to do this. I felt obliged to sort of pay attention. And the stuff that was around were things like Warrior. The people who I started to meet were artists like Gary Leach and I think I met Brian Bolland at that point, and maybe one or two others. But particularly Gary I remember meeting. And I labored over these drawings with Letratone, and trying all that sort of technical stuff, and then tons of cross-hatching... I just tried lots of different things. The response would be, "It looks completely dead. It just looks completely static." And I really found it very hard to get away from that.

But in illustration, I found it easier to loosen up. I'd paint, and cut paper. I had a lot more fun doing it. So with comics, I was trying to do these drawings that had to move and tell a story. Yet they were dead on the page. And with my single illustrations, which could quite happily be completely static — they were just, you know, an illustration for a magazine or something — yet they seemed to have some life to them. So I finally managed to get the two to blend a bit. And the first experiments with that were one or two things before Violent Cases, just short things, but then basically Violent Cases.

DM: No. In art school, there was a printing department. And we did printing as a study. So we published four comics. They're really quite awful, and I've tried my best to find all the copies and burn them.

I know that some escaped me. And I think there's one, maybe two things in there that started to look okay. There's one little thing I did about Miles Davis, but they were mostly dreadful, and they mostly labored under this terrible stiffness.

DM: Sure, I showed my stiff work to the best of them. And they all said, "My God, this is stiff." Yeah, not a great response. Well, an encouraging response. I mean, Gary Leach was always encouraging, but I obviously wasn't there yet.

DM: No, I was writing my own scripts.

DM: Um... no, I was doing different kinds of things, really. I tried to do a science fiction story, that I just tried to make kind of bleak and a bit funny. And it was probably neither. I did things about jazz which I obviously had a connection with.

No, I really was just all over the place. Trying to find something. Actually, I'm leaving out something, which was meeting Paul Gravett and the Fast Fiction crowd, and seeing Escape magazine. That very personal view of comics was inspiring. I certainly wasn't doing anything like them, I was barely using the line to do anything that I wasn't doing in paint. I mean, it was still... it was still full of tone even though it was a line drawing. There wasn't much expression. And this was just a big problem for me at that point. The drawings I was doing for Arkham, I still have some of them in my sketchbooks here, were really getting somewhere. And then by the time they were painted, as illustrations I thought they were okay, but they did seem to lose that initial energy and that movement. And likewise with the "Hold Me" story [in Hellblazer]. Some of the drawings, I think, underneath all that crosshatching and stuff, are probably... some of them are okay. But they just lose it with that treatment. It was a big problem I was trying to fight my way through at that point. And I didn't really feel much empathy with anybody else at that point. I didn't feel like this was some sort of movement and I was part of a group and we were in there together and trying to... In fact, to the contrary. I actually felt that the movement was generally towards more and more finishing and more and more surface.

DM: It was, yeah. And also all the stuff I liked, I was just ripping apart. I was trying to find what it was about them that I did like, and much more importantly, what didn't work. And why it didn't work. And how I could improve on that, and how I could communicate clearer and more accurately than that.

DM: No. I think like most of these things, you don't wake up one morning and start the process of deconstruction and then 73 days later end the process of deconstruction. They're just gradual shifts. Gradually, I found myself not really liking any comics at all. And just trying to understand why. And just trying to make sense out of that.

And then I found that actually these drawings worked really well for comics, these little sort of 30-second doodles that I was doing at the time. They worked really well. They caught all that was needed. If somebody's sitting in a chair, smoking a cigarette, well how much information does that take? It takes about 30 seconds' worth. Anything else is just superfluous.

So it was things like that that made sense. And this is just a gradual shift. By the time I got into drawing Cages, maybe at the end of the first issue, beginning of the second one, I was starting to show pages around. I showed Neil, just to see what people thought.

DM: I think what happened was two or three of the stories suddenly had connecting points. I think it was either a character that was basically the same character, or that story was actually happening in the background of this one. And then they all started to click together and it became this big thing.

DM: They were mostly after Arkham was out, toward the end of Signal to Noise. I know I was working on some stories when Signal to Noise was in mid-air, because one of them ended up being half of Signal to Noise. The film director story part of Signal to Noise. So I was obviously writing bits and pieces then. The year after Arkham Asylum I basically did very little. I just traveled a lot, and went on holidays and bummed around and drew things and played some music and did all the things that I hadn't done for ages. So it was then that I started making notes, I think. And I pretty much decided to pack up doing comics then, anyway. So I was just making notes on whatever came to mind. Songs and bits of musical ideas, painting, a lot of notes about photography — I was really getting into photography at the time — and then the odd story idea.

DM: Um... I think I know what you mean, and yeah, but that's always been the case. I mean, working with cut paper collage in art school insinuated itself into my comics and suggested ways of telling stories. I think all that happened around 1990-91-92, getting well into doing Cages, because I just got more and more focused on what constitutes storytelling. In this peculiar form, in this printed form. As opposed to storytelling in novels, as opposed to storytelling in film. So anytime something came along, I mean, Signal to Noise, I used a color copy machine for quite a bit of it and that's a great tool. It's made for doing comics. It's got time built into it. So I've worked on a couple of short ideas using a color copy machine as the primary tool assigning emotional values to the color scans, and using the movement of objects on the surface as it's scanning. And all that sort of thing. As soon as you start playing with a medium, certain values come out. Some of that stuff is useful for making a static image. Some of it is useful in enhancing a painting, whatever, but some of it is useful for telling stories.

DM: Yeah.

DM: Yeah. No, that's the stuff that really keeps me paying attention. If I had to do... if I had to wake up every morning and make images in the same way every day, I would go mad. I don't think I'd be able to get out of bed. I like learning things. And I like that feeling of not actually knowing how this is going to go. And it gets a bit frightening when you can't get it to work and you have a deadline, and you have to get it to work. But that's all part of it. And that's the bit that I really love. It's very much a conversation as well. All of these things contribute. They have their own peculiarities. And quite often, if you're dealing with a machine, it's made to do a job. And if you force it to do a different job, it will try, but it won't be able to do it, but what comes out the other side is its best attempt, which are often full of peculiar qualities and inaccuracies and noise that is wonderful and adds so much to what you're trying to do. It's that dialogue. It's where the mistakes are that is where the excitement is.

DM: Yeah. Again, it's this idea that everything is full of meaning. And they are random, and they are completely uncontrollable, but they're also begging interpretation and they're begging use. And it's nice to be out of control sometimes. It's nice to see how far you can let the thing out on a leash and still... remember the skeleton of what you're doing, and remembering how it has to communicate, but allowing these things room to maneuver.

