KIRK CHRITTON: How did Cages come about?
DAVE McKEAN: It's based on a collection of little ideas I've gathered while working on other writers' projects. Writing ideas are gold dust. They come along very rarely, so it's taken ages to actually get enough material together — enough things that I wanted to actually put down — to get a book out of it.
I don't really want to go into the plot too much. It's broadly about why people believe in things and what happens when you believe in things. The nature of belief. It's linked to my beliefs. I'm not a religious person, but I believe very strongly in creativity as a force to get you through life. So, it's just about that really, and since it's the first thing I've written, I wanted to stay on home ground and not bite off more than I can chew.
KC: How confident do you feel going into this as a first-time writer?
DM: I feel reasonably confident now that I'm actually doing it. Up until about four months ago I hadn't got anything down on paper, so I felt nervous telling the people I talk to, like Neil Gaiman, about it and getting their feedback. It sounded all very grandiose and interesting, but actually putting something on paper was quite different. Now that I've actually got something down, I'm pleased with it, and that was the main thing since I really haven't been all that happy with anything I've done for the last few years.
KC: You haven't been?
DM: No, not at all. I just really wanted to do something that I was pleased with, something that I could stand up and defend, and be proud of, and show people, and say, "This one's mine."
KC: When you say you're not happy with what you've done, is that in terms of material, doing superhero work, or a feeling that your own artwork wasn't up to par?
DM: Pretty much everything. I was never happy doing superhero stuff because I've never liked them. And the more I did it, the more I realized that I couldn't do it even as a job. I couldn't get out of bed in the morning — couldn't work up the enthusiasm to do it — because I didn't believe in it. If somebody's doing superhero comics, and they really love it, and it's what they always want to do, fine, more power to them, but not for me.
KC: Was Arkham Asylum something of a breaking point?
DM: It was kind of a breaking point in as much as at the beginning of it I thought if could push it as far as I could in the direction that I wanted to go — this sort of very abstracted work and dense atmosphere. I tried not to accept any of the ground rules at face value.
When Grant first came up with the story he didn't know who was going to be drawing it so it was a very traditional Batman story. But, it had Robin in it, and I didn't like that at all. At one point he was Bruce Wayne, and I didn't want that either because I don't believe in the character as a human being. I like the idea of him being sort of a cross between man and an animal, and I think as a mythic story that's kind of interesting.
We chopped it and changed it around. It became sort of a symbolic play. We piled all this stuff on top of it, and dressed it up in its best clothes, and sent it out. Then I sat down afterwards and realized, "Why? Why bother? It's such an absurd thing to do." It's like suddenly realizing the fact that you're desperately trying to work around the subject matter — trying to make the book despite the subject, rather than because of it. At the end of the day, if you really love to do Batman comics, then that's probably the best thing to do. Not liking them, and then trying to make something out of them is just a waste of time.
Also, by the end of it I'd really begun to think that this whole thing about four-color comics with very, very overpainted, lavish illustrations in every panel just didn't work. It hampers the storytelling. It does everything wrong. It's very difficult to have any enthusiasm about it after that.
KC: So you really came to the point that it seemed like the art was working against the story?
DM: Yeah, definitely. Especially in this case. There was so little content there. I mean, it does nobody any good at all to realize that Batman is a psychopath. Who cares?
KC: There isn't much world-shaking significance in the fact.
DM: Exactly.
KC: When you say that you realized that full-color, overly painted work was hampering the story, is that why Cages seems to be such a different approach to comics storytelling for you?
DM: Well, I suppose so. I don't think it is, you see. Because the trouble is — and it's taken seeing other people doing full-color work to make me realize this — what a lot people are seeing is the surface of what I've been doing. It's all atmosphere and lush colors and texture and this kind of stuff. I've always thought that if there was any strength in my work at all, it was the basic drawings. Now, I go to conventions and people show me their portfolios and they're full of tons of paint and texture and airbrush and, Christ, it's got bits of watch stuck on it, but the basic drawing is — nine times out of ten — really poor or almost nonexistent. So it was really worrying. I've started to feel responsible for convincing people to just splatter it with paint and forget the drawing.
With Cages, I really wanted to do something that was all drawing and as little flash as possible, so it's all pared down to the absolute essential skeleton of the drawing. It's probably still overdone. I think it works a lot better. Just through reading it, you don't stop. There are no false stops. It just keeps you moving through it, I hope very easily. I've been pleased with the feedback it's been getting. It seems to bear out what I was striving for.
