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Dave McKean's Magnum Opus: CAGES

March 2024 - Liam Autumn

Cages (published between 1990 to 1996) is a long-form highly experimental graphic novel written and illustrated by Dave McKean. Through a series of vignettes and sequentials, it chronicles the intersecting lives of a demented painter, a philosophical musician, and a confined writer who inhabit a strange apartment building in mid-twentieth century England. Cages explores a highly surreal and impressionistic landscape of the mind and is a profound exploration on art, divinity, suffering, creation, and the cages we build for ourselves.

Exhibiting in words like Kafka and images like Klimt, the story of paranoia progresses as so: an artist named Sabarsky moves into an estranged apartment building. As he explores the town and building he learns of various other mentally tortured individuals, particularly a woman, a writer, and a musician. As time progresses his life becomes more intertwined with each of these individuals and their philosophy, art, and madness develop as one.

Cages is heavy in philosophy. Though the outcomes present the authors’ strong philosophy on the world, the book explores the philosophies of these artists and madmen. One’s philosophy seems to drive their whole character and fate and the way in which they approach art and exhibit emotion. Each character’s philosophy as well as emotional balance are heavily intertwined and established in their character and representation throughout the entirety of the book.

Issue Eight of Cages is dedicated entirely to music theory and is narrated by Angel, the mad and philosophical musician. It consists of sheets of music written over in poetry and scratchy illustrations overlaid with images depicting the rhythm and emotional melody in the lives of the other estranged inhabitants. It is up to much interpretation as it is an extensively experimental piece, but maintains a certain calmness throughout the storytelling. In this piece, the musician also explains how to make a stone sing notes more beautifully than any instrument.

Cages includes some very dark themes of isolation, mental and anatomical torture, and helplessness through dreams, life, and creation. The story involves many mentally complex and unstable individuals and highlights each of their greatest fears and weaknesses through a series of unfortunate events. There is a story which is told to a child later in the book regarding a disfigured king who has a dream to create a massive and glorious piece of architecture to house the evergrowing arts of the world for eternity, but in the process drives himself mad through the realization that this kills the beauty in the very memories that drive his ambitions. The moral of this story is that one must destroy before they create, and that you should consider the consequences of a creation before acting, even if this means you will be forgotten. This is just one of the many morals, most of which are negative, but it is good to note that in the end, the artist finds his muse through the god he has created in his mind and thus becomes void of the isolation that confined him, this is perhaps the one constant throughout, lying to oneself may result in comfort and happiness.

Cages is a highly-acclaimed underground graphic novel that is well known for its poetry, philosophy, and art. McKean explores a wide variety of art in highly experimental ways including forms seldom used for sequentials. The majority of the book includes black, white, and grey-toned illustrations but the story frequently morphs between representative-impressionist light ink illustrations to extremely surreal heavy-ink drawings as well as large acrylic and oil paintings and sequential representative and abstract collage photography of figurative sculpture.

One of the most interesting things about Cages’ publication is the covers. Each cover is wildly different from the last. The covers were all constructed on large scale boards consisting of photography, sculpture, clay, illustration, acrylic paintings, dye, cloth, fish bones, 8mm film, string, stone, terracotta paint, and heavy indian ink paintings. McKean enjoyed exploring poetic appeals in his cover works rather than a clear preview piece like most other series of the time. In early 2022, one of McKean’s covers sold for $90,000 USD.

Dave McKean is a world renowned artist known for his ventures through sequential art, illustration, painting, photography, prose, sculpture, album covers, and filmmaking. He is best known for his work with Neil Gaiman, Grant Morrison, Alice Cooper, Stephen King, and Ray Bradbury which includes illustrations and writings for wonderful books such as A Serious House on a Serious Earth, Coraline, The Ocean at the End of the Lane, Testament, The Sandman, Hellblazer, Violent Cases, The Wolves in the Walls, The Tragical Comedy or Comical Tragedy of Mr. Punch, Celluloid, The Graveyard Book, Black Dog, Sokol, Cages, and one of his feature films, MirrorMask. You should check out his work, it leaves you thinking.

-Artworks by Dave McKean-

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