Dave McKean - She turns on the movie projector and discovers a portal to elsewhere: a sort of lust-saturated, X-rated version of Pan's Labyrinth

Dave McKean, Celluloid, Fantagraphics Books, 2011.

"A woman arrives at an apartment, but her partner can’t get away from work. She is disappointed and settles in for a night alone, but finds a film projector with a reel of film loaded. The film is scratched and blurry, but she can make out a couple making love. When the film burns out, a door is revealed which leads to a misty town square... and a series of fantastical sexual encounters.
But the plot doesn’t really matter. Celluloid is a rare instance (especially among Anglo-Saxons) of a top-flight cartoonist working within erotic — even pornographic, to embrace the word — parameters, with the intent of creating a genuine work of art.
As the artist says: “There are so many comics about violence. I’m not entertained or amused by violence, and I’d rather not have it in my life. Sex, on the other hand, is something the vast majority of us enjoy, yet it rarely seems to be the subject of comics. Pornography is usually bland, repetitive and ugly, and, at most, ‘does the job’. I always wanted to make a book that is pornographic, but is also, I hope, beautiful, and mysterious, and engages the mind.”
Bringing to bear the astonishing range of illustrative and storytelling skills that have served him so well on his collaborations with Neil Gaiman and such solo projects as the (recently re-released) epic graphic novel Cages, Dave McKean forges into new territory with this unique work of erotica. 232 pages of full-color illustrations."
Turning the page of Celluloid, Dave McKean's new graphic novel and seeing a full-page spread of an ejaculating penis is disconcerting, no matter how mature and sophisticated the medium has become. McKean is best known for his surreal and often macabre cover collages for the seventy-five issues of the beloved comic Sandman. His work has always been interested in the visual language of fantasy and dreams. Here, McKean is attempting to subvert hardened notions of both comics and pornography. It's a book that gets the blood racing just as it raises questions that just won't go away about the nature of art, porn, and the male gaze.
Celluloid is also about dreams and visions, in this case, about the sexual fantasies of his female protagonist. The plot, which is mostly there to frame the fantasy sequences, follows an unnamed woman who discovers a movie projector in her home threaded with an erotic film. She becomes aroused as she watches the movie, and suddenly the light of the projector opens up a doorway into a sexual wonderland where she can, in explicitly uninhibited ways, enact her fantasies. Celluloid is wordless, and depends entirely on McKean's facility as an artist to convey not only the sexual acts, but what the main character is feeling. With each successive fantasy -- being caressed by anonymous hands, making love to a multi-breasted goddess, performing oral sex on a devil with a monstrous erection -- our heroine is at first unsure, but ultimately gives into what is an essential part of her. Eventually her husband comes home to find the same projector, this time a film of her, a portal opens, and the cycle begins anew.
Each fantasy is done in a different style: Dali-influenced surrealism, cubism, and McKean's signature collage work utilizing photographs of live models. The opening and closing sequences are drawn in pen and ink. Sketch-like, they are the loveliest and most evocative despite their simplicity. These moments, which narrate the discovery of the projector, first by the woman and at the end by her husband, are the least explicit but resonate the most deeply. They are a reminder that being capable of wild flights of sexual fancy is very human.
Comic books (and by extension the graphic novel) and pornography have had a long uneasy relationship. While comic book creators have always challenged convention regarding violence, sex has always been treated in a much more modest, albeit puerile, way. With sex, unlike violence, it seems easy to know the limits. One false nipple and you're out. The underground comix of the sixties changed all that. With deliberate and often explicit references to sex in all its myriad permutations, underground artists pushed the artistic envelope with raunchy and dirty images. Stories about incest, sadomasochism, and copulating anthropomorphic animals were not to titillate as much as to say "no one can stop us." Sex became synonymous with rebellion and with satire. Some comix, however, were interested in exploring sex as a real thing that real people do, and using the conventions of comic book language, there was a way to mold stories around the explicitness, as in the case of the cult comic Omaha the Cat Dancer. By the late seventies there was a market for just the sex, no satire or underground sensibility required to give energy or purpose. Like it has in all forms of media, porn found a home in comic books and graphic novels, sold through the mail or at specialty comic book shops, often distributed by the very best of the comic publishers such as Fantagraphics and Last Gasp.
