The Conversation

DAVE McKEAN: I apologize for my country for that one; some English comics artists are involved with an extreme love/hate ambivalence about American comics. The Judge Dredd strip hates everything about American comics, while at the same time, it is the same thing. It's a Rat Kink. The Rat Kink is when you get a nest of rats, and they're all scrambling around, and their tails get tangled up, and they can't get away from each other. They're all trying to get off in different directions, get away, but they're all tied to each other as well, so they can't get away from each other. It's a metaphor for someone who's on the outside of comics looking in, and has a quite disturbed, negative feeling, a tension and anxiety for people involved in comics, and it may be because comics is so looked down upon, but they're sort of trampled, and disturbed egos, and so everybody's desperate to distance themselves from the comics scene, but at the same time, desperately needs the comics scene for any semblance of career. The alternative is to try and take on the real world, and that's obviously an extremely difficult thing to do. The level of communication suddenly goes up a few grades if you try and take on the world through writing, or television, or movies, or painting.

DM: I haven't actually seen one yet that is a satisfactory experience in the same way that a movie is, where you just forget yourself and are immersed into this experience. It's a failure as far as a real visceral experience. It's wonderful for information, if all you want is to look up things. But if you want to have some sort of meaningful experience, it's woefully inadequate. It is getting better all the time, and with a little judicious thinking around problems, you can actually start to get something that is a little more interesting.

DM: If it's not achievable, I quit. I don't want to do these ridiculous point-and-click exercises where you... like the lovely Polish cartoon with a guy earning his ten coins doing some ludicrous repetitive task on a conveyor belt, goes out to spend his coins in a tree, birds tweet and the forest beckons, and he just plunks in another coin and then that's it. And he moves on to the next thing and he puts his coins in another machine. It's so condescending. It's on the level of... you click on Peter Gabriel and it's... Do you want to see a picture? Here's your picture. It's ludicrous. It'd be much better to read a book.

So, if we can get past that, that's the future. Nobody really knows what this medium is or what it's best at. Few people have really thought about what it means, this interactivity. And I take it to mean it's your room. You stroll about, people go where they will and look around. You can approach anything you want to if you're interested, and look at things, or pick objects up. It's a beautiful perspective of space; you just wander around.

DM: It's just like that. You can create a completely surreal world, which we've done in Mr. Punch, where you can find a box on the stage, you look into the box, and see a puppet. You look into the cell and see Neil Gaiman reading you a story. Hopefully, people will enjoy wandering around this place.

DM: We've done a demonstrative version. We've separated up the experience into eight parts. Igor, who is running Artemis, has done these meetings. We've had a very positive reaction from Warner Brothers. My agent was there; she's not put off by their odd manner. They are interested. We got a typical reaction from Sony. "Yeah, but where are the guns?"

DM: "We've got to kill people." And apparently, they kept on saying, "We really get into the computer game market," and then Igor would carry on with the demo a bit more, and they'd say, "Yeah, we'd rather get into the computer game market," and then he'd show them how you interact with the mask, the old movies, and they'd say, "Yeah, but fellas we're really into the computer game market."

He got fed up in the end and said, "Look, I just came by to show you what's going to be required of it," and the panel actually went down quite well, because one of them came to him after and gave him his personal card and said, "I was at Warners for a while, and I don't know how long I'm going to stay here at Sony, but keep me in mind."

DM: It's bound to come down in price. The important thing is: It still doesn't do it for you. You have to prod them. It still depends on the person sitting behind it. So I don't think anybody who is really driven to put images down in paper will be held back by the appalling price of an Apple Mac. I think they'll make drawings still and work towards finding ways of making computer images if they have to.

I felt I had to because the people who I was taking part with were all using computers. I'm thinking particularly of designers. Completely computer-literate, and you could tell. The clarity and precision of the work was way beyond what I could do with paste up. So I was either going to have to pack in pretending to be a designer or invest in this computer thing which I was a bit unsure of. Now that I have, I can't imagine working without it. I think it's a glorious tool and practically everything I'm doing now at some point goes through the computer.

DM: Yes, but the other side of the coin is that you may have to spend a reasonable amount of money, but it's not something you'd have to mortgage your house for anymore. Anybody can get a multi-track studio, digital, in their front room with a sampling keyboard and basically put together professional-quality digital music.

