Cages (graphic novel)

AUTHOR: McKean, Dave

ARTIST: Dave McKean (illustrator)

PUBLISHERS: Tundra; Kitchen Sink Press; NBM; Dark Horse Comics

FIRST SERIAL PUBLICATION: 1990-1996

FIRST BOOK PUBLICATION: 1998

Publication History

Dave McKean initially began serializing Cages in 1990, publishing a total of ten issues between 1990 and 1996. The early volumes were released by Tundra Publishing. After Tundra folded, Kitchen Sink Press took over the project and printed the final issues. This first phase of Cages’ publication history is notable for the erratic release schedule of the initial issues, especially for the three-year gap that separates the release of the eighth issue from that of the ninth. While these original issues attracted considerable attention, the project as a whole remained incomplete until 1998, when Kitchen Sink issued the first complete collection of the book. Cages lapsed out of print after Kitchen Sink Press shut down the following year and did not return to print until 2002, when NBM issued a new edition. Dark Horse Comics released a version of the book in 2010.

Prior to the publication of Cages, McKean was best known for his collaborations with other comics creators, especially Neil Gaiman, for whom he illustrated the books Violent Cases (1997), Black Orchid (1988-1989), Signal to Noise (1989), and The Tragical Comedy or Comical Tragedy of Mr. Punch: A Romance (1994), as well as several books for children and other illustrated texts. McKean also contributed covers to all seventy-five issues of Gaiman’s The Sandman series (1989-1996) over a period roughly contemporaneous with the creation of Cages. Another important and widely read collaboration paired McKean and Grant Morrison on the Batman story Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth (1990).

Plot

Stylistically diffuse and often nonlinear in its narrative style, Cages is a volume that rewards careful attention and regular rereading. Although McKean originally conceived of Cages as a series of entangled short stories, the finished novel does have a clear narrative line. After a lengthy opening prose sequence in which McKean relates four original creation myths, Cages introduces the reader to Meru House, the mysterious apartment building at the center of the novel’s labyrinthine plot. Throughout much of the book’s first chapter, a black cat prowls from window to window, pausing briefly to study the building’s various residents and visitors. Developments in later chapters suggest that this sequence is temporally disjointed, many of the events taking place out of the order in which the text ultimately presents them. As such, the cat’s perambulations function as a sort of overture to the book as a whole, offering brief, literal windows into the discrete lives of Meru House’s various residents.

The first few chapters of Cages’ true narrative follow Leo Sabarsky, a frustrated painter who takes a room in Meru House in the hope of kick-starting his artistic process. Through Leo, the reader gradually comes to know of the building’s other residents, first glimpsed through the black cat’s eyes. Among them is Jonathan Rush, a once acclaimed novelist who has been in hiding since his most recent book, also titled Cages, sparked riots. As McKean eventually reveals, Rush is now at the mercy of a pair of thuggish men in bowler hats who provide for his needs but take away everything that he loves. Leo also befriends Angel, a brilliant jazz musician who lives upstairs. Through Angel’s machinations, Leo later comes to know Karen, a botanist who has somehow grown a forest in her own apartment. Karen repeatedly sits for Leo, allowing him to draw her, and the two gradually fall in love.

After Jonathan’s tormentors remove and murder the black cat—for which Jonathan has been caring—Leo learns of his friend’s predicament. With the help of Karen and Angel, Leo helps Jonathan and his wife, Ellen, escape from Meru House. As the book comes to a close, Karen and Leo consummate their relationship, recommitting themselves to the value and promise of human creativity.

A number of other stories intercut these events, including a lengthy monologue delivered by Edie Featherskill to her parrot in which she ruminates on what to cook and reflects on her past, eventually revealing that her husband Bill abandoned her years before. Near the close of the novel, the reader learns that Bill was somehow transformed into a cat years before, only to return to his own form upon the black cat’s death.

Elsewhere, Angel delivers a parable about the origins of music and an unnamed mother tells her child a story about a tower that a king built in order to make his kingdom greater only to learn that it would undo all his past accomplishments. Other interwoven elements include a small handful of fantastical wordless sequences seemingly run through with allegorical import but not obviously connected to the central story.

Characters

•Leo Sabarsky is a visual artist who moves into Meru House near the beginning of the narrative. Observant and sincere, he strikes up friendships with several of the building’s residents, as well as with a handful of other neighborhood characters. Although his own work tends to frustrate him, he gradually comes into a new contentment with the help of Karen.

•Jonathan Rush is a novelist and essayist whose most recent work, the inflammatory Cages, sparked outrage. Now in hiding with his wife, Jonathan begins the novel as little more than a shell of a man, beaten down by past disappointments and the torments of his ostensible keepers. He is loosely based on the novelist Salman Rushdie.

•Angel is an uncommonly talented jazz musician who tends to speak in the form of suggestive parables. Seemingly capable of drawing music from everything, Angel crafts stories that can be made to sing.

•Karen is a botanist who lives across the way from Leo in an apartment where she has somehow grown a forest. Though she is initially an object of distant fascination for Leo, the two soon grow romantically entangled.

•Edie Featherskill is an older woman who lives by herself in Meru House. Though she has apparently been abandoned by her husband, Bill, she generally operates under the delusion that he is merely late for dinner.

•Ellen is Jonathan’s wife. Though she sometimes seems to rage at her husband’s melancholic powerlessness, she remains largely undefined in her own right.

•The gallerist is a small, peculiar man who speaks by way of note cards printed with words and phrases that he rearranges to form sentences and questions, frequently resulting in malapropisms.

