Dave McKean: the British artist and illustrator whose career reshaped comic art

The art of Dave McKean across four decades

Critics keep reaching for the word "dark", and it is not wrong, just incomplete. The recurring materials are dim lighting, muted greys, browns, maroons and deep blues, and human figures whose muscle and posture carry more of the story than their faces. What makes the art of Dave McKean recognisable at twenty paces, though, is construction: the image is visibly assembled from layers, and the seams are allowed to show.

That assembly logic holds whether the surface is a comic page, a record sleeve or a cinema screen. Cages, the 500-page graphic novel he wrote and drew between 1990 and 1996, won the Harvey Award, the Ignatz Award, the International Alph-Art Award and Italy's La Pantera Award. Pictures That Tick, his collection of short comics, took the Victoria and Albert Museum Illustrated Book of the Year Award, and several of his books now sit in the V&A's permanent collection.

An artist built from collage, photography and paint

McKean's schooling as an artist happened in two places at once: the classroom and a rented video shelf. At college he devoured films by Polanski, Besson, Bergman, Dreyer and Murnau, while his drawing table absorbed Marvel comics, Warren magazines and Heavy Metal. Max Ernst's collages, Berni Wrightson's inks, Max Fleischer's Superman cartoons and Monty Python's cut-out animations all left visible fingerprints.

The fine-art debts are just as legible: Francis Bacon and Egon Schiele in the figures, Edgar Degas in the framing, Picasso in the confidence to break a face apart, Russell Mills in the layered surfaces, expressionism and abstract art in the palette. From comics he cites Winsor McCay, José Muñoz and Scott McCloud. Among living artists he has named Michel Gondry, Walter Sickert, Werner Tübke, Paul Nash, John Bellany, Anselm Kiefer and Rachel Whiteread as ongoing discoveries, with Philip Glass supplying the soundtrack.

Paul Nash turned out to be more than an influence. In 2016 the Imperial War Museum and 14-18 NOW commissioned Black Dog: The Dreams of Paul Nash, a graphic biography of the war painter, and the affinity between the two artists is plain on every page.

Career milestones, from Violent Cases to Raptor

The career of Dave McKean divides loosely into decades. The late eighties belong to the Gaiman partnership and Arkham Asylum; the nineties to Sandman, Cages, Mr. Punch and the music work; the 2000s to picture books, jacket design and the leap into cinema with MirrorMask in 2005. The Gospel of Us with Michael Sheen followed in 2012, then Luna in 2014, then a run of intensely personal graphic novels: Black Dog, Raptor, and the collected short comics.

Record buyers met the same imagery through a different door. Fear Factory's Demanufacture, Dream Theater's Metropolis Pt. 2: Scenes from a Memory, Machine Head's The Burning Red, Paradise Lost's One Second, Kreator's Endorama and Testament's Low all wear McKean sleeves, and the metal audience has stayed loyal to them for thirty years.

The pace of change around that career is easy to underestimate. The same decades that turned scalpel-and-glue collage into Photoshop composition also moved whole pastimes online, from streamed cinema to fast withdrawal online casinos, and an artist who once depended on gallery walls now reaches most of his audience through a screen. McKean adapted early and without fuss; digital tools entered the studio as one more material, not a replacement.

Tools of the trade

Fans ask about software constantly, and the answers are unglamorous: Photoshop for composition, InDesign or Quark for layout, Final Cut for editing, After Effects for moving pictures, Maya for the 3D work that fed MirrorMask. He advises younger artists to master basics before chasing tricks, to seek criticism rather than dodge it, and to treat CGI as a material with its own grain instead of a shortcut to copying reality.

He works alone by preference on personal projects, hiring collaborators only when a production demands it, and he has said that everything from architecture to food has fed the work at some point. The mixed media habit, in other words, extends past the canvas.

Where to start

This site is arranged like a catalogue: each section below takes one strand of the career and follows it properly, with the works index and timeline holding the whole thing together. The art of Dave McKean is unusually welcoming once you pick a thread; for most readers, the Sandman covers and Cages are the two doors in.