See, I don’t collect comic books. I don’t live close enough to a comic shop to warrant hunting down the current issues of my favorite characters to keep up with the epic storylines that are happening. Comics also take up a lot of space, what with their fancy backing boards and protective mylar casings, and at $2.50 or more per issue, it’s not a cheap hobby. It feels more like having a pet or paying child support to an estranged spouse than a delight.

So, I collect graphic novels. It sounds fancy and hip, but it’s really just eight or so regular comic issues bound together into book form, like a mega-comic. There’s a scientifically tested probability that if you call them ‘graphic novels’ instead of ‘comic books’, your chance of scoring goes up about 15 percent. Also, showering will increase that percentage. Who’da thunk it?

Cram a year’s worth of drawn-out visual anticipation into a single volume for about 15 bucks and you have gold - the graphic novel. Sure, they’re about 8 months out-of-date as far as comic continuity goes, but they look a lot nicer on a bookshelf, and you can snag ‘em on Amazon or your local bookshoppe on the cheap. They probably won’t be worth more later, as some comic issues are, but profitability usually isn’t my main motive behind my interest in comics. My real motive is that I want to be Batman in more ways that I’m comfortable explaining and I’m trying to glean some of his tricks. So far, I’m up to ‘step one : become a billionaire’. I’m sure that the buttkicking comes somewhere after that, but I’ll skip the whole ‘getting a little boy to live with me and play dress-up’ stage.

In keeping up with the never-ending saga of the immortal Batman, I picked up the recent ‘Face the Face’ storyline, which collects issues 651 to 654 of Batman and issues 817 to 820 of Detective. It deals with Batman’s absence from Gotham, how a reformed Two-Face somehow protected the city while Batman was gone, and Two-Face eventually going crazy again upon batman’s return. While I still don’t understand how a non-physical villian character could defend Gotham city as well as Batman could, nor do I agree with the death of one of Batman’s more important and interesting enemies, The Ventriloquist, it represents an important part of the Batman canon. Ergo, I was obligated and compelled. Apparently, it was really interesting to watch play out over half of a year, but I got it all in one fistful.

See, DC Comics recently orchestrated an enormous, soul-shattering series of events that shook every DC hero and villain to the core. People dying, heroes disbanding and losing their powers, and generally depressing stuff flying all around. And then, they suddenly flash-forwarded all of their stories to a point one year later, and since this past May, they’ve been explaining the bizarre changes and the missing time in a weekly series called ‘52’, which again seems to be building up into another insanely huge crisis. This too will be collected, eventually, and I’ll try to catch up again. If you’d like a good jumping-in point, I’d try the Identity Crisis collection, and for all of the obscure characters that will pop up, I’d also suggest the enormous DC Comics Encyclopedia. It’s a worthwhile book to have to address how the characters might be related, though since the events of the Crisis, it’s probably gone a bit out of date. Does it sound unnecessarily difficult and complicated to need to keep track of a comic story with an encyclopedia? You’re not the only one who thinks so, so DC Comics will publish a Companion to help understand these events.

Don’t let that stop you, though. There are plenty of non-hero related graphic novels that deal with all kinds of subjects, often biographically. Jeffrey Brown deals with his relationships with women in tiny vignettes, in tiny books. Craig Thompson chronicles his first true romance in Blankets, which is a charmingly semi-epic and emotional exploration into love that actually, physically broke my heart. It was messy. And then there’s books like Cancer Vixen and Mom’s Cancer, which visually deal with telling the stories of people battling diseases. The classic Maus and Persepolis intelligently deal with living in war-torn countries.

Being a ‘comic’ doesn’t exclude something from being an intelligently executed work of literature, which is still a dominant perception in America. The pictures aren’t included to simplify a story, but to amplify and describe, and more often than not, to engage a viewer who might not have otherwise been so attracted by a page of words. Even more dominantly than that, the creator probably just needed to draw. So maybe you won’t be able to sell it later at a higher price, they’re good reads - something my five-foot tall stack of them will attest to. Comics like Gaiman’s Sandman have won genuine literature awards, and this week saw the publication of the very first Best American Comics 2006, from the very reputable Best American series of books. And if there’s any doubt about where to jump in, start at the beginning.

Around the mid-90’s, the shelves of your average comic store were rife with heroes and heroines who bulged in every which direction but real, and every comic had 15 variant covers. Half of these covers were your good ol’ paper-and-ink covers, but the other half were rare-foil-embossed, alternate-reality variants, designed to draw the buyer into a false sense of ‘collectability’ that still hasn’t panned out 15 years later. Avaricious ‘investors’ from those days are left with garages full of mouldering books that no one really wants anymore. Like that tattoo of the hissing kitty cat that you have on your lower back, it really seemed like a good idea at the time.

