Since he burst onto the scene with Violent Cases, Dave McKean has quested further and further in the search for new ways of producing comics. But Cages, his first solo work, sees him adopting a more conservative approach. Stuart Green asks: is this the face of the future?
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Art is kick-started by technology. The cheap availability of state-of-the-art sampling equipment has created an alien music that beats out the future an afternoon radio, photography pushed painting further and further into abstraction. But according to Graham Harwood, creator of If Comix and member of the public, most of the comics we feature in Speakeasy "look like they have been caught up in the printing process of fifty years ago.
"How things were printed then is why you drew a comic in that way — full colour images that use three flat colours," he opines. "People don't work within the limitations of the new technology, but within limitations that are fifty years old."
Dave McKean, who is sitting next to me, laughs resignedly. "They work within their own limitations. That's what comics are. A mass of neuroses. Tons and tons of personal little cages." Cue for a comic?
Well, not quite yet.
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LET'S GO TECHNO
Dave and I have been invited by Graham, who doubles as a lecturer at Middlesex Poly, to test-drive some new paint software he is working on. The idea is that Graham will hold Dave's hand while he creates a painting for the 21st century. Or something like that, anyway. Graham's software takes photographs, or video images and maps them onto 'paper'. You can practically 'order' the exact paper quality you want, which will give a natural effect often lacking in computer generated images. Then you can add further texture to the image in various ways that mimic the action of a brush.
"It's shoving chaos in the system," Dave says energetically. "The thing I like most about painting and image making is degrading images. Make them look more natural. In the same way that you get a piece of wood, the more you weather it and the more you leave it out in the rain, the more and interesting it gets. Computers tend not to do that. They tend to deal with refined and precise images." Take a look at Digital Justice, if you want to know what he means.
While not accessible to everyone (yet), this is cheap technology. In his enthusiasm, Graham communicates the idea that someday everyone will be able to create their own glossies in the privacy of their bedrooms. The photocopied 'zine' is disappearing already. Soon everyone will be able to produce glossies in the comfort and financial security of their living rooms.
So, why did I ask Dave McKean to come along and test the potential of the new boxes? Whatever may be said for the benefits of the experiment with "fully-painted art" — sure as hell, the results have been mixed so far. Dave McKean has been at the forefront of the new ambitions and grand designs. Nothing has quite provoked the reaction that greeted Arkham Asylum — the product of two cocky young chancers. Each page is a painstakingly composed collage. Okay, so at times it seemed overdressed, but just look at the sheer, naked ambition. Every panel breathes with the excitement of someone feeling their way, of someone trying to change the way comics are done, of someone trying to change the way we think about them: "The reason it originally came about hasn't changed. It is that the basic comic book images — trying to be as objective as possible, they're cold. I think they're inhuman, and I don't think they communicate to very many people outside of the little clique who have a history of reading them. Traditional comic imagery is black and white line drawings that look like they're drawn from stencils. I was doing films and videos at art college and doing illustrations. It just seemed logical to try and play with other imagery."
Arkham, and Dave's current work, are an attempt to initiate change in the moribund world of comics. As he explains his philosophy, I catch a glimpse of how this obsessive artist approaches his work. His conversation is animated, every idea illustrated with an expansive gesture. Of both hands. "It's like talking about so-called advances in popular music. Winston Marsalis [a jazz musician Dave rates highly] just sees the whole thing as one big decline. He said in response to a question about rap music: 'Every time something new comes out, I think, how much worse can it get? How much more simple, and basic, and moronic can it get.'" Dave is antipathetic to pop culture, as you'll learn. "He was saying that The Beatles were singing singable songs, but you take them from George Gershwin, or Cole Porter, and that's a hell of a decline. And that doesn't seem to be stated in comics."
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SACRED COW
This is the point at which Dave sacrifices a couple of sacred cows. "It's like all the clutter of Jack Kirby, who reduced everything to these built up, ludicrous caricatures of what real people were like. This is accepted as the starting point. Why not Winsor McCay, who was at least a draughtsman? I mean, he created comics in about six or seven episodes of Little Nemo and almost all of those strictures are commonly held to be the foundations of comics now! Nothing's happened for 80 years. What the fuck is going on?"
But you've given up the painted canvasses and turned to line drawing and a limited palette. "For starters that's just for this one, though it may be for others as well." Dave appears to have taken onboard the two main criticisms that were made of his work on Black Orchid, Arkham, and of painted art in general: that it is cold and results in static storytelling. "The amount of time it takes to produce a panel to the amount of time it takes to read is way out of line. It unnecessarily slows the reader down. Once you have a drawing and it works, everything else you put in there is not communicating anything else to the reader. At best it will maintain the same value. At worst, which is often what happened, it took a nose dive, and just got lost in its own masturbation.
"I've done three years of comics with an attitude of... 'I have an idea of where comics should be,' but I don't know if there's a market for that. And I don't know if the publishers will go for it, so I'll do something half-way there."
Arkham?
"All that stuff. And I have that attitude at the start of the project so even by the middle of it, time has gone and I've seen something else and I'm that much further than that." The result? Boredom and a change of direction. "What I want to do now, is try and see the furthest possible point of what I think a really great comic would be, and do it now. Right now. That's why I'm doing Cages. It's the comic I always wanted to read. I've no idea whether anyone else is interested, or even gives a toss what the hell it is.
"I'm not saying I'm an artist, but you have to have a point to aim for. And that should be as high, and as lofty, and ridiculous and as unapproachable as you like. I want to produce a comic strip that will be thought of in the highest possible terms. I hate this promotion that's been going on in comics, that they are the new pop music. If that's the best comics can aspire to, then I'm going to quit tomorrow."
Dave has settled on two ways he will now approach comics. Cages is an example of one, a conventional comic narrative which he sees as basically cinematic. "The problem with it is that it is like a sub-movie. The advantage is that it is so accessible, allowing you to get to know people on a personal level."
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NEW AMBITIONS
Cages will be followed, as soon as Dave has finished two collaborations with Neil Gaiman, the expanded Signal To Noise and Mr. Punch, with the project he refers to, lovingly, as "my baby. My How To Do Comics My Way manual." This will employ a completely different methodology influenced by Mattotti's Man At The Window and the prints of New York-based artist, Jim Dine.
"Mattotti rarely draws backgrounds; every panel is like a sign, triggering a set of associated signs that the reader has. The sign images can be as complex as you like, because they keep on firing more and more images. The panels can seem to have no narrative from one to another, you just go through in a sequence. In any sequence.
"Other examples of that would be things like the prints that Jim Dine has done. A set of images that can be read in any order, but a narrative is built up because you're forced to do from one to another. The actual narration takes place between the pictures, if you like. That's another fascinating way of doing comics. The disadvantages of it are that it is less accessible and the reader is forced to make connections themselves, but in the end it could be more rewarding."
Dave McKean, a young man still at the beginning of his career, leaves looking to the future: "Comics are too tied up in the past, they're not looking forward and they're not looking to communicate to everybody. I am convinced that to reach the general public you have to talk in a language that relates to everything else they come across in their lives: films, TV graphics here, there and everywhere, every illustrated thing. All it needs is for the guys doing it to set aside this safe comic book world and go for it. Just look out," he implores.
I'll be waiting.