Thalamus: The Art of Dave McKean by Dave McKean: Review by Karen Haber
Thalamus: The Art of Dave McKean, Dave McKean (Dark Horse 978-1-50672486-7 $149.99, 600pp, hc) November 2023. Cover by Dave McKean.
A giant of the fantastic art field deserves a huge print retrospective, and for British artist Dave McKean, one of the most acclaimed and influential artists in the SF/F field and beyond, Thalamus fills the bill. A huge, slipcased, two-volume retrospective of McKean’s artwork, it’s a monument to one artist’s remarkable revolutionary achievement. It’s also a very personal statement by McKean, years in the making, of his life as an artist spanning subjects, media, influences, and much, much more.
As you open the first volume, prepare to be impressed. You get an immediate clue from the endpages: rolling fields of brainfolds containing vast cultural references, as though we’re peeking into the artist’s thalamus. (As some of you may know, the thalamus is the human brain’s relay station, processing information to be sent to the cerebral cortex for further use.)
A polymathic multimedia artist, writer, filmmaker, and musician, McKean – whose sui generis artwork combines photography, collage, digital, and hand skills – revolutionized the look of comic cover and internal illustration. His art transcends categorization. He plays with perspective, medium, texture and the viewer’s own visual expectations. If Kafka had been an artist in the late 20th century, this is what he might have created: challenging, oddly skewed perspectives, dark frightening elements tinged by more than a touch of paranoia, and salted with humor – for example, wolves in the walls gleefully wearing stolen socks.
Thalamus touches down at every point along McKean’s career: Sandman, Arkham Asylum, Mr. Punch, Cages, Pictures That Tick (a collection of his short stories in comics form that won the Victoria & Albert Museum Illustrated book of the Year Award in 2000), Coraline, Voodoo Lounge (his collaboration with the Rolling Stones), CD covers, photographs, the 500-page Harvey Award-winning comic novel Cages, and even illustrations for The New Yorker. In 1996 he composed and performed the music for the BBC Radio adaptation of his graphic novel Signal to Noise with saxophonist Iain Ballamy. He designed and directed the movie Mirrormask, among others. His list of collaborators begins with Neil Gaiman, but includes Grant Morrison, David Almond, and The Rolling Stones. He has worked on a variety of book and film projects with John Cale, Stephen King, Lars von Trier, and Iain Sinclair.
At the end of the second volume, we even find McKean grappling with the dawn of AI-generated art and its implications for good and evil in the art universe.
It’s all presented with the highest production values, glossy paper, sewn-in binding with ribbon bookmarks, and attractive slipcase. Most of the art is well-presented at good size with occasional small ‘‘in-development’’ images accompanying finished covers. Copyright and credit pages document each work. There’s really too much here to be encapsulated in one review. His art bio and list of awards and collaborators alone would take pages. It might be easier to simply list any realms of the arts that McKean hasn’t touched.
This staggering achievement, a guaranteed collector’s item, may be the most important retrospective by an artist to date. At 600 pages total, these two massive slipcased volumes require a huge commitment on the part of the reader. You can’t just page through them. Details must be investigated. Attention must be paid. Thalamus is a must for artists, comic lovers, art worshippers and anyone else with the pocket change and shelf space for this huge compendium, not to mention the time to spend wrapped up in McKean’s universe.
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Karen Haber is the author of nine novels including Star Trek Voyager: Bless the Beasts, and co-author of Science of the X-Men.
She is a Hugo Award nominee, nominated for Meditations on Middle Earth, an essay collection celebrating J.R.R. Tolkien that she edited and to which she contributed an essay. Her recent work includes Crossing Infinity, a YA science fiction novel of gender identity and confusions.
This review and more like it in the December 2024 issue of Locus.
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