december 29

Good artists can become great artists, but how does someone become the kind of artist that expands the vocabulary of a medium itself? Somebody like comic-book artist Dave McKean?



It's folks like McKean that render the potentials in comic book art toward the infinite. When I first saw his Black Orchid mini-series, I kind of liked it, although it didn't feel like comic book art. Even now, I feel clumsy trying to describe his work, but it's its own kind of beautiful. McKean's one of the reasons we call it graphic storytelling - because it's more than cartoons in panels, just like the stories are more than superheroes in fight scenes.



He's made the leap to filmmaking, doing as he's always done, ignoring and eradicating borders. Here's a short film he made, based on one of Shakespeare's sonnets.