DM: Um... I honestly forget. It was almost certainly a collaboration. I know it was there, because originally the thing came out in monthly chapters, so there was time in between each month. In a collected edition, obviously, that goes. So it just didn't seem right to have the end of a chapter butting up immediately to the beginning of the next one. We had to have something there to replace the month that had elapsed. So we ended up dealing with the noise part of the title a lot more than the signal in those bits. Mostly because we felt like we opened this wonderful Pandora's Box with the title, and the themes of the story, but really hadn't gotten to grips with it. We'd been very safe, and we hadn't stretched the material as far as we thought we should have. I got a letter, a critique from a friend of mine, Barron Storey, in America, that basically said that I'd let the material down. And I agreed with that, really.

So, I thought, going back to do a collected edition was an ideal chance to try and put some of that right. We added a couple of chapters that were certainly noisier than the previous chapters. And the inter-chapter material was the most noisy. It's also the stuff that most people hate.

There seems to be a small group of people, it sounds a little like you might be one of them, who actually like that material, and think that's where the meaning of the book is. That's where the guts of the book is. Most of the reviews I've read hated it. They can't stand the noise. They think it's pretentious and irrelevant. And ultimately, I think that's really interesting. I think that just basically says people don't like noise, they like things to mean something. But with a book called Signal to Noise, we had to deal with it. We couldn't walk away from that, really.

DM: Hmm. Yeah. The interesting thing recently was that we got to do it on the radio. We did Signal to Noise for the BBC, and the great thing about that was we had a wonderful actor, Warren Mitchell, playing the director. And the humanity and warmth he brought to the character allowed us to go completely over-the-top with the noise and the static and the random bits of information. And overlaid layers of texture. Because you always had this warm, human center for people to stay connected to the material. And all of this stuff could surround and envelop and sometimes swamp and sometimes bubble underneath this lovely central performance. I think, ultimately, it was probably more successful than the book. I do think it was better than the book. But again, I think the interesting thing about that was how accepting of abstraction people are in sound, in music, and not in words and pictures. A picture has to look like something. Whereas, since when has a piece of music ever been a solid object. It is this wonderful, intangible abstract language.

DM: It goes straight in. There's no filter. It's not even like words, where you have to make literal sense of the language. Music just goes straight in. And voices, whether you can hear what they're saying or not, go straight in. It was a great learning experience for me. On the one hand, sure I'd like people to like it, but I'm much more interested in just a reaction.

DM: Yes.

DM: Yes.

DM: Yes. The reason, well two reasons really: one is I think with all of these things, I've tried to do what's right for the story. And whether that proves to be right or not is something that you realize as you get into it. But ultimately, when I'm working out these books, I try and always do what I think is right for the story.

Cages was always going to be told using as simple line drawings as I could bring myself to do. As it was, I sort of undrew a lot of those pictures. That's the third or fourth attempt that actually made it into print. And I couldn't, but maybe should have, carried on, simplifying and honing. But at some point you have to come away with a page, otherwise the book, a 500-page book, is never going to get finished. So that's the first thing.

The second thing is I have to say, I've really fallen in love with using the computer to bring all this stuff together. There's a real anti-computer feeling around, especially in the comics world, as far as I can tell. And initially, I thought it was pretty funny, it was a bit like, sort of, Neanderthals standing around [Brayshaw laughs] a typewriter, prodding it and wondering if it will bite or... It felt very much like being afraid of fire. But now I'm just getting a bit pissed off with it all. Because it's just a bloody tool. It's just a great tool. And I'm not doing anything particularly conceptually with the computer that I wasn't doing before. It just allows that balance of materials to be exactly what I want as opposed to being as good as I can get it on a flat piece of artwork which often was 50% of what I really wanted it to be. And especially with something like the Iain Sinclair story. I don't know how familiar you are with Iain's work.

DM: You know how he works, then. He's incredible. I mean, the man is a walking library. He works with incredibly dense narratives and layers of information, most of which, you haven't got a clue whether this is fact or fiction. I've actually done a whole book with him now. And we're working on a film together for Channel Four. And I've tried, you know, I'm starting to sort of get into this world. And even now, I've been working with it for a year, and I still feel like I'm still at the front door. He works with these layers of meanings, and the computer is made to do that. I mean, it's perfect for compositing information in making these dense visuals.

And you know, on the one hand, I also like simplicity, less is more. And the simplicity of a drawing is a beautiful thing. And if you can do that right, and make these very simple, almost handwritten, stories, they are great. Sometimes I like listening to a solo piano piece. But sometimes I like listening to a whole orchestra, you know. Sometimes I like complexity. And the computer is great for dealing with complexity. And for Iain's work, it's a godsend.

And I can't help feeling a lot of these comments I've heard and reactions I've had to computer-based work is a basic sort of distrust of complexity and an unwillingness to deal with these very complicated collisions of images. The great thing about a computer is that I can make images that are impossible. They're completely impossible. I can paint stuff that's impossible, but it's a painting. You can see the paint marks. It's always a painting. With a computer you can make impossible things. You can take all of that media context out of it, and try and deal with a whole other set of contextual things. And that's exactly what Iain does constantly in his writing. And I think it's been interesting for him. He's always wanted to do comics. That's the great thing.

The very first comic we talked about doing together, the first thing he said was, "I don't care if this doesn't have a single word in it." I don't know many writers who would ever say that. So he's been working with these ideas for ages. He's always shot films; odd little super-8 films and things. And he's always worked visually and always worked with many layers of information. And it's just ideal for him.

DM: No, not at all. We were both at a science fiction convention. I was with a theater group called The Unauthorized Sex Company [Brayshaw laughs] and we were doing this odd show about sex, basically, and I was doing the music for it and I did the set. And he was a guest as well. And I'd heard, I don't know how, I think it might have been from Alan Moore. It was either through Alan or it was through Neil that I heard that Iain was interested in doing a comic. And at the time, when would this be? I was starting work on Cages, but I was still looking around for other possible things to do. And I was interested in trying to work with people who didn't write comics. And so I just stopped him while I was there, and said, "Here's my name and number. If you ever fancy talking about doing a comic, I've heard you might be interested, give us a call."

And at the time, Victor Gollancz in London was trying to get a whole line of books together. Ultimately, I think, they only published six. One of them was a book I was going to do with Jonathan Carroll, but that didn't pan out. And one of them was this book that I mentioned. It was called Between Tides at the time, that was going to be with Iain. So we talked about that, but that didn't come of anything. And then I did a couple of maps for a re-release of one of his books. So we sort of kept in touch. And then Oscar Zarate came up with this plan to do a short story in It's Dark in London.

DM: I think so. Um... I think Iain is very unusual. And I suppose Neil is a little like this as well. He's pretty unprecious with his work. He cares a lot about his work, but he likes the collaboration, and he enjoys the differences, and is quite happy, I think, to send off his manuscript and get this wholly other thing back that obviously has his voice but also has mine. And I don't live in London, and I don't have this huge knowledge and love affair with London that he does. So my impression of London is as an outsider. So there's bound to be friction. But I think, generally, that's the stuff he enjoys. And the film is going the same way. The film is a very odd process whereby he's evolving a story out of something like 12 hours' worth of documentary footage and interviews he's done with various people. And it's become this sort of pseudodocumentary about this guy called Peter Whitehead, who was a documentary filmmaker in the '60s, and then became a falconer in Saudi Arabia, and now writes novels. And he's a very nice but rather strange man. The whole thing is largely a fiction. But it's purporting to be fact. I have all this raw material to deal with, and again, I'm feeding it through computers and re-shooting stuff end animating bits and making this sort of layered multi-textural thing.

