McKean, Dave 1963- (David Jeff McKean)

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McKean, Dave 1963- (David Jeff McKean)

Personal

Born December 29, 1963, in Maidenhead, England; married; wife's name Claire; children: two. Education: Berkshire College of Art and Design, degree, 1986.

Addresses

Home—England.

Career

Illustrator, artist, and film director. Organizer, with others, of Unauthorised Sex Company, England, c. 1990; Feral Records (recording studio), cofounder with Iain Ballamy. Time-Warner International, designer and animator. Wormwood Studios, director of short films, including The Week Before, 1998, and N[eon], 2002; director of full-length feature film MirrorMask, 2005. Designer and illustrator of book, album, and CD covers; conceptual artist for films Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban and Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Jazz pianist. Exhibitions: Work included in shows at galleries.

Awards, Honors

World Fantasy Award for best artist, 1991; Newsweek Best Children's Books listee, 1997, for The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish by Neil Gaiman; British Science-Fiction Association Award for Best Short Fiction, Elizabeth Burr/Worzalla Award, Bram Stoker Award, Hugo Award for Best Novella, and Prix Tam Tam Award, all 2003, all for Coraline by Gaiman.

Writings

SELF-ILLUSTRATED

A Small Book of Black and White Lies (photographs), 1995.

Dustcovers (collected "Sandman" covers), DC Comics/Vertigo (New York, NY), 1997.

Cages (graphic novel; published in ten comic-book issues, 1990-96), Kitchen Sink Press (Northampton, MA), 1998.

Author of short comic Pictures That Tick, 1995, and of photography collections Option: Click, 1998, and The Particle Tarot.

ILLUSTRATOR

Neil Gaiman, Violent Cases (graphic novel; originally published in comic-book form), Titan (London, England), 1987, Tundra (Northampton, MA), 1991, third edition, Kitchen Sink Press (Northampton, MA), 1997.

Neil Gaiman, Black Orchid (graphic novel; originally published in comic-book form), DC Comics (New York, NY), 1988.

Grant Morrison, Arkham Asylum (graphic novel; originally published in comic-book form), Titan (London, England), 1989, 15th anniversary edition published as Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth, afterword by Karen Berger, DC Comics (New York, NY), 2004.

Neil Gaiman, Signal to Noise (originally serialized in The Face magazine), Gollancz (London, England), 1992.

(With others) Neil Gaiman, Death: The High Cost of Living (graphic novel; "Sandman" series; originally published in comic-book form), DC Comics (New York, NY), 1994.

Neil Gaiman, The Tragical Comedy, or Comical Tragedy, of Mr. Punch: A Romance, DC Comics/Vertigo (New York, NY), 1994.

Neil Gaiman, The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish (juvenile), Borealis (Clarkston, GA), 1997, revised edition, with a CD narrated by Gaiman, HarperCollins (New York, NY), 2004.

Iain Sinclair, Slow Chocolate Autopsy: Incidents from the Notorious Career of Norton, Prisoner of London, Phoenix House (London, England), 1997.

John Cale and Victor Bockris, What's Welsh for Zen?: The Autobiography of John Cale, Bloomsbury (London, England), 1999.

Neil Gaiman, Coraline (juvenile), HarperCollins (New York, NY), 2002.

Neil Gaiman, The Wolves in the Walls, HarperCollins (New York, NY), 2003.

S.F. Said, Varjak Paw, David Fickling Books (New York, NY), 2003.

Neil Gaiman, MirrorMask (screenplay), William Morrow (New York, NY), 2005.

S.F. Said, The Outlaw Varjak Paw, David Fickling Books (New York, NY), 2006.

Neil Gaiman, The Graveyard Book, HarperCollins (New York, NY), 2008.

Neil Gaiman, Crazy Hair, HarperCollins (New York, NY), 2009.

Illustrator of comic-book series, including "Hellblazer" and "Sandman," and of hundreds of other comic books, including Voodoo Lounge (with the Rolling Stones). Contributor to periodicals, including the New Yorker.

Sidelights

British artist and filmmmaker Dave McKean is best known for the illustrations he has provided for book and CD covers as well as comics and graphic novels, especially those written by friend Neil Gaiman. McKean's talent is extensive, however, and his creativity extends to photography, painting, model-building, music performance, film direction, and digital and graphic design. As a visual artist he use a variety of mediums, including drawing, painting, photography, paper and found-object collage, and sculpture. Despite his wide-ranging credits, McKean is best known to younger fans as the illustrator of children's books by Gaiman, S.F. Said, and David Almond.

McKean and Gaiman first met in New York City in the mid-1980s, and they have since collaborated on many projects. In fact, McKean's artwork was first introduced to mass audiences in the pages of Gaiman's short graphic novel Violent Cases. Subsequent comic-book projects cemented the collaboration, among them Black Orchid, Signal to Noise, and Gaiman's groundbreaking "Sandman" comic-book series, all of which have subsequently been published in graphic-novel format.