KC: You mentioned that you don't want to do anymore superhero work. Does this mean that we'll be seeing you do less work for DC? I've read that you're drawing Jamie Delano's last issue of Hellblazer.
DM: Yeah, I've done that. It should be out soon. That really came about because I've been trying to get together with Jamie to do something for ages, in fact, since I started doing the covers for Hellblazer, which was three years ago. He's a good friend, and we wanted to do something, but Jamie, having done three years with Constantine had got to the end of what he wanted to do with that. Karen [Berger] suggested that I could do the last one, which was nice. Unfortunately, it was a bit rushed, so I didn't have the time to spend that I would have liked.
It's pen and ink, but it's much more cross-hatched and much more tonal pen and ink, if you can have such a thing, than Cages is. Then I went over to Ireland and colored it on the computer by hand so that it looks like a full-color thing, but it's kind of a halfway stage.
KC: So will there still be DC work? Will you keep doing the covers?
DM: Well, I'll certainly keep doing the Sandman covers until somebody throws me off, really, because I love doing them. Apart from the fact I like the comics and like Neil's writing a lot, it's just a great, broad framework of subject matter to go in. He really worked out a little universe there that you can have anybody in. It's really nice to work in such a free world.
But in terms of doing books, I've by no means fallen out with DC. They've been very nice, and I know other people have had problems, but I certainly haven't. Karen's a great editor, and some of the other people there, like Tom Peyer, are really nice. I'd still like to do books for them, but the trouble is if you want to keep on moving forward in any sense, unless you're left alone to grow at your own speed and just do what you feel is right you're going to eventually hit the ceiling, you're going to hit a wall where you can't go any further. At DC you are very much a hired person; you're working for them. If you want to grow at all you'll eventually hit the wall. You just have to realize that that's the case, and it won't change. You can try to push the wall a bit and force them to change a little bit, but eventually you'll hit that wall. It just means that you have to look around for other places to do you work.
KC: So do you see you doing your future work through more individual avenues like Tundra, which is almost a self-publishing situation?
DM: I think so. Tundra is kind of a dream of a situation. The very loose contracts they've got are absolute dream contracts. They're very nice, personable people to deal with and you certainly feel like they are working for you inasmuch as they want to try to make the book its very best, and that's first on the priority list. Even to have the thing about making money, the profit thing, as being second on the list is an improvement over the obvious first on the list with the big companies.
I don't see that there is anything I'm likely to do that Tundra wouldn't want, unless the quality of it was obviously poor, which is only my fault. And the other place that I'm doing stuff is a book publisher in London called Victor Gollancz. They started as a science fiction book publisher, but now they publish all sorts of different things, and they've just started a line of comics. Again, a good editor, very easy people to work for, and it's a good situation. I'm doing two books for them at the moment.
KC: Will those be distributed in the U.S.?
DM: They will be distributed in the U.S. We're hoping to work out a deal, possibly even with Tundra. At the moment they've got two books from me and Neil, Alan Moore, Mike Harrison, and Ian Miller all doing for comics for them. It's quite a nice little list they've got. And the books that I've seen are superb.
KC: Here in the U.S. we kind of have this vision of all the British creators sitting in one little community controlling our industry and taking away our opportunities. How much contact do you have with the various other creators over there?
DM: It's exactly like that. We've got a control room [Laughter].
No, we're spread out all over the country. All the different people who are doing American comics are spread out from the top of Scotland and beyond all the way down to the Isle of Wight. It's difficult to stay in touch, or even know everybody. There are certainly quite a few I haven't even met. But, we all tend to know each other, and then there are the little groups within that. My immediate friends tend to be Neil and then a few guys like Mark Johnson and Mark Buckingham and Richard Rayner, and few more established people like John Bolton and Brian Bolland. There are other crowds, like the general 2000 A.D. crowd who I don't really know because I've just never done any work for them. We tend not to see each other.
KC: I think there's a perception over here that there's a very marked stylistic difference between U.S. and British artists and writers. Do you see that, and what do you think the differences are?
