Dave McKean

Born in Maidenhead, England, Dave McKean is one of the leading comic authors active today. Not only does he excel in the graphic side of the medium, designing virtuoso mixed media images, but also he has many fine stories to tell. It is a perfect combination that is not encountered very often.

The turning point in McKean's career is the hefty 500-page comic 'Cages', in which he elaborated his views on art, life and recipes for ratatouille. Besides being one of the greatest achievements in comics history - a no less than stunning case for McKean's claim that 'there is magic everywhere' - 'Cages' marked the divide between the driven graphic artist who does not seem to be hindered by any technical limitations and the thoughtful, self-conscious artist who knows that restraining his capabilities leads to the finest work.

In the early days of his career, after finishing art school, McKean started out like any young artist. Hungry to prove himself, he showed off his baroque painting techniques in the eco-thriller 'Black Orchid' and the Batman comic 'Arkham Asylum' to immediate effect: both books proved to be instant best-sellers. The young man who just left art school in no time found himself to be one of the main fan favorites in comics.

Besides the production of his spectacular mainstream comics, McKean ambitiously kept busy with loads of other projects. Best-known of these are his legendary covers for the 'Sandman' comics, written by his friend Neil Gaiman. After the completion of this best-selling fantasy series, McKean's covers, digitally manipulated images of painting with scraps of ripped-up lace and over-exposed photographs, were collected in the volume 'Sandman Dust Covers'. This 'Sandman Dust Cover Book' is indeed the one apparently no graphic design student can live without these days - as omnipresent among them as is the inevitable exotic musical instrument in every young anthropologist's room. In addition to digitally manipulating these 'Sandman' covers, McKean experimented with more personal comics stories scripted by Gaiman. These range from the early meditation on human memory-cum-mafia story 'Violent Cases' to later stories on the death of a film director (in 'Signal to Noise') and the imagination of childhood years ('Mr. Punch').

Stunning as these early works may be, they increasingly frustrated McKean himself. Over the years, the artist grew tired of the predictable effects of using crow skulls and realms of mist to create overwhelming gothic atmospheres. He felt that the long hours he put in to create these eye-popping images stood in no relation to the seconds his audience spent reading his efforts. This was the moment when 'Cages' came back in. In 'Cages' McKean used no more than two colors and an efficient brush line to tell the bulk of the story. Only occasionally did his trademark wild color work come in to add visual emphasis to key moments in the story.

After finishing his masterpiece 'Cages', in 1998, McKean took a lengthy break from comics. Touching on photography, painting, film and graphic design, the man proved himself to be a full-fledged visual artist, happy to put any medium to his hand. The one comic exception, in recent years, was Gaiman's delightful 'The Day I Swapped My Dad for a Goldfish', a children's story that McKean, as the father of two, no doubt enjoyed illustrating.