In Celluloid, McKean attempts to subvert this by drawing on the tradition of fine art as a vehicle for erotic vision. By painting an erotic sequence with a surrealist's brush, McKean reveals the raw sexual current that underscores all pornography. Despite the simulation inherent in dirty movies, real people are still having real sex, and McKean sees something undeniably erotic here. But porn is also made by people with lives beyond the camera lens, and the making of these films might be a detriment to the performers' actual lives. Comics are free from all this. The characters exist only in the frames of the graphic sequence. Sadly, like most porn, very little is written or drawn by women, and most is driven by male sexual fantasies. Despite the medium, porn comics still seem to be consumed by the audience that most traditional comics are: men.
As an artist who has transcended the juvenility of comics, McKean takes what is puerile about comics and porn and shows that putting them together under the right conditions might give you a graphic erotic fiction that is wholly non-exploitative, while remaining rigorously and explicitly sexual. The small but not inconsequential inclusion of photographs adds an unsettling autobiographical motif. People let McKean take their photographs, but this only heightens the erotic energy in way that continually skirts the tension of how much this ambitious work is still a work of a male artist." - Peter Bebergal
"The endearingly ludicrous Suicide Girls notwithstanding, there's an increasing number of comic books that deal with sexual themes and situations in fairly explicit yet very sophisticated ways, despite identifying or otherwise qualifying as "erotic" or even "porn" comics. One that comes to mind is Chester 5000, wherein cartoonist Jess Fink depicts in x-rated fashion the sexual relationship between a Victorian era housewife and her steampunk-esque love robot. Fink's Chester 5000 mitigates her western audience's trained conservatism with respect to x-rated art by creating something that's as funny and clever as it is tantalizing, but what may prove to be a more challenging entry into the marketplace is Celluoid, a new graphic novel by Dave McKean that explores sexual fantasies and voyeurism in a way that's paradoxically more explicit while being deeply abstract
On sale soon from Fantagraphics, Celluloid is the story of a woman who, during a moment of sexual frustration, discovers a film projector and reel of film that depicts a couple having sex. In a twist familiar to fans of McKean's work with Neil Gaiman, this woman finds herself traveling from our world into a dreamlike realm of sexual fantasies that's presented in the artist's trademarked style(s). As the story progresses, so too does the form of McKean's artwork. The woman begins simply as a voyeur and eventually graduates to full participant in various activities with the entities she encounters. Concurrently, McKean's images begin as the simplest of line drawings but develop into hyper-colored, mixed media collages reminiscent of his work on The Sandman and MirrorMask.
While more than a decent hook as far as pornography goes, the story is not as important to McKean as its inspiration. Fantagraphics promotional materials quote the artist as follows:
"There are so many comics about violence. I'm not entertained or amused by violence, and I'd rather not have it in my life. Sex, on the other hand, is something the vast majority of us enjoy, yet it rarely seems to be the subject of comics. Pornography is usually bland, repetitive and ugly, and, at most, 'does the job.' I always wanted to make a book that is pornographic, but is also, I hope, beautiful, and mysterious, and engages the mind."
McKean elaborated on Celluloid's use of wordless, expressionistic imagery in a recent interview with Comic Book Resources:
I didn't want any dialogue, or captions. The scenario I had in mind didn't need it, and unless you have a very specific idea to cover in dialogue, I think the conversation surrounding sex scenes is usually pretty ridiculous. So I was after a more sensuous experience, closer to music than literature. I also thought it would be more interesting coming from a woman's perspective, and for it to be essentially fantastical, a series of sex dreams, allowing for a more impressionistic view, trying to express the feelings of each stage, rather than just showing you literally what happens -- what photography probably does better.
[The art is] very simple and neutral to begin with, so color is only used when it has a job to do. Red is very important in one scene and acts as a stain or splash of sexual excitement as well as the color of one of the characters. The green and blues of one of the sequences merges the characters into the landscape and the natural world.
Celluloid is a 282-page hardcover graphic novel and available to order now from Fantagraphics Books. For more imagery from the book, check out this NSFW video preview, and be sure to read CBR's interview for more insights from Dave McKean." - Andy Khouri
"Fermentation and fog: That's the atmosphere in which Dave McKean's graphically charged Celluloid breathes and pants and gasps. The longtime illustrator of tales by Neil Gaiman returns to the storyteller side of things, his first lengthy solo opus since 1998's Cages, with this extended sexual fantasy published in luxurious hardcover by Fantagraphics. You ever wonder what Lynd Ward would've wrought in full color if he'd been doubly possessed by the god Eros and William Gibson's Wintermute?
Look: A woman goes to the apartment of a male friend who's unable to meet her there; she undresses, takes a bath, turns on the movie projector in the middle of the living room and discovers a portal to elsewhere – an elsewhere that seems a sort of lust-saturated, X-rated version of Pan's Labyrinth.