•Doris is the landlady of Meru House. Because of her comical tendency to mishear what others say, Leo occasionally refers to her as “Mrs. What.”

Artistic Style

Prior to beginning work on Cages, McKean was best known for maximalist multimedia images of the sort seen in his contributions to The Sandman and in books such as Arkham Asylum. Cages marks a pointed departure from this less restrained style; the majority of its innumerable panels are drawn in spare pen and ink accented only by limited shading done in grays and blacks. McKean largely refuses realist forms of representation, and the bodies and faces of his characters are often distorted and distended, as if the lines themselves are striving to escape the shapes that hold them together. This sketchy approach has the effect of suggesting that the lives of the book’s characters are very much in progress; they are beautiful drafts of things yet to come.

At numerous points throughout, McKean embraces altogether different artistic techniques. In the opening chapter, for example, as the black cat peers into the different windows of Meru House, McKean intermittently adopts a more fully realized style, introducing painterly panels that resemble underdeveloped black-and-white photographs. Other sections find him making use of photo manipulation during fantasies and dreams and even deploying brief bursts of color during some of the book’s most vivid depictions of its characters’ troubled psyches. When questioned about these shifts of style, McKean tends to suggest that he simply took on whatever form seemed most appropriate to the narrative. While this willingness to play and experiment can make Cages difficult to parse at certain junctures, it contributes to the book’s rich narrative climate in which allegories are piled atop one another.

Cages also contains a number of moments of virtuosic cartooning. Most famous among these is a sequence near the middle of the novel in which a conversation between Karen and Leo bleeds into a musical performance by Angel. As the sequence descends into abstraction, the couple’s dialogue bubbles take on a pictographic character, suggesting those conversations in which the overall emotional tenor is far more important than anything actually said. In a few scant pages, McKean is able to suggest hours of rich and deeply felt discourse without actually telling the reader anything specific that his characters have said or done.

Themes

Taken as a whole, Cages works as a study of various creative processes and the frustrations thereof. Virtually all of McKean’s major characters are artists of one kind or another, from the novelist Jonathan Rush to the painter Leo Sabarsky and the musician Angel. Indeed, even Mrs. Featherskill, who spends much of her section of the text fussing over her cabinet of recipes, might be understood as a practitioner of the culinary arts. Struggling—and often failing—to realize their dreams and desires, these characters speak to the promises and pains of art. Approaching the book in these terms also helps explain the presence of its most controversial element, the four prose creation myths that appear at the beginning. What is at stake here and throughout Cages is a celebration of acts of creation as such, regardless of their products or consequences.

Cages is also deeply concerned with romances and relationships. Throughout the book, a number of different interpersonal bonds are shown at a range of different points in their respective arcs. Whereas the bond between Leo and Karen only grows over the course of the narrative, Jonathan’s marriage is in a heightened state of dissolution. Worn down by years of creative and interpersonal disappointment, Jonathan and his wife seem all but incapable of communicating with one another. Elsewhere on the spectrum, Mrs. Featherskill has long been separated from her husband, Bill, of whom she speaks incessantly. These and other couplings are deeply intertwined with the questions of creativity that are at the heart of the novel. As the text repeatedly suggests, humans are at their best when they are able to make things with others.

Finally, Cages can be read as a meditation on the nature of allegory. The novel is replete with stories and other elements that seem to stand in for something else, though what they purport to illuminate or otherwise explain is rarely self-evident. Many characters—especially Angel—comment on and call attention to this tendency in the text, making allegory itself as much a subject as a technique. Cages’ continual slippage in and out of allegorical forms of representation may be frustrating for some readers, as it can be difficult to distinguish what is really happening from that which merely comments on the narrative.

Impact

Cages emerged on the scene at a critical juncture for independent comics in the English-speaking world. In the wake of Art Spiegelman’s 1992 Pulitzer Prize for Maus, the medium seemed primed for broader mass-market acceptance, but its future direction was still uncertain. Eschewing the more narrowly personal narratives of many independent comics of its day, Cages aspired to offer a story of far-reaching import. The book’s real impact, however, may have been more material: Originally printed on high-quality paper in an expensive hardback edition, Cages helped pave the way for more elaborately produced independent comics. Today, the book is memorable in significant part for its desire to push the “artiness” of comics art to its limits. Though McKean’s style has influenced some younger artists, his often dizzying formal aspirations in Cages remain largely unmatched.

While he has continued to work in comics, publishing works such as the short-story collection Pictures That Tick (2001), McKean has focused much of his energy on other art forms in the years since Cages was published. Cages remains in high regard with most critics, and its various reissues have garnered generally favorable reviews.

Further Reading

Barry, Lynda. What It Is (2008).

Campbell, Eddie. Alec: The Years Have Pants (2009).

Pope, Paul. 100% (2005).

Bibliography

Feltman, Matthew. “Phantom Towers: Crypto-Towers Haunting Dave McKean’s Cages and Mirrormask.” ImageTexT: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies 4, no. 1 (2008). http://www.english.ufl.edu/imagetext/archives/v4‗1/feltman.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. “The Art of Dave McKean.” Interview by Dan Epstein. Underground Online. http://www.ugo.com/channels/freestyle/features/davemckean/default.asp.

McKean, Dave. “Dave McKean on Arkham Asylum and Cages.” Interview. Comics Career 2, no. 1 (1990). http://www.comicscareer.com/?page‗id=55.

McKean, Dave, and Neil Gaiman. Dustcovers: The Collected Sandman Covers, 1989-1997. New York: Vertigo, 1998.