Back in my darker high school days, I’d do a lot of that candle-burning, pentacle-wearing, tarot-reading stuff that scared old people, despite it being a completely innocent form of spiritual exploration. I had all of my hair, I always wore black, and I was still allowed to be completely awesome. I needed to carry around an index to keep all of the kinds of awesome I was organized. I’d slowly age, gain weight, lose my hair and become a pathological introvert, but back in those glory days, I’d carry The Vertigo Tarot deck around with me. Something about Dave McKean’s photographic depiction of the major and minor arcana really spoke to me, and no other tarot deck really passed my unrealistic standards of excellence. There weren’t enough nice decks to warrant collecting them, even though I was compelled to.

McKean would go on to ambitiously explore the entirety of the 78-card tarot deck a second time, this time through a pair of limited edition photography books. The first volume, The Major Arcana, was released in the summer of 2000, and this week sees the release of Dave McKean’s long-awaited companion piece, The Particle Tarot : The Minor Arcana. Between then and now, he’s been pretty busy with various films, stage productions and spot illustrations, so he has a good excuse for the delays. I usually attribute my creative delays to Pseudo-Narcolepsy and Gamecube-itis.

As far as The Vertigo Tarot was concerned, McKean was limited to using the characters from Vertigo Comics for a vast majority of the cards, and the rest of the cards were fairly literal interpretations of the cards’ meanings. These cards were mostly McKean’s early explorations into Photoshop and what it could do for him. With his own non-branded photo books, McKean has clearly broken free, advancing his own images with the available digital technology. Of course, I’m never going to love any of his books more than his very first one, A Small Book of Black and White Lies, but as McKean constantly changes his approach, my appreciation constantly evolves. Maybe not as quickly as his works emerge, but eventually, things sync up again.

There’s always an intelligence and genuine ability to his digital photography works. Photoshop is a horrible tool when in the wrong hands, but McKean is never, ever guilty of slapping two things together and calling it art. His obvious understanding of the fundamentals of art and photography (and innate talent for exciting composition) leave no doubts whatsoever about the virtues of Photoshop or other digital editing tools. It is my unique opinion, and by no means do I expect you to share this, that McKean is the pinnacle of artistic genius. They should build a planet and name it after him, and it should have a planet-wide dress code that requires monocles and pet owls.

That being said, ‘The Minor Arcana’ has about a million boobs in it. For real.

The book is arranged into the four traditional tarot suits: swords, cups, pentacles and staves, each suit having 14 images. The book is dominated by photomanipulations of altered bodies in various situations, most of them missing parts or texturally altered to appear as other non-human things. One might see a violence to his images and ‘mutilated’ bodies, but a careful inspection will reveal no violence at all. The bodies all seem to be painlessly giving up parts of themselves to integrate better with their meanings and environments. Where bodies turn into broken wood and vegetable landscapes, there is no blood, but the semi-anthropomorphization of the inanimate.

Each suit follows a visual theme that divides it from the other suits. The swords are yellow and wet with flashes of light. Staves are blue urban landscapes. Pentacles are mostly broken machines in a field. Cups are dark and focus around fragmented male heads. Every photograph is a powerful work unto itself, and to have such a quantity together is a bit overwhelming, but also wildly inspiring.

If I have any qualm with the book whatsoever, it’s that McKean’s chosen models for his Particle Tarot books are very much of pornstar proportions. Perhaps this is to emphasize the common theme of ‘fertility’ that seems to run through the tarot, but it makes some of the photos border on the lurid. It seems like every time I paint a human butt, I’ve created a half-scandal among my viewers, so I’ve become really sensitive to a possible loss of meaning in artworks, or the quality of the work being obscured by the easily misinterpreted.

With a cover price of $54, severely limited and published by Allen Spiegel Fine Arts, it’s an essential addition to any collection of modern illustration and / or photography. Dave McKean is so prolific that I guarantee that you’ve seen his work at least twice before and don’t even know it. I don’t think my bookshelf would be complete without this.

Now, I really, really want to go make things.