Artists On Comic Art Interview

DAVE McKEAN: I'd always loved comics as a kid, but I tended to get bored pretty quickly and move on to the next thing. I liked all the usual dopey stuff kids like; first Marvel comics, then the Creepy and Eerie magazines that Warren published, and then I got into Heavy Metal and the European stuff. At art school I got together with a couple of friends and we published our own comic. As no one was actively teaching comics there, we had to do everything ourselves, and I actually ended up learning more than I did on a lot of the courses. We each did one story, wrote and drew the whole thing, and it was truly awful. But at the same time it was good, practical experience. It was called Meanwhile..., and we did four issues; my strip was a stupid Blade Runner, science fiction-type thing, this friend of mine was really into Frank Miller so he did a sort of Elektra rip off, and so it went. When we got to the last issue we did a music theme for the whole thing, and I did a piece about jazz. In a way, that started to point towards some of what I would end up doing in Violent Cases, involving all the collage and the different media I could use. The criticism we got at college was very good and very hard, and that's what we needed at the time. And likewise, the feedback we got when we went to sell the magazine to the Escape [British anthology title, which ran for nineteen issues between 1983 and 1989] people. I met [co-editor] Paul Gravett and he was full of enthusiasm and encouragement, but at the same time saying, 'This is pretty much the same as every other American comic, why don't you try and do something that means a bit more to you personally?'

DM: I went to art school wanting to be an illustrator. A lot of the stuff I liked was album cover art and other music industry stuff, and that's primarily what I saw myself doing. I did consider comics, because at one point I remembered that people actually did that for a living, but initially at least I saw myself as an illustrator. Then, mid-way through college I changed tack, and decided I wanted to be a designer. It seemed to me that an illustrator, even one doing comic book art, was very much beholden to other people; it's really the script where the ideas are and the illustrator just comes along afterwards and puts those ideas on paper as best he can. If the script's no good, no amount of pretty pictures are gonna make it any better. Same thing if you're doing a CD cover or book cover, it's the art director or whoever who comes up with the idea. All the creative stuff seemed to be going on elsewhere and the illustration was just kind of wallpaper. I decided I didn't really like that role very much, so I set out to be a designer, or at least someone who was responsible for creating their own work and ideas. But people like to be able to pigeonhole you, to know that you're an illustrator or a designer, or a photographer, but if you want to do all of these things it gets a bit messy.

By the end of art school I decided that was all rubbish and went back to illustration, mostly because I'd finally got a handle on what my strengths were in that direction. I'd floundered around for maybe four years trying all these different kinds of things, none of which had really felt like mine. In those last few months, though, I got a few things together of my own that I really felt I had not seen elsewhere. Previously, I had been very obsessive about the craft and technical side of things and that really swamped everything else. At the urging of my art teacher I loosened up completely and started being a lot more expressive with the initial marks I was making on the page, not trying to tie everything down in the first ten seconds. They were very loose and scruffy and full of texture. I started sandpapering everything and I got electric drills out, worked those into the paper, just having a good time. It ended up as something that felt very alive, full of interesting things that I could never have planned. It was almost like looking at somebody else's work, because it had that immediacy to it. The way I see it, if you labour over something it never really takes you by surprise, you know what it's going to be almost before you've started the piece. I liked the playfulness of it all, and that really came from certain artists I'd been exposed to for the first time back then: people like Jim Dine, Jasper Johns, little bits of David Hockney and Francis Bacon. And Ralph Steadman, who was a huge inspiration.

Then I went to a lecture given by an American artist called Marshall Arisman, and that completely sold me on illustration as a way of life. Everything he thinks of goes into his work and basically all his paintings are like a personal diary; they're extraordinary and at the same time very powerful and visceral. This was a guy working at home, beholden to nobody, not doing packages for soap or CD covers for music he hates, this was just somebody making pictures and it seemed to be exactly what I wanted to do. So that was it, I ditched the design stuff and only just scraped through my course, because instead of doing the work I just concentrated on getting my portfolio together. At the end of the day, the degree, the piece of paper, is very nice to have, but it doesn't get you a job. It's what's in your portfolio that counts.