DM: I kind of see the differences. Only talking about Neil, Grant [Morrison], Jamie, and Alan as writers because that is generally the work I look at more than anything else that's produced over here, it tends to just not accept the restrictions. All of them are capable of doing anything they want. Neil has worked as a journalist and has written novels. Grant's written plays. They've all done the work, and they're all capable of doing the work, because at the end of the day, the skills of being a writer are pretty much the same. You have to be able to tell a story. You have to have an ear for dialogue and characterization. It's the same with drawing. Drawing is basic skills. So if you can do it, you can do anything. Maybe you can do some better than others, but the skills are pretty much the same.
I tend to feel that the skills in American comics have become so specialized that what you actually have to do to write an American superhero comic has become so dictated and constricted that it's not surprising that it tends to be very samey. That's the main stylistic difference. I think the reason it's there is because of two reasons. One is that guys I mentioned are not fans. They're all enthusiastic about comics, and love doing it, and want to keep pushing, but are also extremely critical of comics generally. I know for a fact that for whatever criticism they've got for their respective books, they could write far better criticisms, because they're so critical.
I'm the same way. There are very few comics I like. I can count them on one hand, simply because you almost have to be that critical if you're going to be motivated, if you're going to keep pushing forward. You have to, even when something comes out from somebody you really like, you have to sit down and think, "What is there in here that isn't working? How can you improve on this?" That's a strong motivation.
Plus, the other thing is the geographical part of it. It's essentially British stuff. Where in America you've had very much a limited amount of genres to work in — it's primarily superheroes and a few other small genres. It's pushed Bill Sienkiewicz, Frank Miller, and a few others, to really try to absolutely stretch those thin genres out to their maximums, so it's produced some interesting work because they have to push like crazy to actually get anything interesting. In Europe, they've been able to do anything they want — comics about absolutely anything they fancy doing at all. But, conversely, it's produced a smaller range of styles because the storytelling is often very similar from one European comic to another, although the subject matter is very wide. So, stuck in middle here, in this little island, we can pick and choose from America and Europe, and hopefully come out with something that is the best of both.
KC: You talk about the diversity of the writers — what diversity is there on your part, in terms of a variety of art experience and background. It's obvious that you've done work beyond comics. What sort of things have you done?
DM: Apart from comics? Well, it's about half and half. I still do tons of illustrations for book covers. In fact, I've just won an award for best album cover of the year.
KC: Congratulations.
DM: Thank you. I couldn't believe it. I thought they'd made a mistake.
I've done an audio-visual installation for a museum in Carlisle. I've worked as a production designer on a movie in Hollywood for a short while.
KC: What movie was that?
DM: It was all pre-production work on a movie called Ecotopia, and it's all still in pre-production, so you probably won't even hear of it until 1992. I've done music for videos. At the moment we're doing a play, a collection of readings by some science fiction authors here, and I'm doing all the music and painting the backdrop and doing some theatre for it. All of that stuff feeds the comics, and all the aspects of comics that you don't get from just sitting down and sketching stuff — like storytelling — feeds the rest. The ability to work with a writer and capture what the writer had in mind in the script, obviously feeds into doing an illustration for a book cover because you have to sit down and imagine what the writer would have on his book cover. It all cross feeds.
KC: How does a Sandman cover come about? How do you come up with an initial idea and take it to a finished piece? I ask because what you do looks so unlike what other people are doing.
DM: I talk to Neil pretty much every day. We've got three or four books in the works, so we have to keep abreast of what's going on. What that means is that as soon as Neil has any sort of idea about what's going to be happening in the future as far as the Sandman he can tell me and I can start planning it out.
KC: Do you tend to do a series of covers in a row, uninterrupted by other work?
DM: That's right. I've been tending to get out of Neil as much information as possible about the next four or five covers and then do them as a bulk. One, because it's easier for me to get it done that way, plus, I try to do the stories, such as the current "Season of Mists" storyline, with a particular feel to them. These have a little box of type at the top with the "In which" quote, and the logo is displaced, moved down a bit. And they're all photographically based, somehow, most of them double-exposures. Prior that, we had the short stories, "Dream Come True", and they were all done in that sort of pointillist painting style. And then the one before that had all the shelving down the side.
KC: The ones with the shelving down the side are unlike most American comics work, or any comics that I can think of, in that they're three-dimensional. What was the impetus behind that?
DM: At art college I started doing 3-D work and a lot of flat paper collage, which I'm still doing. It's another place to go. If you do one thing over and over again, it tends to lose that spontaneity. It gets boring, and that boredom communicates itself to the viewer as well as to the person who has to draw it all.
