Splinters

A collection of short comics bound in an oversized hardcover with glossy colour pages, Pictures That Tick (2001) is under the complete rule of Dave McKean's fancies. The bric-a-brac cutesiness of frequent collaborator Neil Gaiman is apparent in many of the stories, whereas the influences behind McKean's visual aesthetic run the gamut from the films of Jan Svankmajer and the Brothers Quay to the art of Marshall Arisman, Joseph Cornell and Lorenzo Mattotti. Each of the pieces in prefaced by McKean's haphazard, dreamlike comments:

what?
you want sense?
i'm too busy throwing the artwork into the river
to make sense

The best way to approach these stories is in terms of jazz improvisation: enjoy the giddy atmosphere and the fine touches here and there. In fact, the book has a suite of jazz-themed shorts, one of which contains this anecdote about creativity:

One time when Miles wanted to improvise around one repeating chord figure, Herbie said, "You know, I... I like to improvise and everything, but I don't know what to play." And Miles said, "If you don't want to play, don't play. Only say something when you have something to say."

Pictures That Tick ends in a quiet, majestic manner. In "His Story", a piece of cut glass is used as a visual metaphor for heavy emotional weight. One day, a father tells his son a story about his life. Perplexed, the boy places the story (a pointed scrap) into a drawer, putting it out of sight. Sometime after, the father passes away. As a youngster, the son decides to study his father's story again: "It was still clear and cold. But I was sure there was more to it than that." He plunges the shard right through his eye, and it gets stuck in the socket. Soon the young man begins to see things through a prism.

The stuff of life continues to go on: end of studies, wife and kids, houses, pet fish, artistic work. But the refractions of his father's story (preceding the death, but acquiring meaning only after it) take decades to stop influencing his way of seeing. Finally, the understanding comes without effort "[i]n amongst the sleeping and the getting up, and the moving about...".

McKean-related links: Dreamline (the best source for galleries & interviews) * Overview of published work * Creativity and Apple