DM: It does seem that way. I mean, I'm sure it doesn't to a 17-year-old leaving school, desperately wanting to make music and seeing five or ten thousand quid as being out of reach. But on the other hand, people who can't afford demos in professional recording studios for five or six thousand pounds suddenly can have all the time in the world. When I left college, there was a computer graphics system called Matisse which was about 25 thousand pounds. Now you can buy a Mac for not nearly so much, to get up and running. And then further down the read you can add more memory and programs.

How do you feel about it? All this time doing amazing paintings and drawings and never needing a computer, producing images that preceded those that many produce on the computer now.

DM: I think using Schiele as an example is a good one: You can look at those drawings endlessly. There is so much in those obsessive drawings. Perhaps to line up 30 or 40 of those in a row and try to have some sort of narrative followed. Personally, I would think that that's probably not the best way of looking at those drawings. You don't want to look at one, waiting to see the next one, you just want to look at that drawing. Whereas the sort of drawings that you do need to guide you into the next one and to prime you for the next panel and then move you on to the next one and keep this motion going, I think it's just a different quality, a different problem. Profusely illustrated panels are often wonderful to look at, but for me it fights against the content of the script.

I do think it's possible to do profusely illustrated comics. But then you would not be dealing with a script, where you were involved in a cinematic way. You may be involved in the same way that you might be involved with characters in a painting — you're certainly gleaning information and maybe getting meaning from whatever text is supplied — but you're absorbing the story in a different way. I don't think that would have worked for something like Cages, which is very much about watching these people wandering around and talking things over. I think it would have been a real mistake to have illustrated those panels very heavily.

DM: The first one was Violent Cases. Black Orchid was the first thing we did for DC. Violent Cases was a single book that came out in England in 1987. There was an American edition later on. 1991, I think. It's so old...

DM: I did a little three-page story that squeaked out just a few months before that came out — they pretty much came out at the same time. I was very much sort of fighting Bill Sienkiewicz's influence, and all those American illustrators, the Peaks, and Fuchs's. Trying to get away from it, but loving it as well, and feeling that there must be more to life than this, and not really knowing what it was. The best thing about it was on the back cover, by the price, it said General Fiction. That was the best thing about it. [laughs]

DM: No, I started doing Violent Cases straight out of Art School. I met Neil while I was at Berkshire College of Art and Design.

DM: No, Neil had been working for eight years as a journalist. He was around the science fiction and horror fantasy circle, writing reviews, the odd short story, and a bit of journalism, living on lunch parties, and starving in the south of England with his wife. He loved comics, and got in touch with Alan Moore, and offered to take him to meet people he wanted to meet, like Iain Banks and Clive Barker; in exchange, he sat Alan down and said, "Look, how do you actually write a comic?" So Alan helped him and shed a little light. And then he showed him the first couple of things he had written, and at the same time he was going to a writers' workshop, everyone brought their current stories with them and critiqued them. He took Violent Cases and polished it there. Then he came to me to see if I wanted to do it.

DM: I'm sure I've seen it; I've seen a lot of Heavy Metal. I'm also aware of Luis Garcia, but not through the Warren magazines... Eerie and Creepy. Does it look very... heavily photographed?

DM: Tightly drawn in pencils or markers. I loved them when I found them. I'd never seen anything like it, you know, these very very finished illustrations in comics.

DM: Basically, we had very little contact. Neil calls every day. And I literally had 2 or 3 meetings with Grant. We ran over it, and then I just stayed at home, worked on it, and mailed off the artwork, and that was it. I didn't see Grant again until the book was out, and we were doing an interview at the ICA in London and kicked around the corpse that the book was at that point.

DM: Not at all. My impression at the time was that he was really stretching to find a voice. He'd been living a little bit in the shadow of Alan Moore, like most of the British writers at that time. Neil and Jamie Delano and several others. Because Alan had made such a big impact. He knew he had a voice of his own, but was struggling to find that, and he's a huge fan of Dennis Potter and various other writers. He turned me on to a Jan Svankmeyer film that he had seen in London. That was great. I think, in introspect, Grant has felt more comfortable doing off-the-wall but essentially mainstream superhero comics. Which is not a degradation, but they are sort of the equivalent to pop music — they're very quick and very to the point, and a great pop song can change your life.

DM: The history of comics recently and music have definitely been in touch with each other. In England, comics really never got anywhere because the youth culture was centered around pop music; that's why England has had such a great series of bands and writers. Whereas in France, that wasn't the case at all. A lot of the energy went into comics. Youth culture was about Metal Hurlant and the Humanoid Associates and Moebius and Bilal. There was very little French pop music that really made any headway into the world.