DM: Yeah. Yeah, I mean I haven't seen much of his stuff. I've seen Sans Soleil and I've seen La Jetée. But yeah. It's much more along those lines than something like Peter Greenaway's films, which has much more of a nailed-down structure. With film, you can't help but have to plan stuff, it's so bloody expensive to do. But it's a lot more loose, and a lot more playful. And a lot more about discovering what the film is, almost frame by frame as we're doing it.

DM: Um... yes. The central figure of the book that I've done with Iain which is called Slow Chocolate Autopsy, is this guy called Norton, who's a ghost figure who can't escape London. And one of the other characters is a photographer, Axel Tumer, who documents what he sees through the camera, what he is seeing, and what he thinks he sees, so there's always this difference between what is real and what is illusion. So yes, there's a feeling of trying to make sense of it. With Norton, it's with words, and with Axel Turner it'swith images, photographs. So yeah, I feel exactly like I'm doing that all the time. And Cages was the same. Trying to describe things. Not literally, I'm not interested in explaining things literally. You can stare at an apple on a table and it's completely obvious what it is. You can see it perfectly. It's crystal clear. There's a feeling of wanting to get beyond that complete overload of literal information towards some other kind of way of understanding it. What it feels like. Taste? Scent?

Does that make any sense?

DM: Yes, it's just a much more illusive world. I really can't describe it. I can try and show you things and try and explain it in a combination of pictures and words and music... they're just feelings, really. And I suppose what I'm trying to do is allow somebody else to get into my head. Much as I love to get inside other people's heads. The ultimate goal being to understand things. And to understand people. And to understand situations. There's a greater, I think there's a greater... um... well, there isn't really an end result. But a goal to work towards that is greater than just making pretty pictures, or telling somebody an interesting fact. It's a deeper understanding of things. I'm sounding very sort of hippie-ish and airy-fairy, but I can't really explain it any other way. And you realize all you're doing is doing the same thing over and over again. You're trying to explain something. And this time I'll explain it as a song, or this time I'll explain it as a photograph. And then you change your opinion slightly or you catch a different glimpse of things. And you try and explain again. And it's this constant, very, very slow, slow elaboration on the world.

DM: Yeah.

DM: Sure, yeah. All of these things carry different feelings and weights. You juxtapose one thing against another, you put one photograph next to another, you immediately get a story going on, just with the associations, that's what people do, that's what human brains do, they make patterns between things, and find connections.

I was going to say something else about collage. Um... yeah, I mean, the other thing is if you use existing materials, they bring with them their own past lives, a tremendous accumulation of time in each piece.

DM: Yes.

DM: Yeah. And it was painted on existing materials, and painted over existing photographs, and then chipped away and worked over. And about halfway through doing it, I realized that actually there was no real need to paint in between the lines. The foreground drawings and the background paint are two different things. They can do two different jobs. Sometimes they can come together and sometimes they can just be entirely separate.

DM: Um... well, both, really. Some of the pages included panels that were computer generated and printed, and dropped into the rest of the page. Some of the sequences are great long lists of processes. Some of them are very simple. It's just whatever works. I mean, the thing with Punch was just trying to keep that feeling like everything is slightly tawdry and degraded and, you know, I live quite near the sea, and in the summer all the beaches are full, but in the winter, everything is sad and faded and sunbleached and knocked about a bit. And old. And that's where these objects have had their lives. That's the sort of feel that we wanted to have even just in the background painting.

DM: Yeah.

DM: Yeah.

DM: They don't exist, I'm afraid. [Brayshaw laughs] It's all work in progress. It's all work in very slow progress. The multi-media world is pretty dead at the moment. They're very expensive to do. And a lot of it is work that relies on skills that I don't have: programming and such, so, I have to work with people, and we have to pay them. So it's very slow. And it's been a very frustrating mix of disappointments with huge technical limitations, and you know, just glimpsing the huge potential and the possibilities. That side of it has been incredibly exciting and galvanizing.

But ultimately, almost all of the multi-media publishers that I've seen are trying to define multi-media as either some sort of extended book, which is fine but nothing groundbreaking or some sort of sales device to get yet more Star Wars product out there, or music-related, another Rolling Stones product. Or most depressingly of all, just another game where all you get at the end is a score on a board.

The stuff we were doing was really something else entirely. It was really trying to find out what this medium was and where its strengths were and the conclusions that we ended up with produced some really wonderful directions, the main one being it's a great opportunity to allow people to be creative themselves, without any technical skill. You don't have to learn a musical instrument or be able to draw or anything like that. Just by moving a mouse, or it wasn't even a mouse in our case, we designed this piece of hardware that we've patented that would allow a very transparent interface between you and what was going on on the screen, so that hopefully you would almost forget that you are... it would become second nature. And you would have an experience that really is an honest-to-god conversation between the raw materials on the disk, and the person manipulating that material.

DM: Well, the materials could be anything. We were trying to come up with simple templates, and the things that we kept on thinking about were things like tarot decks, anything where somebody sat down and tried to document and categorize the human brain, and the way we use knowledge.

One of the projects I was working on was called Mirror. And so the first "mirror" would be my colors and my textures and my sounds and my "fear" and my "love" and that would be the raw material on the disk and you would move through this experience, and come to control it. Initially, it would be hard to control, but eventually... and if you were jumpy, the interface has a degree of biofeedback with it, so the computer knows whether you're hot or cold or jumpy or relaxed or whatever, so if you're tense, then the computer knows you're tense and you'll have a tense time with it. But ultimately you will be able to control that tension. And just like any tool: certain things, certain colors, certain collisions of images, would allow you to control your own emotions through this thing.

A lot of this is theoretical, but it did seem to to be working, it was very hopeful. All of this stuff is worked out on paper, but then to get the programming done... actually making a whole piece of work like this is just monstrously difficult. It's hugely expensive, it's impossible to get anybody to invest in. It's impossible because it's so hard to understand. The question constantly was, "Yeah, very interesting. But where are the guns? Who wins?" You're not only trying to create quite an avant garde piece of work, but also trying to define a medium. And so it's very, very hard. We're carrying on with the work, but at the moment we're more involved in film projects rather than the CD-ROM stuff. And we're carrying on with that in our own time with our own money as best we can.