DM: I met Neil right at the end of all that. I started out doing illustration work while I was still at art school and I had shown samples to Leigh Baulch at Titan Books. He in turn had shown it to the people at Escape, who were starting up their own magazine, and so I went along to a couple of their meetings. There were several people there who have since gone on to do comics professionally, but Neil was the most proactive of the lot and we just got on well. It was around that time we started talking about Violent Cases. I had done a single sample page for 2000 AD and realised almost immediately it wasn't what I wanted to do. I did a couple of short bits and bobs, something for Knockabout, and a Mister X story for the Mister X comic.

DM: The only difference between myself and Neil, is that Neil is a literary storyteller, whereas I tend to see everything in sequences of pictures. With my images you kind of get the feeling of how the people in the picture arrived there, and what they're going to do afterwards, regardless of the script; that's just the way I see things. On Signal to Noise, Neil gave me only fragments of story and I was happy gluing all that stuff together and making it flow. I don't mind working from a full script, but even then I tend to break it apart and move it around, mostly because it's not so involving to get something that is essentially finished before you've even started it. It's nice to be able to push and pull and give the story a bit of a life of its own. Unless you do that, you never know how it could have come out, you never leave yourself open to the possibilities. On any given illustration I want to know how it would work if I ripped the thing down the centre, turned it upside down or threw oil over it. That's where the energy and fun is for me. It's a little bit more difficult to apply that to a comic, which is rather more controlled, but it's nice to get a bit of that stuff in there, even if it's just in the planning stage.

DM: Bits of drawing, collecting relevant images, research and reading, but mostly it's just thinking about the story and what the story needs. Most of the books we've done together have had their own distinct mood and atmosphere, and it's really just getting a solid handle on that up front. Also, the books tend to be a cross between exactly what I feel the story needs and what I happen to be into at the time. I did a book with Neil called Black Orchid, and I remember I was fed up with the stock comic book character look. It was like the prevailing drawing from somewhere back around the 1940s, when somebody had actually looked at a real human and based their drawing on that. It was as though it had degraded over the years and become this homogenous everyman kind of comics person. With Black Orchid I wanted to get back to what real people look like, and so I chose to shoot excessive photo reference and pay very close attention to the expressions on people's faces, and the subtleties of shading and light. My intention was to clear the decks and get back to square one, so that in the books that followed — Arkham Asylum and then Mr Punch — I could then extrapolate and abstract or simplify and clarify. Mr Punch, in particular, needed a certain type of illustrative style, one that was mixed together with my own preoccupations. That process of mulling over a project usually took somewhere between six months and a year, and the reason why it's preferable to have that amount of time is that the good ideas tend to stick and those stupid little immediate things you think of can be filtered out, re-thought and, if necessary, discarded. If you had to do this stuff on a monthly book, those ideas would end up going straight in.

DM: Not really. All the books have been quite different. Black Orchid and Arkham Asylum, for example, were reasonably similar, in that they were both painted, but Arkham particularly was quite an evolving thing. The writer, Grant Morrison, was great at adapting the script, because it hadn't originally been written with me in mind. Grant had written it full script and drawn out his version in thumbnail form, but when we got together and talked about it we started to re-work the whole structure. There were things in it I really liked and responded to, the whole Alice in Wonderland aspect for instance, but I couldn't seem to get past the fact that it was Batman, and beyond the Joker there were all these villains I just didn't know. I think even Robin was in it originally! Grant, though, was great at picking up on what the book could be, and it happened to play into a lot of things he was enjoying at the time — Jan Svankmajer's films, Dennis Potter's writing — so he revamped it, and left it much more open for me to interpret.