DM: I know that it sounds odd, since I have done a lot of stories but I'm not really interested in them. They're fine, but I don't see them as the point. I think this is something of another American/European split. Paul Schrader, trying to explain the difference between movies, said American movies generally are problems. A mystery that has to be solved. Somebody's in love with this woman, has to find this woman, there's a problem to be solved and by the end of the movie, to a greater or lesser degree, we have solved the problem. European movies generally are dilemmas. There is no resolution. There is a thing and we all wander around the movie for about two hours and we talk about it, and we talk about a bit more; probably many more dilemmas are thrown up by this one dilemma. We've got more problems at the end than we had at the beginning.

When it comes to finding stories to tell, it's a bit like a joke. A great joke, for me, is watching somebody perform it. Once you've heard it the first time, then you know the joke. It's not that funny the second time. But you can still watch a great performer tell it endlessly. It's watching timing in action. All of the undercurrent stuff going on that makes a great storyteller or comedian or musician. Somewhere in the middle there when you watch these two wonderful things come into contact, perfectly shaped and timed. You never get tired of the Marx Brothers.

There's a great Scottish comedian called Billy Connolly... do you know him?

DM: If you've seen a program about him, that would be great. He did some terrible sitcoms that didn't let him shine at all, but he's a walking comedy event. A tremendous storyteller, has no idea what he does for a living, he just goes out on stage and talks, has a few subjects that he likes to come back to, but he just talks there for two hours and you never get tired of watching him work.

DM: I never used to get any letters. When I started writing and drawing Cages, then I started getting letters, and I think the assumption is that the artist can't read. I think they just thought that the writers were the ones in the partnership who could actually make sense of words. But then when I started writing Cages, I started getting letters. I often wondered who was reading my stuff, so when I started receiving letters from across the board — taxi drivers, doctors, filmmakers, men, women, children — that seemed to confirm my feelings that it was impossible to aim your work at one specific group of people, I would be neglecting everybody else if I did that, so I just try and entertain myself. I think you do nothing of consequence if you try and please some amorphous audience. I think you really have to do work that you like, and hope that people will come along for the ride.

The nice thing about Cages taking so long is that I have had feedback all along the way, and it's actually changed a couple of things, especially when the third issue came out. I was 150 pages into a 500-page story, not even a third of the way, but I started getting letters from people saying, "Oh, I get it, I can see what this is about..." It was infuriating. People are writing in telling you what you're obviously going to do next. In the fourth issue... right in the middle of it, I put this little sequence in, about ten to twelve pages, that was completely inexplicable. So that stopped the "I know what this is about" letters.

DM: Three or four issues later, in seven, or eight, they started to make connections... and it's...

DM: It was at the time. There was one panel out of hundreds of panels that connected to the surrounding story.

DM: I really understood something of how Neil feels with Sandman, thousands of pages, and it's been going on for seven years, seventy-five issues. He's playing God with all these characters he's set up. He chucks some more characters onto the stage, some of whom, if he's had a bad morning, he might decide to kill off. I mean, it's a real God-like image. He's really in a position where he's manipulating the readers. He sets up characters and rumors for the characters. He knows damn well that the readers will assume certain things.

DM: Yes, it's that thing of throwing the ball in the air, that you may catch twenty issues down the line, two years down the line. Meanwhile, the speculation's been going on, and he will pull the best bits of speculation and mix them with some of what he intended in the first place. It's wonderful stuff. It's very much like an interactive media, really.

DM: McKEAN: It's back to Francis Bacon, really. I've just been reading a great book about him by a friend of his. It's very much from a very anecdotal, completely uncensored, loving friend's perspective. He tells a story about going to see an exhibition by Lucien Freud, and Francis Bacon's always been known for being ruthless with his opinions of fellow artists. One young artist badgered him to come up and see his work and he wouldn't go, and eventually this artist decided that he wouldn't look at his work because Bacon felt threatened by it. Bacon just said, "No, I don't want to see your work, because I've seen your tie."

Anyway, this guy was going to see a Lucien Freud show and apparently with one of those huge grins he said, "The trouble with Lucien's stuff is it's realistic without being real." And you kind of know what he means. It's tremendously accurate with an awful lot of literal and factual information, but there's not a lot of emotional information and it doesn't get inside you and it doesn't allow you to get inside Lucien Freud or the people he's painting.