Even if you already know that McKean's figurative drawings are like Egon Schiele limning a new season for Alexander McQueen in heaven, you'll boggle at how mere pen marks on paper can be so arousing. Even if you're familiar with the artist's earlier multimedia work, his juxtapositions and combinations of draftsmanship, painting, photography, collage, and magus-level Photoshoppery here will blow (at least) your mind.
Let's not dally with euphemism: McKean's vivid, wordless dreamscape isn't simply erotic, it's downright pornographic. But with a masterpiece like this, Dictionary.com's going to have to redefine "pornography." - Wayne Alan Brenner
"When we think of silent films, the very name indicates to us that something is missing, so to refer to these two recent graphic novels as “silent” would be entirely selling them short — not to mention that the word also carries connotations of quietude that doesn’t quite fit either. Yet, the fact that Dave McKean and Tom Neely chose to tell their stories without dialogue, narration or words of any kind still leads us to look at them differently. When the author refuses to present us with anchoring text — and, in the case of these books, a conventional plot — it can often feel like being cast adrift, treating every image as a puzzle to be solved and somehow jigsawed together with the adjoining pieces. Rather than work against them, though, that feeling seems almost an integral part of these comics, which deal in their own way with very similar themes of transcendence, transformation and sex.
In McKean’s Celluloid — his first long-form comics work since 1996’s Cages — a young woman, finding herself unexpectedly returning home to an empty house, decides to watch a reel of film that sits in a projector, ominously placed on a pedestal. The film that unfolds seems to show her having sex in a darkened room, which we presume to be a home movie, and she begins to masturbate. At the film’s — and her own — climax, the reel stops and the celluloid melts. Rather than white light, what remains on the projection screen is a door. When the woman, of course, opens the door she finds herself taken through various sexual tableaux, each one rendered in a distinctly different mixed-media style by McKean, and shifting ever more towards realism until the book becomes pure photography in its final scene.
Neely’s The Wolf is a similarly hallucinatory nocturne. A man’s night-time transformation into a wolf sparks an exploration of his identity and a sexual journey of uninhibited desire. Alongside the male and female protagonists, who each go through their own transformation, he brings into play the images of skinless creatures and anthropomorphic trees that have featured in his work before. Neely seems less interested in a plot than using his players to riff on certain universal themes and to delve symbolically into the human psyche.
The body is a primary concern for both authors. Given that these are, in their own ways, erotic narratives, we find ourselves frequently confronted with the naked body. This was a feature of Neely’s previous work The Blot, although the overtly cartoonish style of the work made it quite jarring; here in The Wolf, his style is much more aggressive and representational, lending itself well to exploring the human form. The bodies of his two leads, especially the wolf, are impossibly gangly which lends an awkward creepiness their movements. When it comes to love-making, the overextended limbs make the act seem more protean and balletic, rather than animalistic. But the body is also a source of horror, spilling forth nightmarish creatures from its guts — the aforementioned skinless ones — who, for the wolf, seem to reprimand his baser urges, constraining and devouring him; for the woman, they appear to taunt her with a memento mori of the ageing to come: sagging breasts and withered flesh. They become an outward manifestation of their inner doubts and fears that must be overcome in order to be happy.
McKean’s treatment is much more traditional, however. The young woman of Celluloid begins as a mere pencil sketch on the page and rarely do we see a full-figure view of her. The body becomes compartmentalized — a finger, a nipple, lips, legs, vagina — like an infant’s view of the world. As she progresses through the first door, she become solid and corporeal, but merely an observer of the carnal acts going on around her in the fantasy wonderland, until she reaches its second tier. It is here she encounters an “earth mother” figure, haloed in fruit and with fourteen breasts. Unlike Neely’s work, the abnormalities here are presented as beautiful, and as the woman consummates her meeting with the goddess, the resultant imagery throws some interesting analogies between fruit and the body (there is even some poetic visual rhymes, as a physalis becomes a clitoris). The result is that the flesh is constructed as something enticing, without any guilt or doubt surrounding its enjoyment. This makes her next foray with an engorged incubus seem perfectly natural, and their frenzied oral copulation simply another facet of sex.