DM: Oh, there's a number of points there. I'm trying to make notes here so I can get to them all. As far as defining "avant garde," I go along with your definition, but the thing that I'm interested in is creating language, creating the language that is then used by the applied art often 20-30 years down the line. Laying the foundation. So that's the first thing I was interested in.

The second thing I was interested in was this implication that people could be creative with it. And generally, I think people are pretty intimidated by the arts. I think the arts perpetuate the "us" and "them" with ideas like "talent" and "genius" and "Art with a capital A." Anything to separate this very rarified world from the schmucks down below who can't do it. And the mystique of making films is kept on a pedestal, and there's a lot of stock in the "artist's inspiration" and the artist's hand, and all of these things. And I really don't go along with any of that stuff. I've seen people learn how to draw. I've seen myself being able to learn how to think. And learn how to solve problems in a space of... a noticeably short period of time. I don't think people are born with the ability to do such peculiar, specific things as play a saxophone. I think people are born with a variety of skills which you can align in a variety of ways, and are there to be encouraged or ignored, depending on what you want to do. And I'm all for getting people involved in expressing themselves through whatever they want to do.

And the thought that you could have this piece of entertainment, or whatever you want to call it, this thing that you just put into a computer, and instead of passively listening to a piece of music, or reading a novel — I'm not saying that people only passively read, obviously they do interact — but you don't have any say in what's going to happen in the book. You can read it and interpret it and chat about it with friends, which is great, which is a creative act. But I really like the idea that you can actually be involved in this. And you can make a unique experience. You can sit at home and be creative. Does that make sense?

DM: Yeah. No, I completely agree. It's one of the things I'm frustrated by with a lot of the reaction to artwork that is composited on a computer. It's as if you just press a button and the computer does it for you. And that's obviously not the case. The computer is only as good as the person sitting in front of it. I'm only interested in how the computer can help the person, or enable the person. I mean, the last thing I want to see is the death of reading and talking and interacting with people. I'm really very down on the Internet for those reasons. If the sales pitch is to be believed, we'll shop and go to work and do all the things that we would normally do in the real world, on the computer. And that would give us plenty of time to sit at home looking at our computers. And it seems to be anti-social, anti-everything. I don't like it at all.

I don't like games, either. I think games are the work of the devil personally. They're made by huge companies to keep people stupid. What do you get at the end of the game? You get a score. Well, bloody great. [Brayshaw laughs] What is that? I really wouldn't have been interested in this if I didn't think that it would enable people and empower people and allow me to have much more... really much more of a personal contact and conversation with people through the work. Now, if you give people a comic or a film, one that they would really look at and pay attention to and interpret, I think that's great. I obviously would encourage that. But Mirror seemed to be an even more creative interaction. But it doesn't exist yet, so who am I to say what it would do, and how people would work with it.

DM: Yes.

DM: Yep.

DM: It's crawling forward. I wouldn't want to say it was on hold, but it's certainly not scheduled.

DM: Um... well, I'd have to say that initially I didn't want to do Mr. Punch as a CD-ROM. And the deal that I came up with was that if I would go away and have a think about how to do Mr. Punch, since it's a known property, then we would also think about this other project, Mirror, that I was kicking around, which was a completely unknown quantity.

So I went away and had a think about Punch, and I decided that you can't tell a story on a CD-ROM. If you can come at the information from any angle, then that really negates linear storytelling. The whole point to telling a story is in how you reveal information. You are the author, you reveal the information at the speed the story demands. So we couldn't do that. So it had to be much more of an exploration. It's as if you are the boy wandering around a Punch and Judy stage with different props and different rooms. There are little ghost scenes that you walk through and you catch glimpses of,and you piece together actual events and also feelings and states of mind. It's much more of an entertainment thing than Mirror.

DM: [laughs] Yeah.

DM: [laughs] All of the above. It's nothing, really. It's a website. It's there to sell a product. It's a story to try and get people to come back. It was from my point of view, it was an experiment to see if you could tell a story on the net. But I have to say you probably can't. I mean, the download time is ludicrous. People just get bored stiff waiting for these images to come up. It was a job.

DM: Yeah. Finished that. It's odd, really. This year feels so much like the end. It feels like I'm drawing a line underneath the last 10. So to a degree, some of this year has just been rounding things up. The collected Cages is coming out in one volume, so I've been making sure that comes out right, collecting all the Sandman covers together into one volume, the last of the Sandman stuff came out, Violent Cases comes out as a 10th Anniversary thing. It feels very much like the end.

DM: I've carried on doing a lot of design and record covers. And I've started really trying to decide what the next 10 years is going to be, or the next... you know, the foreseeable future. So I've been trying to get more and more involved in doing film and that side of things. So The Falconer will be one project. I'm directing a short film called The Week Before, I'm writing a screenplay for a film that I'd like to do. I'd like to try and keep everything very sort of small and low-budget and independent and small crews. I've been very, very happy with the way, again, the computer has enabled me to keep a good control over this raw material. So everything is fed through a computer and composited and edited and altered slightly.

DM: Um... no, I don't really think I feel like that. There are still three comics that I want to do. When I started doing Cages, the primary reason to do it was that I just wanted to do a comic that I would enjoy reading. And also one that I thought should be around. "This is what I think a comic should be." And I'm not saying, I'm certainly not saying, that it's the only way of doing it. But these are some of the things that I think are really interesting about comics. And I don't see them around that often. And, so, "What do you think about this, folks?" And that was seven years ago. My opinion has changed rather a lot since then. And I'd like to do another book, a book of short stories, which I'm planning to do at some point. Probably at the end of the year, called Pictures That Tick. Which would be ideas since, initiating Cages, really. Trying to decide what the language of comics really is.

DM: Oh plenty, yeah. Definitely. It's an odd... it seems to me an odd time, at the moment, with comics. You know, I don't think I've ever bought as many comics as I have recently. I mean, I get my box of comics from DC every month, and I wouldn't say I'm waiting by the front door for the next issue of whatever to come through, but generally the standard seems to me to be higher. The attention to dialogue seems to be a lot better, generally the drawings seem to be... at least people sit around occasionally and tell jokes to each other, which is great. Makes a nice change from just hitting each other.

So generally, or rather I should say specifically, with these little details, these little islands, I've never been more enthused about how great comics are. Generally, it seems to be really depressing. Everything seems to be sort of folding up. I can't believe the decisions that are being made. By publishers and distributors and whatever. And you can't help feeling that somewhere in the system are these very destructive forces. Self-destructive forces. You almost think that, well, you sort of get the industry you deserve, you know. If you go on treating it like this, then this is the result. You can only poke the thing so many times, and then it dies. So I'm bewildered by it. And I can't say I really have much contact with the comics world. I come to San Diego every year, I get dipped in the deep end for five days solid, and then I'm quite happy to go home and not have to think about it again for another year. But you just wander around going, well what on earth is going on?