I worked out the whole thing on paper, very, very loosely, so I knew were I was going, and that it would fit the amount of pages I had. I did rough thumbnails, scene by scene, and then tried to work in all the storytelling ideas within the panel layouts. There's one scene where a character sees his daughter's head inside a doll's house, so I did a progression of close-ups in which you get nearer and nearer to his eye as you go up across the spread, and then on the other side the progression reverses, and you go down into the eye of the girl's head in the doll's house. The idea is, his consciousness is split and he takes a dive into madness at the point. I'd use photo reference and then extrapolate from those, move them around, so that when I came to the artboard, the style was that much more exaggerated. But towards the end of Arkham I was getting very bored with what I saw as a kind of derivative surface gloss, so I very consciously and deliberately tried to find a different route. There's a bit of that coming through in the latter pages, but I still hadn't really got over my obsession with illustrative technique. Looking back, I think it's actually rather over painted and over finished, which is a shame because I still have some of the original drawings in notebooks, and they're pretty reasonable. But with all the paint and other stuff plastered over them they lose a lot of their energy.

DM: Illustration-wise it was probably on Sandman. As far as comics go, I don't think I really started to find my natural style until Cages, and maybe a little bit on Signal to Noise. Before that I was labouring on techniques which, on reflection, I don't think were ideally suited to comics work. It's a bit like a film, if you're conscious of every shot, it gets really wearing and you're not taken through the story as smoothly as you should be. Instead you're being shown what a great cinematographer someone is, or what a tricksy director; it just draws attention to itself too much. I find the storytelling in Black Orchid and Arkham has the same effect; it's rather leaden, and you sort of lurch from one image to another. Signal to Noise was trying to do other things, but in Cages the storytelling is much more fluid. You move easily from panel to panel and you get a real sense of how these people walk and talk. I don't get that from Arkham. But I'm really glad I did it, and in a way I had to go through that stage. I couldn't have been told how to do Cages or even how to do comics, I had to learn my own way and that involved doing Arkham.

DM: Definitely. That was my big life lesson as far as doing comics goes. With Cages I wanted to try and nail down the way real people talked and related to each other, so the dialogue was hugely important to my whole approach. I initially wrote the dialogue out in the loosest, most conversational way I could, taking on the characters myself and acting into a tape recorder. Every one of those lines and words needed an image to go with them and ultimately that dictated the art style. I couldn't actively paint a fully rendered character and face for each line, each syllable, so I drew as much as I could of anything and everything. I used to go out for the day and just draw people walking, talking, anything, but always as quick as I could, thirty seconds max, bang it down, move onto the next one. I wanted to see what the minimum number of lines you needed to describe somebody accurately was. Say somebody's lighting a cigarette; how many lines is that, how little do you have put down before it's obvious? Maybe later you can go back in and add a bit of atmosphere and mood, but really the essence can be got down very quickly.

It was just very fast line art, and I enjoyed working that way. If I was putting a line down for the side of a face, say, and it was slightly wrong, I'd just make the correct one next to it. I felt no need to get too fussy. Most comics are tied up with this perfect refinement; you start with circles and lines roughed out, then you refine it a bit and do your finished pencils. Finally, you carefully ink over every line to eradicate all that working out and then you rub out the pencils to make absolutely certain. It seems somehow dishonest, you're not showing the technical and thought processes or the struggle that went into it. That's what I really love, when you see someone fighting to describe something and get that down on paper. That's what I love in Bacon's drawings, you see someone overreaching themselves, trying to find absolutely the right line to describe something and putting it down on paper for the first time. That initial line is the most important thing to me, and the stages beyond that always seem as if they're smoothing it out, taking all the sharp edges and the awkwardness out of it, so much so that it loses a lot of its original energy and sense of observation.

DM: I don't know, you'd have to define art for me. Everyone's definition tends to vary. Mine leans towards the aspects of any medium that really moves me or gets to me. True, the stuff most people think of as art is found in the Tate gallery and generally not in a comic book, but that's a social definition rather than a personal definition. For me, art includes comics books such as Maus, When the Wind Blows, Fires or Man at the Window. Often when people use they word art they're talking about themselves as artists, which to me is a bit of a sham. They throw the word over something so they don't have to think about it any more. I think when you boil it right down, what I do is exactly the same as what any other artist does. In the fine art world there are good drawings and bad drawings, good paintings and bad paintings, and the same applies in comics. There are people who draw with great technical skill and there are those who don't.