The cover of Cages #2 is even more 3-D, as is some of the future stuff for Cages. I've been trying to work out ways to use it in the storytelling. I've got one sequence in Cages where I've built a small model of a surreal attic and by illuminating various parts of the attic and taking a photograph just with a pencil torch it produces storytelling because you have multiple images where the torch moves around illuminating different parts of the attic. So there's a way that 3-D work can be integrated into comics, and I hope it will work.
KC: How does your workday tend to go? You're obviously juggling a lot of projects at once, so I imagine there's quite a bit of variation.
DM: I've learned to my cost that if you try to literally keep four or five projects up in the air generally your work suffers because you have to bounce from one to another, although variety is certainly nice.
To sit down for two weeks solid and concentrate on one thing — or 20 pages of a comic book — focuses the work a lot more. At the moment, I'm keeping big chunks of my time, like a solid month, to do an issue of Cages, and then, because it's bimonthly, I have a month free to do other stuff.
As far as a workday goes, if it's something I've got lined up, I usually get up around midday, which sounds horribly lazy, and sort of putter around and pretend that I don't have to start immediately and then eventually sort of get down to it. And then I work straight through until about five or six in the morning, just because the phone doesn't ring, and there are stupid things on television, and it's dark and quiet, and it's nice. I like working at that time. Even if I try to change to be more in sync with my wife — because she gets up early and we tend to see each other in the corridor as I'm going to bed and she's getting up — it only takes one deadline and then my time clock is screwed up again. Other than that, I'm driving around, trying to convince people to sell me skulls, asking people to pose in silly costumes.
KC: Do you tend to shoot a lot your own photos for reference?
DM: Yeah, again it's something that started at college. I carried on with it because one of the things I don't like about comics generally are these generic characters that you see a lot of the time. I'd just hate to get to the stage where I think I know what a human being looks like, because you only have to look at the people around you to see the infinite variety. You will never know anything.
Even if you've got a few characters under your belt that you can draw, there will always be more. There will always be their postures and facial expressions and their body language, the way the light falls on them, the clothes they wear, the way their clothes hang on them. There's just so much information that if you try to pretend that you know it all, maybe you'll get away with it for a year, but pretty soon it'll become obvious that that's all you know because that's all the information you have.
I take reference photographs just as a way to keep on looking and keep on reminding myself that I don't know everything, that I don't even know a tiny fraction of what's out there. Even if I could draw a picture, say of somebody lighting a cigarette, and then I take a reference photo of somebody and just say, "Light the cigarette," they'll do it in a way that I just wouldn't have expected. There's just that sort of a flick of the wrist or the way they frown a little bit. I just wouldn't have thought of that. That light that illuminates up the face, but really just catches at the neck a bit. All of these little details are more information, and it makes for believable people, and it makes for natural movements and body language which you can empathize with, which all aids in the storytelling.
KC: Many comics seem to be almost drawn from a template, where everything fits a structure and will fit according to certain rules, but if people open their eyes, life is pretty messy.
DM: Absolutely. There are no straight lines, and books like How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way are horribly destructive. Anybody telling you how to draw comics is a non-starter; you might as well just give up there and then, because that's not you doing it, that's a book telling you how to do it. Even if it can give you some interesting advice, a shortcut or two, in a lot of ways, it's better to go around the long way because you'll pick up more information and get more experience.
Most of the people who come up at conventions with the obligatory "How do I get into comics?" question are just getting to the end of school, around fifteen to seventeen years old and wondering what to do and how to get into comics. It must be awfully tempting, drawing away in sketchbooks and looking at a lot of the stuff that gets published and knowing that they can do as well as that. They may not be able to do as well as, say, that over there, but they can certainly do as well as that. They think, "This guy's making a living at this, why can't I? I'll just step in and do that."
I can understand the temptation to do that, but I always tell them to go to art college, even if they're really, really good. Given any amount of time, a week or three years, they'll get bored with it. They'll realize that that's the amount of information they've got, and more importantly they haven't got the skills you pick up in art college, because one thing art college teaches you is the skills of how to learn and how to look. A lot of people think you just go to art college to learn how to draw things, whereas the most important things you learn are the basic human skills you need to survive. How to observe. How to think through problems. How to solve problems. How to empathize with people. That's the important stuff. Sitting down in a drawing room and drawing potted plants and stuff is important, but it's not as important as that. Anybody can sit at home and draw a picture of a potted plant, but to actually be surrounded by people with vast experience and a classroom of people who were all the best person in their school and are now suddenly surrounded by people who can draw as well if not better than them. There's that push, that impetus, to get better, and there are always people criticizing you. It's very important to be able to react to that. At the end of the day, if you go through four years of art college and you want to do comics, your comics will be that much richer, that much better, and you'll be ready to go into the industry at a higher level and not have to put up with inking Bouncing Boy for ten years before getting to do anything you really fancy doing.