So I have sort of odd feelings about... I've really made no firm decisions about how I feel about comics. I certainly don't feel that I've outgrown them, because the medium is far bigger than I or any single person would ever be. There's tons of virgin territory out there waiting to be explored. There's a lot of great material around to inspire. A lot of books I still would like to do, three in particular.

DM: Yeah. One of them, as I say, is very, I hope, a very experimental book. I don't know how much of that I will feel obliged to rein in just to make contact with people. But one I hope will be genuinely experimental, a book of short stories. One of them is a book, a very small book, like a novel. It will again be... that's the other thing: I can't imagine now telling a story in less than 400-500 pages. You can't get a story into less than that. Well, I can't anyway, and get the sort of detail I need in the way people interact with each other. So the thought of leaping into another 500-page book doesn't exactly fill me with enthusiasm at this point. But I will definitely do it at some point.

There's one story set in Venice, which is a sort of a "pre-millennium tension" story. Feelings about heading toward the end of the century. And one of them is a book called Neon Oracle. It's a story based on a number of things, one of them being a friend of mine who tragically killed herself. That was a very depressing time. It's certainly got a very sort of nasty, really quite appalling central scene, but hopefully it will be surrounded by humor and warmth as well.

DM: Yes, I'm doing this one on my own, again. It's become such a personal thing. I worked on the original treatment with a friend and the story was a complete work of fiction. It was set in Mexico. It was just an odd fantasy thriller. I've kept one single element from that story, and all the rest has to do with these friends of mine and it's just too personal... I couldn't really ask anybody to work on it with me. The Venice book is actually a collaboration. I was working on that with the novelist Colin Greenland. We both had Venice stories that were going nowhere and we put them together, and they seemed to be complementary.

DM: Yeah.

DM: No.

DM: I have no idea. And at this point, I'm not even thinking about that. I am interested in trying to find other avenues for comics. The book with Iain Sinclair is being published by a book publisher, Weidenfeld and Nicholson. I've done comics as part of a piece of work for Kodak. I'm just kind of interested in finding other places to do comics, you know? Other venues. So, who knows where they'll end up. I have no idea.

And the other thing is, I really don't want to rely on comics for a living anymore. I'd much rather do lots of different things, and I'll work on a book, and when the book is done, we'll see how it goes from there. And if nobody publishes it, well, nobody publishes it, and that's fine.

DM: Well, basically it was an ad campaign for a new film stock. So that was the first thing. The second thing was a video about the making of the ad. And about my work and how I work with photography and computers. And the third thing was a book, where I snuck in a little bit of comics. And that came out last year.

And then I've been talking to them about doing a more expansive... like a single book, which would basically be comics. I think they were as interested in such an odd use of photography as I was interested in them as a venue for my comics. I'm trying to think of another one. I've done a couple of things now. I try to... I'm doing an album cover at the moment, I've tried to squeeze a bit of comics storytelling into that.

Part of the trouble with this stuff is that it's so damn ghettoized. You only get them in certain shops, they're only sold by certain people. It's a real pain in the neck. Trying to get comics into book stores is a pain in the neck. Nobody knows where to put the damn things. I think if they just become part of... you know, part of the furniture, I think it's going to be an awful lot easier to get people to accept this stuff.

DM: Yeah, quite a bit. But very little that doesn't have a use of some sort. I'm not very good at just doing a painting for painting's sake. Even when I do, by the time I've finished it, I've found a use for it somewhere. On an album cover, or something. I'm just not very good at doing that. And I'll start the smallest thing, with the intention of building a whole book around it. So I can't just do a painting for no reason. But I have done a few.

And I'm not a big fan of gallery shows. I like them well enough, but they don't really excite me. Books really excite me, and films do, but I've never been a great fan of just sticking a bunch of pictures in a room and a few people come through the door and look at them and go away. I don't know why, for some reason it just doesn't make me jump up and down.

DM: Umm... well, I think the thing is a photograph is great for certain things and it's great for reminding you about the way things are, the way people move and the way people talk; and photographs always contribute, especially if you're, I mean, in Cages I was fortunate enough to have friends of mine who were also actors pose for the main characters. So they actually contributed to the characters. They were comfortable enough around me to relax while I was taking reference photographs. But they were also very aware of their own looks and how they move and what they do, so you don't get this sort of rather self-conscious stiffness that you can get with people who are not used to being photographed. So they actually contributed a lot to the characters. You get a lot of detail.

I've been very uncomfortable, I think, with saying that I know what people look like, that I know so much that I never have to look at another photograph or real person again to draw people. I think that's a hugely arrogant thing to say. There's always something: a little look, or the way the light works over a surface, you know, there's always something that you can look at new the next time. And I think, just to ignore all that and just sit down at the drawing board and assume that you know everything, and just draw it from scratch, sure, I mean, certainly some people do have a large store of raw materials to go from. But I think what you get from that is what you see time and time again in comics and comic artists' careers. Which is initially everything they know goes down on paper, and there's this terrific rush, and often it can look great. This terrific store of information and imagination going down on paper. But after that it's pretty much the law of diminishing returns. [Brayshaw laughs] It only takes a few years, and then you're basically just repeating that same information, and chewing it over again and agaiun. And you never really regain that initial excitement. And so it's just a constant downward path, as far as I can see.

And I think that holds true of almost all the people that I can think of in, I suppose I'm mostly thinking of American comics, but it holds true to a degree in European comics as well. You know, they hit a peak where they have this memory store and they're refining their style, but pretty soon it becomes as refined as it's ever going to get. And then there's no new information. There's no nuances being added. And it's just a downward path from then on.

DM: Yes.

DM: And worst of all, it starts to almost become a parody of itself. And it gets just worse and worse and worse. I mean, many others have made the comparison, but it's like photocopying a photocopy of a photocopy. It just becomes more and more this thing that is completely unrelated to the initial impetus of the style. And whether that impetus was completely imaginary or observational, it doesn't matter. It's gone. So that's the last thing I want.

And that's why I've always... I mean, even now... I always cover myself and I always take lots of photographs and decide who the people are and try to relate them to friends of mine and watch what they do and how they move and how they talk and what their expressions are like. So there's always new information there. It's the only way of keeping those things alive, I think.

DM: Gosh, very difficult to say. It's really in the heat of battle, getting these things to work. Some fall together very simply and very quickly and easily. But others... I mean, things like Mr. Punch, some of the pages were re-done two or three times. I mean, you know, not out of some sort of hyper-perfection or anything. There's still many pages and many drawings and elements of that book that maybe now I'd re-do. At the time, it's just getting the things to fit well on the page. And that can mean getting them to the point where they blend in to each other perfectly, or getting them to the point where they are very much opposed to each other, and there's a real hard and obvious difference between things that are photographic and things that are drawn.

One of the big things I wanted to try with Punch was exploiting the difference between drawn images and photographic images, and prior to that, most of my stuff had been to one degree or another a mix of the two. It had either been photographs that I had painted over, where the photograph was very dominant, or maybe drawings with collage backgrounds where the drawing was very dominant. Until that point, I really just looked at them as different media, without looking at the implications of each. I mean, people have very definite ideas of what a drawing is, and what a photograph is, and part of the fun of Punch was playing with those expectations.