This treatment of sex and eroticism as an engagement with nature, and an almost spiritual act, is reflected in the way that McKean has his protagonist change through each scene. Initially, it is a sketchy figure who watches photographic images on film, and as her journey progresses, she moves further and further towards the photographic image herself while her partners become increasingly abstract. By the end, it is an indistinct shadow that she finds herself taking pleasure from. The underlying theme that sex makes us whole and has the potential to change our image of ourself is also a concern in Neely’s book. Given the nature of the work, it is ambiguous whether the transformations that the man and woman undergo are supposed to be symbolic, hallucinations, or part of the surreal fabric of his fictional world. Nevertheless, the transformations are central to the book’s working, seeing the male character become more wolflike as he sheds his inhibitions and indulges instincts of not only desire, but also devotion and loyalty. The female metamorphosis in The Wolf is curiously evocative of McKean’s earth-mother figure, with the woman undergoing a literal blossoming from flowers, to branches and leaves until she becomes a tree entirely — a living embodiment of life itself.
For all the pell-mell of the mindbending plots, the creation of altered states and surreal fantasies would be for nothing, if it were not for the sheer virtuoso talent of both creators. McKean has long been established as a master of multimedia imagery and Celluloid represents possibly his finest work. The clarity and seamlessness with which he combines photography with drawings and paintings makes every scene entirely convincing. It’s this hyper-reality that encourages us to submit to the dream-logic of the story. It’s all the moreso with The Wolf, though, as Neely deliberately breaks the connection to reality with his visual quirks. When the skinless creature first emerges, he wears the mime-gloves of old Disney cartoons as a telling sign that the rules of reality no longer apply, and we are in the realm of elastic physics. This allows Neely’s expressiveness to play and amplify the world of the story — the introduction of full colour is later used to indicate the passion between the two central figures and, much like McKean’s world, the characters become fuller and more realised the further they indulge their passions. When they finally do have sex, right at the centre of the book, the art descends to pure expression — swirls of colour collide, lashed by inky black strokes and water splashes — Jackson Pollock with a dildo up his arse.
It’s difficult to compare these books with other work simply because they are so unique and the artists have such idiosyncratic styles that, really, these stories could only be told by them. By losing the words, the art’s connection to the story is drawn so much tighter. Perhaps comparisons with silent cinema are not so uncalled for after all, as when else has cinema paid quite so much attention to the singular image, or been unafraid to break boundaries of convention? That same spirit rests in both these books which are two extraordinary examples graphic storytelling." - Gavin Lees
Interview by Chris Mautner



Dave McKean, Cages, Dark Horse, 2010.

"Best known for his work with Neil Gaiman, McKean is also an accomplished cartoonist in his own right. This is his magnum opus to date: an immense, pulsing graphic novel that's also a treatise on art, creativity and the uses and misuses of technique. Originally serialized between 1990 and 1996 (and collected in 1998), it's been out of print for several years. The book's plot is fairly rudimentary: a painter, a writer and a musician who live in the same apartment building find their lives intersecting. But the book's gradual shift from literalism to fanciful allegories and stories-within-stories mostly serves as the springboard for a visual tour de force. For most of the book, McKean restricts himself to wobbly, jagged two-tone pen-and-ink drawings, occasionally in the manner of Egon Schiele. But he often signals shifts in storytelling mode by switching media or style (to ink-wash brushwork, airbrushed photography, white-on-black "woodcuts," bold near-abstractions or whatever seems appropriate); when the artwork erupts into full-color paintings and collages, the effect is explosive. Even when the story falters or drifts into endless philosophical chitchat, McKean's artwork saves the day. His characters, built out of crazily bent lines and splatters, have perfectly choreographed body language, and his daring visual experiments serve the ideological goals of his writing." - Publishers Weekly

"I’ve had a number of people ask me what comic books they ought to be reading. Most of my recommendations to comic neophytes are the same ones that everyone recommends -- Maus, Sandman, Watchmen, and so on. But there are some that may not be immediately obvious or as easy to find, and it’s these that I’d like to write about here. This column is the first in an occasional series in which I’ll write about non-new releases that I really think you ought to read.
You may only know McKean as the artist who painted Sandman’s lovely and evocative covers, but Cages will acquaint you with McKean the comics writer/artist in his own right, and a brilliant one at that. I’ve often said of Cages that it changed my life, and I’m only very slightly joking when I say that. This is a staggering, ambitious book, and if you are paying attention, you will find that it has a lot to say to you.
Cages covers so much material in its 500 pages that it’s hard to describe it all in a single review. On the most superficial level, it’s about an artist named Leo Sabarsky, and his relationships with Jonathan Rush, a controversial author now living in hiding; and Karen, a botanist who has grown a small forest in her apartment.
There’s a musician named Angel who may be an angel, a man who was a cat, a God who looks like a middle-aged businessman and likes to chat with cats, and a scientist who dissects objects to find out what it is in them that inspires love. And I haven’t even mentioned the jazz yet, or the most beautiful depiction of conversation I’ve ever seen, drawn without a single word.