DM: If you are going to attempt to paint a tree, you just don't stand a chance. A tree is perfect. So if you are going to paint something, there isn't much value in painting anything except what you feel about it. If you want to look at a tree, great! But what are you feeling from this? Paint can become as abstractly beautiful as a leaf, but I don't see the point in trying to just mimic a tree. You're stumped before you've started.

DM: There's quite a few. I have books about them. They all come from a particular school, which has been going since the 20s and 30s with these beautifully illustrated theatrical books and film posters. With a few exceptions, these works are never seen outside Poland, they are just produced for the collectors' market in Poland and are in the hands of just a few important people. And they are all these tremendous, surreal, potent images. It's an old culture that is completely fearless about talking about ideas; very bizarre to see that treatment given to the often extremely frivolous American movie imports.

DM: Oh yes, to a degree. I've certainly seen a couple of his key strips, the "Master Race"... excellent. I read an interview he did and I had never read a more thoughtful view of comics. Of his frustrations at the traditional expectations of comics. He had a wonderful view of Eisner, saying that he just accepted the limitations of comics so thoroughly that it undercut what he was doing, which I absolutely agree with. I couldn't believe that he actually said what I had fumbled around for a few years trying to figure out. Why I didn't like certain stuff that everybody else did. I really regret not having ever got to meet him.

DM: If you go into a record store and you haven't been in for 6 months, suddenly everybody's released a new album, and you go Jesus! When did that happen? You can stay out a comic store for years and come back again and nothing's changed, you wonder what's happening.

But there really are a lot more opportunities now. People are working on books that are either out or in the works that are just wonderful. How many comics would come out in a year that were must-buys 10 years ago, and now maybe it's 5 or 10 that you must have, not a huge amount, but still a great increase. I keep feeling that we should be further along than we are now, but at least things seem to be moving forward, which is a small blessing. It does seem to be a lot more connected across the world now. It definitely feels like a world of comics. Much more of a community.

DM: There's nothing like money to make everybody become reactionary and conservative, and that's what movies and television do. It does make everything a bit more ordinary. On the good side, it gets more attention, so just by statistics alone, the more attention a medium gets, the more work is produced, and again, just by statistics alone, more good stuff is produced.

DM: Generally, movie companies have looked at comics as tailor-made "high concept." It can be summarized in one sentence, preferably... just a couple of words or maybe just a couple of syllables.

DM: Yes, exactly. So a guy puts on a mask, becomes a walking cartoon character, everybody can see that. You can see the terrific special effects, who cares about the story? Unfortunately, most movies seem to get made in that sort of area.

DM: God, yes! The standard is so high! Incredible. Going back to Francis Bacon, one of his often repeated favourite phrases is "concentrations of experience." Those things really are. They're usually as haphazard as hell, but they are really sort of concentrations of emotion. Technically, absolutely staggering. And I don't just mean on the special effects terms. The composition of the shots, the movement, the whole art form has just completely exploded. I think it's interesting that very few pop music directors can carry a film. I really think it's a different set of qualities, a different set of judgments. But if you're just looking at the music videos, they're extraordinary.

DM: You're bound to get a generation who attack their subjects like this. This extremely visually potent language. And I can't wait to see a movie come out using this language that has some sort of sustaining quality, some sort of spine and flow to the piece of work to carry you through an hour and a half.

DM: I love the artificiality of it. Probably why I love silent movies so much — they're so evidently theatrical. There's none of the pretense of modern movies, the language that movies have accrued now. The sort of dummy documentary thing. None of that applied... they're very staged. No problems with patently false stages, just set the camera in front and watch these things occur.

DM: Yes, it's a tremendous film. The F. W. Murnau films and the Carl Dreyer films. I saw a great film the other day called Haxan. It's by a Swedish silent filmmaker, Strossman. He did this film about witchcraft and it's an intercut documentary narrative about witchcraft and the rituals surrounding it with little bits of animation, often very simple, paper on tabletops, and these bizarre tableaux, these sort of pseudo-documentary, obviously staged theatrical things — these witches kissing Satan's backside and all this — in a silent movie, the images seem completely out of context. Extraordinary. And especially sexual images. You just don't expect to see that sort of thing in a silent movie. It elicits the same reaction as 19th-century pornography. It completely turns your world upside down — people didn't do that then! You really have got used to seeing particular kinds of images presented in particular ways, full color photography or video or whatever, of a particular time. But these things turn you upside down. I'd love to try and do something with those expectations.

