He likes fine liqueurs. He also likes chocolate. One Christmas my wife and I gave Dave and Clare a hamper of chocolate. Chocolates, and things made of chocolate, and chocolate liqueur and even chocolate glasses to drink the liqueur from. There were chocolate truffles in that hamper and Belgian chocolates, and this was not a small hamper. I’m telling you, there was six months of chocolate in that hamper.

It was empty before New Year’s Day.

He’s in England, and I’m in America, have been for ten years, and I still miss him as much as I miss anyone. Whenever the opportunity to work with Dave comes up, I just say yes.

I was amused, when Coraline came out recently, to find people who only knew Dave for his computer-enhanced multimedia work were astonished at the simple elegance of his pen-and-ink drawings. They didn’t know he could draw, or they’d forgotten.

Dave has created art styles. Some of what he does is recognizable enough as his that art directors will give young artists samples of Dave McKean work and tell them to do that—often a specific art style that Dave created to solve a specific problem, or a place he went as an artist for a little while, decided that it wasn’t where he wanted to be, and moved on.

(For example, I once suggested to him, remembering Arcimboldo and Josh Kirby’s old Alfred Hitchcock paperback cover paintings, that the cover of Sandman: Brief Lives could be a face made up of faces. This was before Dave owned a computer, and he laboriously photographed and painted a head made of smaller faces. He’s been asked to do similar covers many times since by art directors. And so have other artists. I wonder if they know where it came from.)

People ask me who my favorite artist is, to work with. I’ve worked with world-class artists, after all, heaps of them. World-class people. And when they ask me about my favorite, I say Dave McKean. And then people ask why. I say, because he surprises me.

He always does. He did it from the first thing we did together, and a couple of weeks ago I looked at the illustrations he’s done for our new graphic novel for all ages, The Wolves in the Walls. He’s combined paintings of people, amazing, funny-scary line drawings of wolves, and photographs of objects (jam, tubas and so on) to create something that is once again not what I expected, nothing like what I had in my head, but better than anything I could have dreamed of, more beautiful and more powerful.

I don’t think there’s anything Dave McKean cannot do as an artist. (There are certainly things he doesn’t want to do, but that’s not the same thing at all.)

After sixteen years, some artists are content to rest on their laurels (and Dave has shelves full of laurels, including a World Fantasy Award for best artist). It’s a rare artist who is as restless and as enthusiastic as he was when he was still almost a teenager, still questing for the right way to make art.