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A Man of Sand, Ink, and Soul - Dave McKean Comicon Napoli Interview
A deep, heartfelt chat with the renowned artist many of you know and love from his cover art and his graphic novels. Here we discuss Raptor: A Sokol Graphic Novel, a collage of techniques, and we also have a brief "conversation about AI". [Dave's mic registered some technical issues for the duration of this interview -hence the lower-quality voice and the less balanced audio- and we apologise for it]
Audio transcription
"Hi friends, it's my final day at the Comicon 25th in Napoli and before I leave it's great to talk with a legend such as Dave McKean. Thank you so much for joining us, it's a real pleasure. I just learned your panel is later today, didn't happen yet, I wanted to ask you about, you know, what you want to share about the creative process behind Raptor. Okay, Raptor came out a couple years ago in English, I wrote and illustrated it from three strands of ideas."
"I just got very interested in a strain of nature writing that's around at the moment, books about the natural world but expressed in a very strong way, almost a political way, reclaiming the language of the land, of the ecological processes going on, to stop politicians dismissing land as wasteland and scrub land. This is very strong I think and there's a particular writer, Robert McFarlane, at the centre of a whole strain of wonderful books and I walk every day and the natural world is very important to me so I wanted to do something that would address that, look into that. I was also interested in this Welsh horror writer, Arthur Mappin, because not only I like his books very much but he had this very moving life, his wife died young and he, wrapped in grief, felt there must be another realm, another place that he could step to to see there again, a supernatural world around us. I don't believe that but he, in his grief, felt that he could reach out and touch her beyond the veil and the way he wrote about it and reading his diaries, I just got very moved by that story. And then the third strain, I think like a lot of us I feel quite powerless in a world of political forces and elections going on and the world seems chaotic and I wanted to try and make sense of that for myself not write a specifically political book, I think the politics in England are very different from here in Italy, very different from America, very different from everywhere else, it's hard to generalise but the one thing that I think is true of all of them is that money corrupts and it corrupts politics absolutely and so I wanted to have that little idea in the book as well and I had those three little strains and they seemed to talk to each other and it became a book."
"So perhaps strand one and two you deal with them with more fantasy and strand three you deal with it with historical fiction, more or less?
Well the natural world is very much reality, the idea of somebody in grief reaching from our real world across to a fantastical world or supernatural world is the bridge and then I ended up in the fantastical world dealing with this idea that politics is corrupted by money and the corruption is turning an ordinary human into a monster."
"What can you tell me or what can you tell your fans about the technique?
You are of course known for mixing several techniques and doing this sort of trademark collage sometimes using photography or the techniques, what can you tell us about this specific work how you approached it in terms of a style and technique?
For telling stories where you have to really enter into the story and start to get to observe and understand how people move, how individuals talk and express themselves. I really don't want a busy illustrative technique I want something that expresses those feelings and emotions accurately and then you can move through the page smoothly and start to feel those people talking and moving. So I usually have a few days at the beginning of every project just flanneling around trying to find the right tone of voice and everything goes in the bin and it's awful but slowly those characters become simple drawings or ink drawings in color or black and white depending on what's necessary. The text sort of demands an approach so actually I ended up with the real-world story in quite a scratchy pencil style often ready as if I'm sort of catching people on the fly. The fantastical story is much more designed and has a very specific pen and ink look to it, an expressionistic way of drawing. There are a couple of other styles in there but I try to have the styles very closely linked with the ideas and emotions and feelings that I'm trying to express."
"That's very interesting not only do you combine styles and techniques you also have worked for several different formats or media such as books, music albums and movies. Let's talk about the first two. What can you tell me about your experience like illustrating for music which is kind of a different abstract way of expressing your art and for books this is also different to your own works."
"Well music is my first love really. I play music as well.
Yeah.
And it's abstract and it's emotional and I can perfectly happily spend a day even with music that I wouldn't normally listen to you get an emotional reaction to it and I get to try and express that in some way and find an image to reflect that."
"I mean if you don't know the lyrics you will feel it.
Yes you'll feel it.
You know even a piece of, as I said, even music that is not to my taste you concentrate on the emotions in it and something comes out and I like spending a day going somewhere I would never normally have gone listening to music I wouldn't normally listen to. That's fun. Books are more heavily sort of intellectual idea really. You've got to get inside of the mind of the writer and I understand that a lot of writers do not want to be illustrated. You know that they feel that they're painting the pictures with the words of their writer."
"They don't want somebody else coming in and interpreting that in some literally visual way. So I try and find, for starters I try and work with writers who like imagery. I've done books with Iain Sinclair and Stephen King, Ray Bradbury.
They all love imagery and so that's always a help. But then I just try and find images that don't undermine the words but can try and find a job for themselves. If you're going to have images in a book you don't just want them to reiterate exactly what you're reading in a text. You want them to do something else, to have another job, a reason to be there. So I always try and find that use. That often takes a while and a lot of false attempts. But we get there in the end. I've tried to give each book a feel and a tone of voice."
"Almost like writing a piece of music for it. Something that expresses the feelings.
All the things that you just said could very well apply to cover art. When for example the book is text only and you have to... I've been talking about cover artists with several artists here. I think it's a very interesting role, very interesting topic. Sometimes you have to summarize what's inside and add your own tone to it. Sometimes you want to express something, something added to it."