During this time, it was easy to get lost in the confusing haze of covers and complete lack of eloquent writing to back them up, but there was always one set of covers that stood out, and made no effort to make themselves obscenely rare or collectable, and those covers usually created by a guy named Dave McKean. Working for Vertigo Comics, an offshoot of DC Comics, McKean was doing some of early work on the covers for books such as Hellblazer and Neil Gaiman’s impossibly complex Sandman. Given the nature of these books, which was largely esoteric, McKean took the opportunity to create breathtaking fine artworks for each over, swimming with allegory and allusion and foregoing the usual method of drawing the reader in by telling them the story contained therein with large, blaring statements on the cover. In a world of exhortations, McKean provided a beautiful whisper, and it was enough to make Sandman an award-winning fantasy comic. His artwork played a vital role in bringing comics respect as a literary art form. Sure, they had writers, but no one’s going to go into the freakshow tent if the barker isn’t outside, challenging the passersby to observe the wonders within. That, and the original cover collages were as big as doors.

Dave McKean is why I picked up my first comic, even though it said ‘For Mature Readers Only’ and brought it nervously to the cashier. The cashier chose not to dispute my purchase, and thus began my lifelong love of all things McKean. With the release of the Henson-captained film Mirrormask, McKean (in the form of director and chief visual artist) has become a household name, and justifiably so, but I can say that I was collecting his works way back when. You can check out a small cross-sampling of his work at a few online galleries dedicated to him, as he’s one of the rare modern artists who has not developed a website for himself yet. I’ve actually found myself contributing some of the rarer images I’ve come across to these galleries over the years.

Being a multifaceted talent, McKean has released everything from books of art photography to tarot decks, albums of music and childrens’ books, art prints and films, most of them seeing extraordinarily limited releases. Of course, having an acute need to see and absorb all things McKean (whom I strangely saw as a kind of kindred spirit), this created my first inklings of those vicious collectors impulses. I would find these rarities, and I would acquire them at almost any cost - not to have them, but to observe them as closely as possible and try to gain access to McKean’s creative process and use it to inspire and augment my own. And as usual, I can justify my insatiable desire to collect things with the fact that I can subvert everything that I collect into either a creative product or a more secure lifestyle.

The list of Dave McKean collectibles is a short and diverse one, though there are a few standout points in it, short of owning an original artwork (which I am still working on).

The original edition of The Vertigo Tarot, released by DC Comics, is an item that can reach up to 250 dollars at auction. It contains a full complement of photographically illustrated tarot cards, along with a general instruction manual and a collectors box to contain it all. Interestingly, many of the cards are concerned with characters from various DC comic books and their role in comics. It’s a beautiful set in any capacity, and DC re-released it a few years back, though in a smaller format and with less accompanying literature. I spent many a basement Halloween party reading these cards to curious onlookers, but today they remain in a pouch on a shelf, too beautiful to really touch. The dustjacket of the manual is long gone, and the large box that it all came in is in the attic somewhere, but as long as I have 78 cards worth of art, I’m happy with it.

Many of the rare items that I’ve come across I’ve bought directly from Dave McKean’s agent and publisher Allen Spiegel, who I was in regular contact with at the time. My most treasured item is McKean’s video-only film, ‘The Week Before’. It’s a short film about the seven days before the seven biblical days in which the Earth was created, when God had some serious creative blockage. Due to the fickle nature of magnetic tape, I’ve invested in equipment to get it onto DVD as soon as possible (for my personal use only, of course), before the image decays any further. I was informed that a collection of McKean’s works was slated for release in DVD format a few years back, but Mirrormask took over the production schedule and the DVD has been pushed back to an undetermined date.

The third item in my Dave McKean trifecta of awesome is the limited-release version of McKean’s comic masterwork, ‘Cages’, which saw only 1000 copies. 500 pages of black-slipcased beauty, signed and numbered in silver, and accompanied by a CD of McKean reading some of the myths in his book in his soothing English accent, complete with music composed by him. When I got this, it was another kind of sacred item, rarely touched. I bought a second, non-limited copy of the book for reading and transporting.

The problem with collecting an eclectic artist is that you have to search through nooks and crannies of things to find unannounced appearances in things. I’ve played through video games just to find the series of scenes that he’d illustrated. I’ve imported CD singles from across the pond to see music videos that were embedded into them. I’ve suffered though expensive eBay auctions that took years to arrive, and all for the love of an armload of books, a wall of prints and about 15 copies of McKean’s signature. I’m not sure why I sought out 15 copies of it, but there’s some kind of collected energy that I irrationally hope to gather in one place. Probably because artists are crazy like that.

McKean’s recent output has been far more complex and subsequently far more difficult to track down and in lesser quantities. When you’re directing a major motion picture, you don’t really spend as much time painting up comic book covers. Like any great artist, McKean is constantly reinventing graphic design and himself, and I’ll be sticking around to watch it happen.