People from DC Comics came to England on a talent scouting expedition. Dave and I went up to their hotel room, and they scouted us. “They don’t really want us to do stuff for them,” said Dave, as we walked out of the hotel room. “They were probably just being polite.”

But we did an outline for Black Orchid and gave them that and a number of paintings anyway, and they took them back to New York with them, politely.

That was fifteen years ago. Somewhere in there Dave and I did Black Orchid and Signal to Noise, and Mr. Punch and The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish. And Dave’s done book covers and interior work for Jonathan Carroll and Iain Sinclair and John Cale and CD covers for a hundred bands.

This is how we talk on the phone: we talk, and we talk and we talk until we’re all talked out, and we’re ready to get off the phone. Then the one who called remembers why he called in the first place and we talk about that.

Dave McKean is still bearded. He plays badminton on Monday nights. He has two children, Yolanda and Liam, and he lives with them and with Clare (who teaches violin and runs Dave’s life and never became a chiropodist) in a beautiful converted oast house in the Kent countryside.

When I’m in England I go and stay with them, and I sleep in a perfectly round room.

Dave is friendly and polite. He knows what he likes and what he doesn’t like, and will tell you. He has a very gentle sense of humor. He likes Mexican food. He will not eat sushi, but has on several occasions humored me by sitting and drinking tea and nibbling chicken in Japanese restaurants.

You get to his studio by walking across an improvised log bridge over a pond filled with koi carp. I read an article once in the Fortean Times or possibly the Weekly World News about koi exploding, and I have warned him several times of the dangers, but he will not listen. Actually, he scoffs.

When I wrote Sandman Dave was my best and sharpest critic. He painted, built, or constructed every Sandman cover, and his was the face Sandman presented to the world.

I never minded Dave being an astonishing artist and visual designer. That never bothered me. That he’s a world-class keyboard player and composer bothers me only a little. That he drives amazing cars very fast down tiny Kentish back roads only bothers me if I’m a passenger after a full meal, and much of the time I keep my eyes shut anyway. That he’s now becoming a world-class film and video director, that he can write comics as well as I can, if not better, that he subsidizes his art (still uncompromised after all these years) with highly paid advertising work which still manages, despite being advertising work, to be witty and heartfelt and beautiful . . . well, frankly, these things bother me. It seems somehow wrong for so much talent to be concentrated in one place, and I am fairly sure the only reason that no one has yet risen up and done something about it is because he’s modest, sensible and nice. If it was me, I’d be dead by now.