Cages
By Dave McKean
Published by NBM
A massive, massively ambitious graphic novel, Cages is artist Dave McKean's exploration of form, a marriage of word and image that is clearly visually oriented, yet features haunting themes and dialogue that mark it as a landmark experiment in what is possible in the comics medium.
McKean is well-known as the cover artist of Neil Gaiman's Sandman, and the photo-collage technique he used for that series of covers is in evidence here, but it's only one technique among many used to bring this novel to life. Cages is primarily the story of artist Leo Sabarsky, who moves into a somewhat strange apartment building populated by, among others, a shattered novelist and an inquisitive cat.
As Leo (and McKean, presumably) struggles with how to depict the world he perceives through his art, mysteries arise and the universe unfolds in a dizzying narrative that examines our relationships with art, music, and most importantly, each other.
There are worlds within worlds here, as well as character studies of people by turns searching, broken and enraptured. My favourite character is the writer Jonathan Rush, who has been destroyed by his need to find and speak the truth, and who is challenged to reconnect by his relationship with Leo. The throughline of his story is one of the most oblique here, but ultimately one of the most rewarding. If Leo is the everyman character, Jonathan is the unknowable mystery, his haunted eyes a mystery to Leo, his passion for truth a mystery to himself.
McKean's story seems to drift in an out of focus, but in a David Lynch-like manner in which you know that the story is willing to give up to you exactly as much as you are willing to work to extract from it. There are multiple art styles, some inviting, some distant and unknowable. The main body of the work is in a pen and ink style not dissimilar to Bernard Krigstein, and the novel would surely have pleased Krigstein in its scope and ambition.
In the manner of much great art, the story is, in a sense, circular in nature. We end where we begin, having circled a universe inside McKean's mind. At its core it's a journey of discovery: Leo's, Jonathan's, the cat's, and ultimately, McKean's. Through his art McKean tells us a few things he's discovered, and I ask no more of art than that. It's a massively ambitious work, but it's ambition that keeps its promise and takes its place as a significant graphic novel and a visually dazzling landmark in comics history. Grade: 5/5