McKean begins the book with four creation myths; these are myths you’ve never read in any folklore class, but which seem instantly familiar. It’s immediately apparent that something bigger is going on than the story of a creatively blocked painter. In telling the intertwined stories of art, creativity, and the price one pays for it, McKean hints that it’s in the act of artistic creation that the human touches the divine.
But it’s not all gravity and profundity; McKean’s dry sense of humor infuses the book throughout, keeping the writing and the art light on its feet despite its ambition. And of course, since this is McKean, the book is gorgeously drawn, encompassing a range of styles nearly as encyclopedic as its range of subjects.
A new hardcover edition is forthcoming (and according to the information at Amazon, ought to have been published by now). When you do find it, grab it posthaste. And if you’re very lucky and persistent in your searching online and in the back corners of bookshops, you might find a copy of the limited edition that was issued a few years ago, which includes a CD of McKean reading the creation tales that he wrote for the book." - Karin L. Kross

"When Dave McKean’s comic Cages was originally released from 1990 to 1996 (and collected in hardcover in 1998), there was very little discussion of comics as literature. A genre that is now regularly featured in The New York Times Sunday Book Review would rarely, if ever, make an appearance. When comics books became serious, they were only taken serious to a point. Readers of Art Spiegleman's Maus were either people who already read comic books, or people who didn’t but didn’t read any other comics afterward. But it was good evidence that the under the right conditions, the comic book could be seen as serious literature.
Today, even some superhero comics can merit being called serious as well, though it often takes a feature film to generate interest in a new generation of comic readers that have long been exposed to books like Blankets, Epileptic, and Fun Home. In its day Cages was sadly overlooked by McKean fans and all but the most serious comic reader. Only now, after the cognoscenti has decided comics can be taken seriously, is it getting a much deserved, and affordable, paperback release from Dark Horse Comics in September.
Cages was originally released somewhat irregularly as a ten issue magazine-sized comic book entirely written and drawn by McKean. McKean is well known for his cover paintings of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series, which was a mix of mythology, horror and even cultural criticism that had a huge following up until its seventy-fifth and final issue. McKean’s covers are remarkable mixed media paintings, utilizing photographs, shadowboxes, and a myriad of other mediums. One of the first noticeable elements of Cages is that other than the original covers and a few pages here and there, the work is almost entirely done in pen and ink. It is, like most other comic book, done in panels with word balloons for the dialogue. And it is, for lack of any better term, literature.
The story is simple enough. A struggling artist named Leo Sabarsky moves into a rooming house in a shadowy part of London so he can paint without distraction. But the house is not simple at all, and contains an odd assortment of other characters, each with their own history, neurosis and mystery. The landlady, for example, is at one moment stubborn and argumentative and then suddenly almost overly intimate in her gestures and language. Other characters include a cat that walks the alley way behind the house (and serves as a particularly removed third person narrator insofar as we get to see everything he sees); an old woman abandoned by her husband who still waits for him while her parrot mocks her; a cynical writer who has an dark tense relationship with his wife; and a jazz musician who speaks in riddles.
Leo himself is struggling to paint and behind everything he sees and everyone he meets there is the strange shadow of malevolence. Leo watches everything almost without judgment except to judge himself against it. In one chapter, he meets the writer and upon learning that he has read many of the reclusive man’s books, offers him a sketch. The writer hangs it in empty space on the wall where there appears to have been another picture at one time. The next day Leo comes back and the writer is less inviting and keeps Leo in the doorway. Looking over the writer’s shoulder Leo notices the sketch has been taken off the wall. We see what Leo sees, and it is through the actual literal point of view that we are given access to his emotions as well.
The narrative is carefully constructed by McKean by intense, yet simple, pen and ink drawings that at times suddenly break away from the traditional comic book form. Simple panels become multi-layered with photographs and other times the panels themselves are opened up so much that whole pages turn into sweeping black ink strokes. The dialogue is rich and at times baffling, but the facial expressions of every character are perfectly matched to their words.
The story is at times frustrating and enigmatic, and if it is guilty of anything it's a bit of self-consciousness, but the narrative as a whole is a meditation on art and perception, and so this works to its advantage. It’s only real flaw is that of all comics: it reads very quickly.
Cages is an example, coming late when it was one of the first, of the wonder of comics, the sheer joy of reading by panels, and how the medium can be used for real characterization, plot, and narrative in a way that only a series of little pictures can. It is difficult to not take it seriously." - Peter Bebergal

Pádraig talks with Dave McKean