Really, it should be a total mess. What starts routinely enough as a tale about a small group of artists (a painter, a musician, a writer) all living in one London apartment building explodes into a vast canvass of dreams, stories, lies and hallucinations. As reality shifts and is shifted time and again, McKean similarly unleashes his prodigious artistic talents, pulling out all the stops - lifework, oils, photos, mixed media, full colour, duotone, you name it - in an effort to find new ways of communicating in the comics form. Seemingly building as he goes along McKean presents a densely structured narrative spiked with odd angles, baroque visual treatments and deceptively unmapped extensions. But you know what? In the end it all holds together.
More than that, it actually works. Sure it's wild and often out of control. But at the same time it's some of the smartest and most elegant cartooning of the decade. Some of it seems slapdash and rushed, while other parts seem coldly calculated and deliberate. And that's the way it should be. This is, after all, a book about creation and creation occurs in all sorts of ways from the spontaneous to the controlled.
The success of Cages rests in the fact that McKean is one of the rare cartoonists with such a wide variety of tricks that he could pull off such a display. I can think of few cartoonists who could have pulled off a book as big and bold and brash as this one. But I'm certainly glad that I can think of one.
NEIL GAIMAN:
(from Neil Gaiman On Dave McKean)
I never minded Dave being an astonishing artist and visual designer. That never bothered me. That he's a world class keyboard player and composer bothers me only a little. That he drives amazing cars very fast down tiny Kentish backroads only bothers me if I'm a passenger after a full meal, and much of the time I keep my eyes shut anyway. He's now becoming a world class film and video director, that he can write comics as well as I can, if not better, that he subsidises his art (still uncompromised after all these years) with highly paid advertising work which still manages, despite being advertising work, to be witty and heartfelt and beautiful.... well, frankly, these things bother me. It seems somehow wrong for so much talent to be concentrated in one place, and I am fairly sure the only reason that no-one has yet risen up and done something about it is because he's modest, sensible and nice. If it was me, I'd be dead by now.
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