DM: Yeah. I'd done some photography at art school, but my big problem with photography, like a lot of things, really, was for one, I couldn't find a way of making photographs that looked like they were my photographs and not either some specific other person's photographs or just generally anonymous. They just looked like yet more photographs. And that's been a constant problem really. Same with illustration, same with comics to a degree, same with design and use of type. Trying to find a way of doing work that is in my tone of voice, and not in somebody else's. It's hard. Well, I found it hard. Some people manage to find a voice very quickly. And they're sort of hothouse flowers: they suddenly blossom very quickly and they're very lucky. I found it a hard slog, and it hasn't come easily. And it's been a slow development. What I hope is that because it's taken so long, my roots are that much deeper, and I have good solid reasons and structure behind what I'm doing. It's not just a case of a sudden bit of luck and fiash in the pan. But you never know with these things.

One thing I'm really, really noticing at the moment is that there's just so much stuff. And music, as well. There's just so much of it. There's so many CDs. There's so much television. There's so much. .. I get my box of free comics off DC every month. There's so many! And I have no idea who buys them, but they just become like noise, eventually.

And I think, you know, a reason why I'm really happy with doing lots of different things, a little bit of comics, a little bit of this, and a little bit of that, and keeping it all bubbling away, is that I don't have to get to the point where, "Well, I finished that book, now I have to do another book." Yet another comic to stick on the pile. Produce another book for no real reason other than just, "Well, it's my next one." I'm much happier with the idea of when another comic project comes up, that I really fancy doing, then great. And if it comes up tomorrow, fantastic. And if it comes in three years time, then that's life.

DM: Yeah. I don't see any value in just adding to the pile. There seems to be far too much of everything at the moment, to the point where everything is so fragmented and there's so little common bond between readers and I remember... this has been said 70 times before, especially by writers in England... Now we have five TV channels. I know in America there are many TV channels, but we have five. And there used to be just one. And then for a long time there were just two TV channels. And you can... you know, I'm certainly not anti-choice. It's great that people have the choice to decide what they want to see. But the great thing about having something that's so focused as that, is that if you're a writer, you would write a play for the week, and everybody would see it. And the next day, everybody would talk about it. And there was this terrific cultural glue. And people, whether you hated it or loved it, people would talk about it.

And that's the difficulty with having so much choice and so much fragmentation. What's the big comic at the moment, what's the one that everybody has to go out and buy? [Brayshaw laughs] I remember when Watchmen came out, everybody had to buy that thing. Whether... it didn't matter what you were doing, whether you were underground, independent, European, mainstream Marvel or whatever, everybody bought that thing. And probably likewise bought Maus. Because of its coverage. What's the big one at the moment. I wish there was one.

DM: Sure. I think you have to question those broader "tides," or whatever you want to call them, at work in culture. Beyond just accumulating a CD collection. Or your personal top five films. Or locking yourself away with a comic collection. Personally, I've always thought the whole point of it is to look through somebody else's eyes, to understand another person's life, which is a huge step, a huge jump in logic to try and actually get inside somebody else's head. And then to discuss that. And connect with other people. And that seems to be the point of it. Just to communicate. And if that's taken away, if culture becomes completely subjective, it seems to have gone, it seems to lose its reason to exist.

DM: Yeah. The thing with a lot of stuff in Cages is not every sentiment is necessarily mine. And also there are completely opposing sentiments in it, so it's more accurate to say they're all mine. I mean, I'm not a believer in any sense. I'm not a religious person. I'm also not a believer in any particular dogma where art is concerned. I love abstract art, generally. I love Rothko's work, I love Larry Poons' work, Antoni Clavé, Russell Mills, a variety. But I'm pretty selective with it. And like anything, there's an awful lot of rubbish.

And I think art has basically the same function as comics or films, which is simply to communicate and explore ideas. And if you don't communicate, if you lock yourself away into some sort of elite club, which I think a lot of abstract art, installation art, and figurative symbolist art is guilty of. I can't stand a lot of the pre-Raphaelite nonsense. In fact, I can't stand most of it. Because again, it seems to be this little exclusive club. If you get the symbols, there is a blue snake on the ground, therefore that's symbolic of... you know? [laughs] Some absurd little book of rules that you have to own before you can decipher these paintings. That just seems to be absurd to me. If you're going to deal with symbolism or metaphors, they should be in some way self-explanatory. You should be able to look at something and feel what it means. And either the artist can communicate that, or they just can't. If they're going to have to write a book of appendices to accompany their painting, they're just not able to communicate. Just give up. Be a writer, you know?

So I guess that's basically the thing. I'm into communication. I don't think that galleries are for the elite. I think they're for everybody. And I think it's a shame that people feel intimidated by abstract painting or just going along to a museum. It's there for everybody. If you get something from it, great, if you don't, that's life. I think all I'd say is just give it some time. That's all.

DM: Yeah. I mean, it's the reason why I was never interested in doing advertising at college. Because advertising basically works on very small amounts of time. You have five seconds on a billboard, or you have 30 seconds on a TV ad. And so everything is very condensed. And almost all you can really do is have an image, maybe on a billboard, an image and a line of text. And you're in your car, you read the text, and you look at the picture, and between the two, you get a little joke. And that's fine. That's really all you need to make an advert work. You involve the person and they feel like they got the joke. And hopefully they'll remember the ad. And therefore they'll remember the product. And that's fine. For selling jeans or whatever. But there's something very, well, unambitious about that. Eventually, you feel like you're constantly making these little five-piece jigsaw puzzles. And somebody puts them together and fine, and then they move onto the next one. And there doesn't seem to be any reason for it. They don't stay with you.

I don't know why I got talking about advertising, but I suppose the idea is to stay with the audience. I mean, I'd like to do something that has a life with the viewer. Certainly, my favorite films I've seen the first time and maybe... something's caught me, something's hooked me. But there's been whole layers of meanings and motivations and imagery and things I haven't got a clue about. But it has definitely been compelling. And then, as the years go by, I'll see something, or somebody will mention something, and I would remember back to the film, and think, "that's what that was." And it didn't matter that I didn't get it at the time, it didn't spoil my enjoyment of it, but it's just another layer, another door is opened.

DM: Yeah. And if you can do that, it's a wonderful... I hesitate to say trick, because that trivializes it, but I remember one of my favorite films of all time is this film called The Element of Crime, I don't know if you've seen it.