Basically, a comic book is a narrative of some description; it doesn't even need to be a story, it can be a series of thoughts, a documentary-type piece, even an article. Think of the different types of films that have been made; Jean Luc Godard's movies are completely different from Spielberg's, but they're still movies. In comics, the way that story or narrative is expressed is with words and a series of images, and those could be photographs, diagrams, anything. My definition of comics is as broad as I can make it. The images I create are, as far as I'm concerned, comic book illustrations, but there's no difference in intent between me and the next guy, who may call himself an artist. I'm keen for anybody who might read this book to realise that doing comics is not just a technical exercise, it's as much an expressive a way of putting your ideas and thoughts down on paper as anything else. I'm not interested in the next great technical illustrator to come along, if I want to see that stuff I'll usually look through the latest illustration annual. What I'm really interested in is what these people have to say.

DM: Those were done over a period of about seven years so naturally things changed a bit over that time. I don't remember Neil actively sketching out any covers for me, though he might have done that for himself when he was writing the scripts. To start with, I did roughs that I submitted to DC, but that only lasted for maybe the first ten issues. After that DC trusted me just to get on with it. The deadlines were always rather tight, so I never had a great deal of time to really plan them out. Often, what I'd do was talk to Neil about the ongoing and upcoming stories and find out what they were about. He would chat away and I would make visual notes. I would then go away and do a bunch of covers at a time, usually the four or five needed to cover a particular story arc. The pleasure of Sandman was that it could go anywhere and be anything, and so the covers could also be anything; they could be photographic or collaged or computer-generated, and we just sort of reinvented it each time. The covers are like a diary for those seven years, and where I was at that particular time.

Literally anything that I came across could be used in there somewhere. Like the strip work, it was a mix of what the brief was, what the story wanted and what I happened to like at the time. The first covers formed a portrait gallery, and I decided to do them very big, mainly because one of them has a piece of a door on it; a great lump of door in fact, complete with doorknob, that I found at a railway station. The scale of the thing meant that everything else had to be done in proportion, so I ended up with a door-sized illustration with a hand reaching down to turn the knob. Another one in that initial series had chains on it, and again I wanted the chains to appear in proportion to the other elements, so I ended up with these huge locks. Then I noticed that a lot of the textures I was adding to something of that size were just disappearing when it was reduced down, so the next series of covers I did really small, these tiny little things, so it meant that if I put a spider on the cover you could see it, because they were done slightly smaller than printed size and then blown up a little bit.

I started experimenting with embedding resin, the stuff you use as a kid when you make a paperweight with a beetle in it. I bought an industrial amount of the stuff and made a print of an image and then put embedding resin over it, so I could float copper dust and other things on it, giving you this very ethereal image. That was all well and good, but what I didn't know was that the resin reacts rather badly with a particular kind of digital print and so it looked great for about twenty minutes and then just exploded! The end result was unusable as I had originally intended but the exploded piece of resin was really beautiful, so I ended up photographing that, scanning it back into the computer and finishing it onscreen. It's another example of how you never really know how the thing is going to turn out, but you get there in the end.

DM: Take Sandman issue #1, which has this painting of Morpheus within wooden shelves on which various ornaments are displayed. I wasn't using a computer at that point so all the individual elements had to be photographed. The central panel is a painting that's very rough and ready, made up of paint, charcoal, ink and pencil, with all sorts of stuff scribbled and scratched over it. The shelving at the side is made of wood, and tested my DIY skills to their limit. I was in London with Neil and we were talking about various stuff and I just doodled the idea for that cover there and then. So the same afternoon we went around and shopped for stuff, scoured odd little crystal shops and a place called Mysteries that sells religious items. We filled the shelves with with the stuff I bought that day. Other ones are based on equally spontaneous ideas. I remember I really fancied the idea of doing a whole constructions and then setting it alight. I did that on issue #4, the one with Lucifer on the cover, but it was actually a rather timid affair. Then, right towards the end of 'The Kindly Ones' story arc, I finally plucked up the courage and did this piece, a sculpted object as a face, threw petrol over it and just set it alight one morning; it was wonderful. Things like that you always remember.