From ongoing series work, Gaiman and McKean soon turned to stand-alone projects, such as the large-format graphic novel The Tragical Comedy, or Comical Tragedy, of Mr. Punch: A Romance. Featuring a haunting story by Gaiman, the book showcases McKean's multimedia

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art, made eerie due to the darkly drawn and sometimes grotesque adult characters and surreal Punch-and-Judy images. Calling the work "stunning," Frank McConnell went on to assert in Commonweal that The Tragical Comedy, or Comical Tragedy, of Mr. Punch is "easily the most haunting, inescapable story I've read in years." Another creative collaboration, this time with writer Grant Morrison, resulted in the comic-book compilation Arkham Asylum, a "Batman" adventure. Roger Sabin, reviewing this work for New Statesman & Society, concluded that "McKean's artwork is often breathtaking—veering from gloomy photo-realism to brightly-coloured Steadmanesque abstraction."

Apart from their work in comics, McKean and Gaiman have also collaborated on several books for children, as well as on the McKean-directed film MirrorMask, based on a screenplay by Gaiman. In The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish, an uninvolved father realizes that he is not important to his child when he is traded for a pair of desired pets. Coraline focuses on a little girl who crosses over into a nightmarish dimension, while in The Wolves in the Walls an imaginative child named Lucy is the only one in her family who has seen the wolves living in the walls of her parents' house. Another imaginative child is the focus of Gaiman's rhyming story Crazy Hair, in which young Bonnie discovers strange animals and other unusual objects hiding in a man's unruly coiffure, while The Graveyard Book finds author and illustrator returning to their darker themes in a Newbery Award-winning book that School Library Journal contributor Megan Honig described as "a rich, surprising, and sometimes disturbing tale of dreams, ghouls, murderers, trickery, and family." Reviewing Coraline in Kliatt, Sherry Hoy concluded that McKean's surreal illustrations "create the true chills here," while Booklist critic Francisca Goldsmith credited the artist's "startling graphics" for making The Wolves in the Walls "visually and emotionally sophisticated, accessible, and inspired."

Other books featuring artwork by McKean include The Savage, by Almond, and Said's novels Varjak Paw and The Outlaw Varjak Paw. Gestured ink images bring to life Said's novels, which focus on a purebred cat with Mesopotamian antecedents and a talent for the martial arts that saves several threatened family members and lead them to a haven in a dark and dangerous world. In Kirkus Reviews a critic concluded of Varjak Paw that Said's "creepily off-kilter" fictional world is "effectively reinforced by [McKean's] vivid ink sketches," and a Publishers Weekly critic dubbed the book's illustrations "chilling" and "sinuous."

Biographical and Critical Sources

PERIODICALS

Booklist, September 15, 1998, Gordon Flagg, review of Cages, p. 185; August, 2003, Francisca Goldsmith, review of The Wolves in the Walls, p. 1989; April 1, 2006, Ed Sullivan, review of The Outlaw Varjak Paw, p. 41.

Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books, September, 2003, Janice Del Negro, review of The Wolves in the Walls, p. 14, and Varjak Paw, p. 32.

Commonweal, December 2, 1994, Frank McConnell, review of The Tragical Comedy or Comical Tragedy of Mr. Punch: A Romance, p. 27.

Horn Book, November-December, 2002, Anita L. Burkam, review of Coraline, p. 755; July-August, 2003, Anita L. Burkam, review of Varjak Paw, p. 467; September-October, 2008, Jonathan Hunt, review of The Savage, p. 575.

Kirkus Reviews, May 1, 2003, review of Varjak Paw, p. 683; July 1, 2003, review of The Wolves in the Walls, p. 910; December 15, 2005, review of The Outlaw Varjak Paw, p. 1327; August 15, 2008, review of The Graveyard Book.

Kliatt, July, 2004, Sherry Hoy, review of Coraline, p. 30.

Library Journal, November 15, 1998, Stephen Weiner, review of Cages, p. 64.

Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, September, 1995, Charles de Lint, review of The Vertigo Tarot, p. 29; May, 1998, Charles de Lint, review of Dustcovers, p. 22.

New Statesman & Society, January 12, 1990, Roger Sabin, review of Arkham Asylum, p. 35.

Publishers Weekly, February 21, 1994, review of Death: The High Cost of Living, p. 248; July 22, 2002, review of Cages, p. 160; April 28, 2003, review of Varjak Paw, p. 70; June 30, 2003, review of The Wolves in the Walls, p. 77; September 29, 2008, review of The Graveyard Book, p. 82.

School Library Journal, September, 2003, Marian Creamer, review of The Wolves in the Walls, p. 178; February, 2006, Tasha Saecker, review of The Outlaw Varjak Paw, p. 136; October, 2008, Megan Honig, review of The Graveyard Book, p. 144; December, 2008, Johanna Lewis, review of The Savage, p. 118.