DM: It's his first film. I'm sure there are plenty of things that people could find fault with. But I went to see this thing the first time, and just on the visual level, it's absolutely astounding. And the story is very strange, and the film is very quiet and very slow. And there's certainly enough there to not only keep me watching, but keep me thinking after the fact. I saw it in art school. But I've since seen that film I don't know how many times. I've lost track of how many times I've seen it. And every time I see it, not only do I see more and get more out of it, but it seems to have its own internal logic. Now when I watch it, it's almost like clicking a switch in my brain, I have to just forget the logic of this world and accept the logic of the book that the guy is writing and this strange path that he must follow. And it all seems to make perfect sense. And I don't know how he does that. People who can do that really, I just have endless admiration for. That makes me go, "How the hell does he do that?" And it's not a step-by-step instruction that I can copy or follow, it's something else entirely. It's something about living. It's something about accumulated associations and memories. It's very much a living thing. Does that make any sense?

DM: Sure. Well, how can I answer that? I mean, I suppose one issue there is for whom are you doing this — what's the audience? And I've certainly been asked that a couple of times by other people who do comics. I think I remember one time in particular, I won't tell you who asked me. And certainly implicit in the question was "I know what you're going to say. You're going to say you do it for yourself and therefore you're being completely self-indulgent and you're not bearing in mind your audience." And really, they're right.

But the reason why I think that's the right way to do it is I have no idea who my audience is. I have no idea. I can see who shows up for signings, and I can read the letters and whatever that come. But I certainly couldn't specify one type of person who is responding to my stuff. It's all social groups, it's both sexes, it's all ages. There's a little accumulation around 18 through 28, I suppose, but certainly many older and certainly many younger, and I've never been happy with statistics, anyway, because as soon you aim for the majority you bugger everybody else.

So I don't see any reason to try and bear in mind or aim something at a particular audience because there isn't anybody specific to aim at. Eventually, you just have to say, well, I'll just do this thing, and this is what it's going to be. It's going to be 500 pages, and it's going to be this, and it's going to be that, because that's what the book demands, that's what the story wants, and that's the best way to do it, and if people like it, great, and if they're going to come along for the ride, wonderful, I'd love for them to come, and I hope it works, and if not, well, fine, maybe they'll like the next one. But I honestly don't see any other way of doing it.

With comics I've been very lucky, and I've pretty much gone my own way. But in other things, doing record covers, and doing film and television stuff, I've been in enough meetings where you get these sort of gray people all wanting to put their word in, and ultimately nobody really knows what's going to be successful or not. All you can do is guess, and that puts everybody in the same boat. So, you know, I have no time for that at all.

And I'm trying to do more and more stuff in the film business now, and it's the worst place really for that sort of thing. People dine out on a project for years, trying to figure out exactly what the whole world wants, and it's an impossible task. And why would you want to do it anyway, it's crazy. Much better to just let one person see the thing through, at least it will be a cohesive, solid piece of work, and it'll find an audience. And maybe that audience will be big, and maybe it'll be small. It's hopeless second-guessing.

DM: Yeah, definitely. That's something I've had a lot of fun doing with not only Griffin's Egg but the other couple of stories I've done with Iain for this book, Slow Chocolate Autopsy. And also stuff that I'm playing with for this book of short stories, Pictures That Tick. All the time you have to be aware of checks and balances. I have to constantly check myself to realize, does this actually mean anything to anybody except me? Am I really kidding myself that anybody's actually going to get this? Or put the time into it?

And again, that's an almost impossible thing to do. I can show it to people... usually the best thing to do is just to live with it for a while. If you live with it on your desk and look at it occasionally, two or three months go by and it's still as exciting as when you did it, chances are somebody else out there will get it. And have that same reaction.

DM: That is pretty much what it was. I mean, it's a very scholarly magazine, History of Photography, and I'm no scholar, and I've never pretended to be. I told them that I couldn't write the piece if that's what they expected. So all it is... I mean, I tried initially to sort of put photography and comics into some sort of perspective, but I'm not only not a scholar, I'm just not that well-read as far as comics go. I just haven't seen that many. So I put a smattering of examples that I could remember and that affected me in there. But the main thing that I thought would be fun to write about would be just the possibilities of photography in comics. Because I am surprised at how little it's used. It is an all-pervasive medium. Everybody takes photographs. Everybody basically tells stories with photographs, everybody goes on holiday and takes holiday snaps, which is basically a story. You end up with a roll of film, snaps which cover a period of time. And yet so few people seem to use photography in comics. And I'm sure there are plenty of reasons why. But I am kind of surprised.

DM: Um... I suppose I m not much of a theorist. I'm not very good on ideas for ideas' sake. I think that's the difference between me and Scott. You know, unless it communicates, or has a reason to be, I'm happy to dump it. Although really, that is the hardest thing, just making sure that things are making sense. And you're getting through.

DM: Actually, I've got a question for you.

DM: Actually, I should ask you this first. Am I right in thinking that you wrote a thing in the Comics Journal, it was something about... the whole magazine was something about State of the Industry?

DM: Was it? [laughs]

DM: Was it you that did a paragraph on, it was either Cages alone or —

DM: I picked up from that, I was very grateful that you wrote it, but I picked up from that a little antagonism towards computers, or use of computer images in comics. And can I ask why, and what that was about?

DM: Oh. That's interesting.

DM: Yeah. I'm always fascinated as to how people read this stuff. Obviously that was there to go "bang." And try... that story was so over the top, in fact, that story originally was just going to be told straight. And I came to write it, and just couldn't do it. I couldn't keep a straight face. I thought it was completely absurd anyway. So I have to have the little God character talking to his cat.

DM: Personally, I felt it was okay for him to tell the story. Because he could be over the top. And he could tell this completely pompous and quite ludicrously overboard story. And it would be undercut by the fact that he's just this little character, this completely powerless little character on a cloud. Whereas if I told it, as the author, it would have been... I thought it would lose everybody.

DM: Oh right.

DM: Ah.

DM: Its interesting. That's one of the things, when you talk about checks and balances all the time, and you have to try and stay aware of whether you're communicating or what you're communicating. And whether you're getting through. That's the trouble, really. I'm so used to looking at images that are made in any number of different ways, including computer-generated, I tend to just not see them as "digital." Unless, well, I suppose in some instances, the first thing that registers when I look at an image is "That's a Photoshop filter." But I'm so used to looking at computer images now, I just look at the image, I don't look at the computer anymore, and yet I realize that I guess an awful lot of people's first reaction is "How is that done?"

DM: I must admit, I haven't found that. I'm not a fan of stuff that is wholly computer-generated. That is, 3-D rendered inside of a computer. That stuff is always clinically clean, there's never any dust, there's never any blur or scratches. I only ever see the machinery, but with computer comps, the reason why I love it so much, and I'm happy to use it, is that unlike trying to make collage out of photographs, you're not aware of the medium. When I see photo collage, even going back to the great people who did collage, you know, John Heartfield, you can see the cutmarks, you can see where one face has been cut out of one magazine and collaged onto the next, and it's standing, the juxtaposition, but you're always aware of the medium. There is that surface that you're aware of all the time. But the computer is great for breaking that down to the point where you can't see where one ends and the other begins.