The covers were also a reaction to what else was happening at the time. Somewhere around the issue #50 mark I noticed there were a lot more painted covers appearing, stuff I associated with pulp fiction; big slam-bam head shots, very slick. So I thought I'd do a collection of covers that bucked this trend completely, all with a bunch of little things on, no big impact at all, very, very subtle. It was as if one of those characters from the Dreaming had come over into the real world and just emptied their pockets onto the artboard, so you have this collection of bizarre little objects; a strange doll holding a locust shell, a piece of gold leaf with writing on it, these oddments that point at a story somewhere.

DM: About a day. A few of the paintings, the Calliope one and some of the others, took a couple of days because they were a bit fiddly, but I don't like spending longer than a day on something. If something's taking much longer than a day there's something wrong with it and I'd rather dump it and start over. To bear that out, the first cover in 'The Kindly Ones' arc I did six times because it just wasn't working, and every time I'd get to the point where it became evidently laboured and just not right. I'd leave it for a couple of days, forget about it and start again. I like working quickly in order to keep that energy going.

DM: The idea was to create something that looked like it belonged to another world, almost out of a dream, out of your head. The great thing about getting the computer — although I initially resisted, because I hated the idea of sitting at a monitor all day — is they are so ideal for creating that specific illusion, confusing someone to the point where they don't know what they're looking at anymore. They're staring at it, thinking, 'There's definitely a bit of photograph in here, there's a bit of something that looks like a sculpted object, there's a bit of typography and a bit of paint texture, but I'm not sure what this is and it's very disconcerting.' The real aim is to put the viewer on the back heel, and that seemed to be perfect for The Sandman.

DM: At the end of the 'World's End' section, with the skull moulded onto the tombstone, but I really started using it properly for 'The Kindly Ones.' When I started doing 'World's End' I was really not enjoying doing the Sandman covers at all, I was doing a lot more CD covers, so the computer sort of saved them really. The first couple were dreadful, just photographic set-ups that didn't work at all, and I redid them completely for the Dustcovers book. When I started using the computer it really did put a fresh energy into my cover artwork. The computer is absolutely perfect for what I do, the control I get over everything is amazing; even technical aspects like the density of the inks on the plates. It's an amazingly powerful tool, but it is still just a tool. I don't like letting the computer dominate what I do.

If, say, you use a lot of paint or other media or spill chemicals on paper, the end result sort of mimics real life, creating something that looks weather-beaten or degraded or whatever, and it starts to take on real natural beauty. Whereas with computers the opposite happens; the more you use the Photoshop filters and those sort of tricksy gimmicks that come with a computer package, the more it starts looking like a piece of plastic. I've noticed a lot of Photoshopped stuff can look kind of dead, and that's when you know you're really overusing the computer filters. But for compositing things together it's an extraordinary tool. I don't think I'd ever use the computer to draw, though. I don't think there could be a computer program that would draw the way that I like. For starters I use a nib pen and I like it when you reach the end of the line and the ink splodges a bit, and then down the pen scratches on the paper and the line breaks up a little bit. That's where the real emotional quality of the line is.

DM: I have, and I found it hopeless, really awful. It's like a sampled saxophone, you can't sample a saxophone or a piano properly, you get a bland computer version, and that's what computer-generated artwork looks like to me. I did a children's book with Neil called The Day I Swapped My Dad for 2 Goldfish, and that was drawn in line with splodges of colour dropped into the background. It could easily have been done in Painter or another programme, but there is no way it would have had the rough splodgey edges and the bits where the inks drift into each other a little, all that stuff that there's no way you can plan or programme. It was all done on water-colour paper and scanned in and composited at the last minute.