In many ways the companies have had it easy for so long because they've had people banging on their door begging to do comics, saying "This is all I want. I'm a huge fan. I just want to do comics. Don't pay me anything. Screw me around. Give me rotten contracts. I'll sell you my kids and everything just for the chance to do some comics." And the publishers say, "Well okay we might let you do something," and that's it. You might as well lock the door and throw away the key because there are no other options for you. As I was saying before, drawing comics is a set of skills like any other set of skills. You can acquire them. You can learn them. To be an illustrator or a fine artist or a sculptor is a basic set of skills that are around abstract things like observation and hand-to-eye coordination and you really have to go through that before trying to take a short cut to do comics. That's why there's such a problem, because the standards are so low, the standards have been accepted as being so low. It's not surprising that people don't take comics seriously. I'm not surprised at all.
KC: Are things you'd like to see happening in the comic book business that aren't happening?
DM: Well, really I'd just like there to be as big an audience as is necessary to support unusual and individual work. It's as vague as that, really. I don't want huge companies buying in and putting millions of dollars on the table, because that's not what I'm in it for. I don't want to hear any more stories of Spider-Man selling three million copies. I don't want to hear that. All I'd like is for the people who want to do small interesting work, so long as it's good — I'm not asking for a market to support rubbish — I'd like it to be supported intelligently and creatively and for those people to be comfortable and continue to work.
KC: You said earlier that you could count the comics that you really like on one hand. What are those comics?
DM: I'm very critical of comics because I'm involved in it. I'm critical of films, but I'm much more a sort of patron. I'm quite happy to go down to the cinema and just watch something that's good time and cheer and clap, as well as watching more stimulating films, something that's more involving. But, in comics I'm just far more critical. I almost have to be, just to stay ahead and keep thinking about it.
So, Fires is really the only one that's come out that I really have no criticism of. It's just a fabulous book. It's a simple story, which I really like, and it treats a very profound subject — man's relationship with the natural world — with a wonderful lightness of touch. It's a very simple statement. I just think that one's terrific.
Oh, and I've just thought of two more that I can't really criticize. One is called When the Wind Blows, which is by Raymond Briggs and was made into a full length animated film recently. One is called Jeffrey the Choo Train and the Fat Coming In, and that's by a British comedian called Alexi Sale and drawn by Oscar Zeratti, and both of those are just fabulous. I thought Why I Hate Saturn was terrific. I think Kyle [Baker]'s a terrific writer. And there are others around.
I enjoyed Watchmen, but I'm not sure now that I could sit down now and get the same feelings from it as I did at the time when it was coming out in its twelve parts. For the first time in years it actually got me waiting for a new comic to come out. Now, looking back on it, it doesn't have the same effect on me. V for Vendetta has a better effect on me, oddly enough. There are lots of people who are doing wonderful stuff, but so far the books they're doing I haven't liked that much. I'm probably being harsh saying I could count the books I like on one hand, but I could probably count the ones I've felt worked beautifully on one hand, and certainly the ones that have affected me the ways my favorite films have. There's this tendency to think, "Well, it's only a comic book," and have less expectation of the comic book than you would of Citizen Kane or whatever. There have only been a few that I've thought really fulfilled that.
KC: In terms of your own future, to put it crudely, how long will we have you to kick around in the comic book business? Is there going to come a day where you're going to get bored and say, "Nah, this phase is over."
DM: Well, I certainly feel like I'm in it for the long haul. I've been less certain, but at the moment, I've never been happier with the stuff I'm doing, and I've never been more enthusiastic about comics generally. Everything at the moment is going swimmingly. I've got several books planned, some with other people, some I want to write myself. I seem to have cultivated at least a small group of people who are curious to see what might happen next, which I'm tremendously grateful for and am very pleased about.
Plus, there are lots of people around who are at the moment are planning or working on some amazing books. I think next year or even this year we're going to see some terrific stuff coming out, and that just fires me up even more, gives me even more enthusiasm.