"Sometimes it's a graphic novel and then you already have images within that you have to reinterpret in a way. So what can you tell me? What can you share about this specific role for artists that might be interested in that? Well I always thought that the covers that I like ask a question. Okay. And they don't just literally give away an event that happens in the book. That seems banal. It's like trailers for a film. You don't..."
"I hate trailers. I always try and avoid seeing trailers. They're almost all terrible. But occasionally you get a trailer that just intrigues you.
You can't make sense of a story. You can't make sense of what's going on. But it's interesting. It's inviting you in. Yes. Intriguing. So that's what I want from a cover really. I want something that catches my eye. So it has to speak in the tone of voice that is good for me. That's what I wanted to do with those early Sandman covers that I did. I had a feeling that there was an audience out there who maybe were not buying comics, not reading comics, but they were buying albums and books and seeing films. So if I could make some covers that had the tone of voice of those interesting albums and great book covers and would wave and say, you might like me as well. It does look like an album cover now that I think of Sandman and all like that. I've never thought of that."
"Okay. So that was the job really. Yeah. To reach out and grab the audience by asking them.
That's a great piece of advice for them. Also, you mentioned trailers and I mentioned movies before. So let me ask you about MirrorMask and your experience with it.
I know it was very well received within your fans and they liked the freshness of it. So how do you, you know, looking back at the project, how do you feel about it?
Yeah, yeah. And movies in general, of course, you're also related with movies."
"I mean, there's a couple of problems with MirrorMask. One is, or with anything really. I have an idea in mind of what I want this thing to be.
And usually my feeling about it in the end, once it's finished, reflects the distance between what I originally had in mind and what I hoped it would be and what I've ended up with in the end.
And for MirrorMask, there's quite a distance. Nobody else knows what that is because nobody else knows what I originally hoped for."
"So it's purely my own feelings and impression. Also, Mirror Mask for me is colored by the process of making it, which was quite torturous. It took far too long.
We had a tiny budget and we were constantly battling technology on the bleeding edge. And we were constantly trying to deliver this rather big idea with limited funds and technology.
So I found it a really painful process to make. And so I can't divorce that pain from the final film."
"Having said all that, there's lots in it I like. The actress, in fact, working with the actress generally was probably the most fun bit for me.
And the lead actress, Stephanie, was wonderful. So there were lots of great things actually in the process. And I think I've managed to make it into the final film.
In the end, it's a difficult one."
"Would you do it again?
Would I do that exact thing again?
Well, of course, different concept, but go into it.
I've learned my lessons. Going into making another film, possibly. But the trouble is, you compare having to write the film, but then pitch it and rewrite it and develop it."
"That's not a creative process.
And then raise the millions of dollars and then work with teams of people. You've got to compare that process with the idea that you could come up with something that you really feel passionate about.
And I could have a cup of coffee and I could just start it as a book. I don't have to ask anybody's permission. I don't have to raise a budget. It's incomparable."
"It's how I thought, of course.
So it would have to be quite a set of circumstances to go back to making another film.
Final one. You said fighting technology. So I have to ask you about the elephant in the room.
I have been asking about every single artist here, which is AI."
"How do you feel about it? How do you perceive it? Do you think it can be a tool?
A tool used to combine techniques and styles. Do you think it could be a tool to aid you in your creative process? Or is it a threat for artists stealing ideas? Or perhaps both at the same time?
Well, I became aware of machine learning and artificial intelligence imagery a couple of years ago."
"I was, like many people, confused by it. I wanted to know what was going on.
So I did some research on that. I spent a day curled up on the floor of my studio in a fetal position thinking that's my life over.
Then I decided I needed to just work out really how I felt about this.
So I made a book called Prompt, Conversations with Artificial Intelligence."
"And through that book and the process of making that book, and making hundreds, hundreds, almost thousands of images to do that book, I feel I have developed a good sense of what AI did well and what it did less well.
What its strengths and weaknesses were, how it worked, and how it fitted into the world.
In the end, I think it's a mistake to call it a tool. It is a tool."
"Is it an agent, perhaps?
But it's far more than that. AI is everything, to a degree. So it's hard to just pin it down to one thing.
But it's not a tool in as much as… Yes. It's all your input."
"I mean, you might as well call the internet a notice board. It's clearly far more than that.
It's a huge societal force. Yes, of course it will steal jobs.
Technology always does that, to a degree. So that's less of a bother for me.
It bothers me that artificial intelligence couldn't function without stealing the work of others."
"It can only do what it does by scraping the work of real humans, without asking their permission, or paying them at all, or giving any credit, or redistributing that wealth back into society in some way.
So I think it is fundamentally unethical.
So we have a choice as people. We can choose to work ethically or not."
"And that's down to each individual's conscience.
I think the amount of energy that AI uses is criminal.
And you wrote about nature very recently.
And although I think AI's pattern recognition ability and predictive ability will be extraordinary in the worlds of virology, and planning, and various sciences… Science investigation."
"Personally, I've come to the conclusion that it has absolutely no business in our creative lives.
I think art is about human empathy.
And this has no human empathy.
It is fundamentally meaningless."
"And I think if all it's doing is adding more and more an infinite plane of meaninglessness to our world, which is already struggling with its relationship with what is true and what is not true, I think it's only going to be a bad force for the world.
Personally, I'm totally and utterly against it."
"I think that's a beautiful, even dystopian, but beautiful way to wrap this up.
Both your interview and, for me, the Comicon 25th.
So thank you so much for your time. Enjoy the rest of the show."
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