DM: It's basic collage; everything's stuck on the board and painted into, painted over, with acetates laid on top with translucent stuff on those. At one point I tried to get a more layered, ethereal feel by using double exposures, taking two or three illustrations that related to each other and then photographing them double exposed on the same transparency, so the light showed through. It's a bit crude, you don't have that much control over the process, but you do start to get that layered feel that I can now get much easier in the computer. On that, you can composite a vast number of elements and have them react with each other in an infinite variety of ways; double exposures are like toy time compared to that really. On the Hellblazer covers I did, I still actually sent in the boards, but even those had things stuck on them. I think the sixth cover I did was made up on slate, which weighed a ton and there was no way I could send it anywhere without being charged a fortune. Instead, I photographed it, and from that point on I started photographing everything onto ten by eight transparencies.

DM: Initially maybe they were important because they stood out a bit and helped to pull in a particular audience that was not necessarily just a comic book audience. A lot of people who read Sandman weren't reading any other comics, they were reading novels and word just spread. So initially I think it helped get people's attention, but after the second story arc, Neil was completely in control and had his own voice, and people were picking it up for the stories. Also, because the interior art has changed so much and the book didn't have such a strong, artistic identity of its own, the covers compensated for that. And because the stories were all over the place — some were realistic, others dreamy, some period pieces and others contemporary — the interior artwork, with a few notable exceptions, was generally pretty literal, whereas the covers were not. They were rather more allegorical, or metaphorical, and acted like a filter; you entered the comic book through seeing the cover first, and the cover took you into another realm, another state of mind. That seemed to work okay and was something I very much wanted to achieve with Cages; that's why the covers for that series were so bizarre compared to the drawings inside, which were often almost kitchen sink in style.

DM: At that point I had done twenty-two Hellblazer covers, fifty Sandman covers, ten or so Black Orchid covers and assorted other covers, plus maybe thirty or forty CD covers. I was just bored and lacking inspiration, so yes, I guess I had something like a minor burn out. I either needed a break or for something to come along and fire my engines again, and I couldn't take a break without packing Sandman in. I didn't want to do that, I wanted to stay on for the whole run, so the computer was a great kick up the arse.

DM: I still do The Dreaming covers every month and I'm doing a couple of short comics for a French publisher called Amok, one of which is called Ash and other 'eye'; the symbol not the word, because there aren't any words in it. I still do the odd comic strip when I can, but they tend to be part of other jobs; an element of a CD cover or a book for somebody else. I'd still love to do comics but there doesn't seem to be much impetus at the moment. The support seems to be very low. There are still fans out there but rather less than there used to be, as the industry generally has rather self-destructed. Instead I'm enjoying making films, doing CD covers, I've even started a small record label, and I'm pursuing a career as a photographer; I'm working on my third book of photographs and I have gallery exhibitions based around those. I'm also doing another kids' book with Neil and there are a couple of projects we've got in the works with animation companies and film production companies. Because it's new, it's fun, and making films is enjoyable. I've done two television films for Channel 4, The Falconer and Asylum, and the Goldfish book is in production with a New York-based animation company, so Neil and I are working on some of that. And I've written and directed a couple of short films.

DM: I pretty much have at the moment, but I'm still keeping my hand in. One of the CDs I'm releasing is the Signal to Noise radio play we did for the BBC, and Neil's written an extra little chapter so I'm doing that as part of the CD booklet. I'm also putting a CD out of my own music and I've done a little comic strip for that. Recently I designed John Cale's autobiography, and I got a little comic strip in there as well, so they usually get levered into other things I do. I kind of like the idea of finding new homes for comics, and not just keeping them in the same old comics industry-based rut. It always bugged me that everything was so enclosed; it's like a little goldfish bowl world and I wanted to get comics out of it.

DM: It never worked out. I did a couple of Hellblazer comics [issue #27 and #40], mainly because both times Karen Berger asked me I happened to either have a job fall through or just had the time to do it. That never seemed to happen with Sandman. After a period of time doing the Sandman covers I got so completely swamped with work there was no way I could crowbar doing something like that in. I could easily fit a CD cover in, because it takes a couple of days, but at best a whole comic takes a couple of weeks, so it's a bit more of a commitment. I talked to Neil a lot about doing a stand-alone Sandman book, probably from around issue #30 onwards. We still talk about it now. Who knows, it may actually happen at some point ...