DM: I suppose it's trying to marry up the visual work that I like with ideas that get into the subconscious, that allow you to get inside the creator's head. I'm thinking of painting, and some comics, and some films, but mostly painting and photography. I love film of all kinds, but generally films have developed this pseudo-documentary style. They pretend to be real places with continuous narratives, and they set up documentary scenarios. And there's very little genuine sort of surrealism or expressionism in film. Probably because it just has this incredible illusion of reality that's so hard to break.

DM: Right. Theater doesn't suffer from this, because nobody would be convinced for a minute that these things are real. It just happens to have evolved that way, because of the obvious presidium arch, and the fact that you can see the audience around you, and the players on the stage, and you know they have to do it every day. Even though there's a story going on that you can get involved in, and pretend when the character says something and the other character appears to be surprised, that they are actually surprised, whereas of course they say it every night.

DM: Yes, exactly. But there's something going on where both things are allowed to happen at the same time, and the presence of the creators, the writer and the director, is tangible on the stage, whereas there are very few films that have explored that. It's one of the reasons I love Peter Greenaway's films so much. Because he's so false. He has no pretensions about trying to be realistic. People complain about the scripts and the fact that the acting seems cold. It doesn't seem important to me; the fact is that Peter Greenaway is evidently present in every frame, you just can't get away from the man. He's absolutely embedded into it, the motion that every actor makes, in every composition, in ever choice of colour and object on the set. I really feel like he's allowing the audience into his mind. There was a time when movies were just a camera placed in front of a theater. George Méliès's stuff has that quality.

So yes, obviously I would love to make a film at some point, but I think I really do feel that to be a writer or filmmaker, you really have to spend a while deciding what you want to do. There is a responsibility that comes with it. I don't think you just go out and write a novel or make a film and expect it to be worthwhile. I think you have to have lived a bit.

DM: I'd love to do that. Modern pornography is aesthetically appalling, dreadfully dull. There's nothing else going on there, apart from the sex, but the power of some of those images is just undeniable. I know Stanley Kubrick has sat around saying, "Why can't we have some of this kind of imagery in our films?" There's just something magical about taking those things out of context, and I think it's a similar thing to Mr. Punch, really. You realize quite how the brain pigeonholes information, and you suddenly very crystal-clearly see how the brain works, when you see something so completely out of context like that.

I bought a book recently of photographs, black and white, sepia-toned, distressed surface and everything, obviously made in a limited edition. There's 1500 or 2000 copies, in France. It's obviously just this woman and her friends, her immediate circle, and the book is obviously for a sympathetic audience, you can see that just by the way that it is put together, by the restrictive price, it's a very expensive book. It's a series of extraordinary bondage photographs, including a whole series of photographs of these women tied up, peeing into glasses, and urinating on the floor; it's a jarring experience just to see them, I can't explain it. I didn't expect to see these images. You know we're living in the end of the 20th century, we've seen it all, you know there's nothing left to the imagination — we've seen murders in Vietnam, the Holocaust, open-heart surgery — and to get that jarred, you suddenly realize quite what creating these images is all about. I thought it was just wonderful. I'd like to try and do that. Quite how, I've no idea, with deeply sexual images. Especially just playing with people's expectations of what's "allowed." Those slight twists of perceptions. I think that's the interesting thing. Movies are a good place to do that. Maybe CD-ROM is the place to do that. It's a vaccuum waiting to be filled. Is that what you were asking?

DM: Really?

DM: Wonderful. So you've got the thing shot, you have the trailer shot?

DM: Great! I'd love to see it.

DM: I did the art for that... for the advertising hoardings.

DM: Right.

DM: It's an amoral world in which we live. I mean, that's one thing we really want to change. We can't let computer media or interactive media alone with these people. We have to do something. While the rulebook is still being written, we have to do something now.

DM: So you didn't mind then?

DM: It's using a similar image... but I've used one of mine for the back of the piece, rather than replacing the mask on the front.

DM: It's open to interpretation. It probably didn't come across in black and white... but it looks like a Time magazine cover with a red border. Very loosely interpreted, but it looks like a Time cover with the big face. You know how they're always pretty innocuous in their art direction, and then Watch in kind of awkward spidery writing instead of their usual very bold Time logo, but then on the back it's got a green border around it and a lot of the images are straight inverted negative images, so it's up to you to interpret it, but that's where it came from. I was trying to usurp Time magazine.

DM: Well, it's a pleasure. Anytime. I enjoyed it.