I start up the first incarnation of my Dave McKean website (dreamline.nu) back in March 1998, while I am still in college at UVA. At the end of this week I’m finally closing the site down. In honor of the occasion, here is what is probably my #1 favorite bit of McKean art:

It is a sequence from “Strata part one”, a 1992 volume of his serial graphic novel Cages, in which two of the main characters, Leo and Karen, having just met, spend all night in a downtown jazz bar engrossed in conversation. Before this one sequence hits, we see the two of them share an eight-page conventional dialogue scene. But then as they continue to warm up to each other, and their conversation takes off, the written dialogue disappears and McKean’s art explodes into a wild, sensuous, improvisational-jazz-inflected, increasingly abstract thirteen-page wordless montage, impressionistically nailing this sense of Leo’s and Karen’s being carried away by their conversation and the music and the wine and their surroundings and the crowds of people and each other, and their losing all track of time, floating out of the panels and off the page and beyond the reach of the grammar of comic narrative, so lost are they in talking and listening and drinking and (it turns out) falling in love brains first.

Not sure I can ever adequately convey just how much these thirteen pages absolutely floor me when I first read them several years ago. They still do floor me. (And the fourth and fifth pages I think may be my favorite single McKean art piece.) I guess for a start I could just repeat what Leo says to Karen earlier in the scene, moments after they meet: Someone should throw some cold water over me, really.