DM: And the Douglas Brothers and various others... yeah.

DM: Sure. I mean, that's a whole other thing. Again, photography, photography's very much like comics in a way. Until recently, it's really been a medium for purists. The comics world is full of people who will say, "You must do comics this way. A computer does not belong in the comics world. You cannot make —" Wonderful sweeping statements. "You cannot make comics with computers." For so long, photography's been about image and transparency in printing and you have to make these perfect prints and it's all a precise craft. I love the fact that the Starns are quite happy to sellotape all their stuff together, and they put up gallery shows and the stuff is literally taped to the wall. And they'll screw up prints and they'll over and underexpose at will. And it's wonderful. At that point, the photographic process is really contributing to the image. It has nothing to do with any book of rules. You're interacting with it. And you're playing with it. And I think a lot more interesting stuff comes out of that. And again, you're playing with people's perceptions of what the medium is.

DM: Enormous gaps.

DM: Well, no. Because I hadn't bought a computer in 1990. Not only that, I was very antagonistic towards computers. I had no intention of buying one at all. Ever. That is still my attitude towards computers, really. I'm really not interested in computer technology for the sake of it. I just like to be able to make the images that I want to make.

And if I had not got a computer, I still would have done a full-color spread on that story in Cages #10, and I still would have tried to make an image that suggested both the spiraling of the universe and the spiral of the ammonite. And the differences of scale, and the themes that were in the story. I still would have tried to do that. And for myself, I don't think I would have been able to have done it so well. If I could have done it better with paint or with a pen and paper, or with any other medium, I would've. It's just that I honestly thought that the computer was really the best way of making that image. It felt to me the most transparent way. You would not see cuts around photos.

The great thing about a computer is you're working on a screen which is illuminated light. You're working with light. I always work on all my images in red-green-blue, not cyan-magenta-yellow-black. So I'm working on the images in the same way a photographer does. You're adding and taking away light. And that felt exactly right for that image of the universe expanding. It should be blisteringly light, white in the middle, overlaid images in the middle, to the point where it becomes white. And if I was doing that on paper, the more images you add, you're heading towards black, you're not heading towards white.

So everything about it, and the fact that it's digital, and you can talk about bytes of information, and then this huge great image which is many megabytes of information, again, that seemed to be appropriate for the theme. Everything about it seemed to be... and I don't mean to sound overly defensive, trying to defend that particular image. Since it came up in conversation, I'm just sort of picking that one as an example of my attitudes towards the computer. So, yeah. I mean, no, the way it was structured, I had the whole plot worked out, the whole skeleton of it, but really when it came down to writing a scene, whatever I felt at the time would be best for the scene, whether that was what I originally planned or not, that's what I ended up doing. And a lot of the scenes did change.

There were a lot of negative aspects about the thing going on so long, I mean, people did get fed up and the audience went down, which is a shame, obviously. But there were a couple of good things. It did mean that every issue came out and I got feedback from that issue. And that feedback actually went into the next book.

I remember when number one came out, it ends with the artist pulling the cloth off the canvas, a canvas that he has in his room. And you don't see what's on the canvas. And it never occurred to me really that that was a big thing. I always knew that the canvas was blank.

But when it came out, a friend of mine said, "I can't wait to see what the picture is on the canvas." I thought, "Jesus, I built this thing up, obviously he's waiting for this big epiphany moment in #2 when you see what the image is, and it's just a blank canvas." How can I make that be even more important than an image?

So all of that, all of those feelings went into the writing of the second issue. So for writing a first book, it was actually a nice way of doing it. I had never written anything before, so it was nice to get that sort of feedback.

DM: Now there's a loaded question.

DM: I really loved it. Finally, that's the thing I'm most happy with. It's full of flaws and problems, but the things that I really wanted to do, I think I achieved. One thing is humor. I wanted it to have a lightness of touch. The conversational aspect, I wanted people to talk, and I observed people talking, full of pauses and you start saying one thing, you head off in another direction, and you say something and you know what you meant but it's taken differently. You know, all of that stuff I've never seen represented in comics, really. I mean, I see people who can write good dialogue. But it tends to be very literary dialogue. People speak perfect sentences, beginning to end. I don't know anybody who speaks like that. So I wanted that to be represented. And also I wanted a lot of the writing to be covered really in the pictures, and for the dialogue to just be there as punctuation. As part of the flow, and to allow the images to breathe.

DM: Yeah. I've been very lucky to work with Neil, who writes great prose, I think Mr. Punch is full of some lovely prose, I really think Mr. Punch is some of the best stuff Neil has ever written. But Neil comes from a literary background. And I really don't. I have... I can't really think of any influences on my writing, such that it is, other than people who write film scripts. Good screenwriters. Which is a whole other skill, really. It means allowing the imagery to talk. And when you're writing dialogue, so much of it is in the body posture and whether somebody's looking to one side or looking straight at you, that's often where the information is. It's not in the words. And I'm sure if you're writing a comic, I'm sure if I was writing for somebody else to draw, I would find it hugely frustrating.

Part of the pleasure of it was really to be able to sketch in a script. They were the loosest of scripts, because I knew so much of the characterization and the story really was covered in the smallest of visual details that I would put in as I was drawing it.

And a lot of stuff was also contributed by the people who I got to pose for reference photographs. I'd just get people alone, I'd tell 'em what the scene was, and then we'd just sort of walk through it, and sometimes I'd take very specific shots. Other times, I'd just sort of get rough coverage, and they would always contribute something. Just a look, or, there's a great bit that I'm really happy with where the... I think it might even be in the first issue, where the cat... oh no, it's one of the others, where the cat comes to talk to the artist, and we were photographing, I was taking some photographs of the guy at his house, and there was a cat, we were outside and this cat came along, and the way he knelt down and got the cat to come to him, and stroked him and the cat rolled over, was perfect. It was absolutely perfect. I could never have got such a lovely feeling of empathy between the cat and the person if I hadn't got some of those photographs.

DM: Graphicus Touring is a touring exhibition company that's run by Leo de Freitas, a friend of mine who was one of my tutors in art school. I've kept in touch with him over the years, and he's started this touring company, initially to tour Tenniel's prints from Alice, and that kind of thing. So he was putting together exhibitions to go around museums and local galleries and libraries in England. And he asked me if I wanted to put together an exhibition to tour as well. It's a contemporary show, which is the main difference from everything else that he's doing. But it's been a real success. It's been wonderful. It continually tours. There's a standard exhibition that I just add to occasionally if I've got something new out that I'd like to stick in there, then we just update it a bit, and it just goes from one venue to another and it started going around Europe as well. I don't do a lot of exhibitions, and I don't really have the time to do all the teaching I'd like to do, or all the lectures and stuff I'd liked to do. So this exhibition fulfills a lot of those roles, without my having to show up in person.