NEWS ITEM
MATTOTTI AND McKEAN
Posted: February 18, 2011
The recent announcement of a Comica Conversation between Lorenzo Mattotti and Dave McKean, on Saturday 12 March at Goldsmith University in South London, will be of interest to readers of Escape Magazine in the 1980s.
Lorenzo Mattotti provided the illustration above, The Red Guitar, for the cover of Escape #11 in 1987, which also featured his four page strip Insomnia and an interview conducted by Paul Gravett. With the release of an English-language version of Fires the year before in 1986, Paul declared, “Mattotti is Italy’s grand architect of dreams… Mattotti’s rich imagery introduces sensations and depths of emotion new to comics - a breath of wind, the heat of fire, the freshness of woodland, feelings of tribalism, melancholy and peace. Fires proves it is possible.”
In 1987 Paul was directly responsible for partnering Neil Gaiman with Dave McKean on their first collaboration, Violent Cases, which was released through Paul Gravett and Peter Stanbury’s joint venture Escape Publishing. Neil Gaiman later recounted:
I was twenty six when I first met Dave McKean. I was a working journalist who wanted to write comics. He was twenty three, in his last year at art college, and he wanted to draw comics. We met in the offices of a telephone sales company, several members of which, we had been told, were going to bankroll an exciting new anthology comic. It was the kind of comic that was so cool that it was only going to employ untried new talent, and we certainly were that. I liked Dave, who was quiet and bearded and quite obviously the most artistically talented person I had ever encountered.
That mysterious entity which Eddie Campbell calls ‘the man at the crossroads’, but everyone else knows as Paul Gravett, had been conned into running advertising in his magazine Escape for the Exciting New Comic. He came to take a look at it himself. He liked what Dave was drawing, liked what I was writing, asked if we’d like to work together. We did. We wanted to work together very much.
Somewhere in there we figured out that the reason the Exciting New Comic was only employing untried talent was that no-one else would work with the editor. And that he didn’t have the money to publish it. And that it was part of history… Still, we had our graphic novel to be getting on with for Paul Gravett. It was called Violent Cases.
Don’t miss this opportunity to witness a unique encounter between two of the world’s greatest contemporary visionaries on Saturday 12 March. Be sure to buy your tickets now.
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