Broken Frontier

Content warning : this review contains images featuring nudity

Self-exploration is a wonderful thing. Seeing an artist the caliber of Dave McKean constantly trying to re-invent himself is a joyful thing. Reading a graphic novel by said artist concerning all things erotic should be a truly ecstatic experience. But was the butter worth its salt (every review of an erotic book should have an obscure Last Tango in Paris reference sneaked in) or did McKean just turn out to be a dirty old man. The answer is : probably a bit of both. 

It has been a long wait for another comic by this grandmaster, McKean’s last illustrated novel dating back to 2007 with Neil Gaiman’s Crazy Hair. If you count the GNs McKean produced which he actually wrote and drew, you have to go even further back to 1990 when he started to serialise Cages. To make a graphic novel worthy of McKean’s masterpiece Cages the creator needs to start out to actually have this be the intent and this was definitely not McKean’s purpose with Celluloid. But for what is basically a self-indulgent art book, Celluloid sure is some pretty pictures. 

And pictures are aplenty, it’s a wordless breast … sorry, tale with a minimum of story infusion. Unnamed woman arrives at lover’s house to find a an old film projector with seemingly erotic imagery on its celluloid. When she turns the camera on, a strange door appears and she takes an Alice in Wonderland by Budd Townsend jump, travelling through different erotic settings drawn in a variety of styles by McKean.  
Going back to Sandman, McKean has always been attracted to erotica, sneaking in the odd breast here and there. His first full blown erotic work - pornographic is a better description though - is the short story in NBM Eurotica’s First Time, written by Sibylline.

Contradictory enough, McKean’s art style seems to struggle with the premise itself of erotica : being erotic. His figure work exonerates a strangely androgynic quality. Steeped in history, he evokes the drawings and paintings of Egon Schiele, Gustav Klimt, early Picasso and Modigliani. All powerhouses of artists and McKean succeeds in mixing their styles up with his own specific brand of fantasy photography. It is this exact historic context however that forbids the work to be viewed as totally his own and therefore radiates a distant quality. To some point, McKean is aware of this. His hard scratchy linework - in Cages a metaphor for the symbolic distance between characters - lends a raw quality reminiscent of pornography instead of erotica and McKean uses this edge to illustrate the real life sections of Celluloid. Once inside the erotic Wonderland, he switches to his patented mix of photography, drawings and paint, all mixed up in the computer. However, his line work seems more honest and direct. McKean’s paintings and photography are so slick and seamlessly blended on his Apple that the pictures lose their immediate quality of sensory reaction. They just become a set of pretty pictures with genitalia. Pretty pictures indeed but for erotica, that lives between the folds of Sex, it comes off as too polished and maybe even too explicit in its visuals.

In terms of illustration, Celluloid is not threading onto any new grounds for McKean, this is not a detraction however. Dave McKean is a truly gifted artist but Celluloid, though I enjoyed ‘viewing’ it, is not a great novel by any means so don’t set out to find one. It is an art book made by an accomplished artist who, as a subject matter, has chosen to tackle erotica. I liked it, but merely that.

For completeness sake, this review is based on the Dutch edition of Celluloid. However, due to the wordless pictorial story and based upon online previews of the Fantagraphics edition,  I have not seen any deviations between both hardcover versions except for issues of language. 

Celluloid by Dave McKean is published in Dutch by Silvester. It is a 240 page hardcover OGN retailing for € 24.95 and is soon to be published in English by Fantagraphics who have a large preview running on their Flickr site.