Dave McKean

Dave McKean (born 1963) is an English illustrator, photographer, and filmmaker whose mixed-media covers for all seventy-five issues of Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman redefined what comics could look like. His work spans the graphic novel Cages, Batman: Arkham Asylum with Grant Morrison, and the film MirrorMask — a career built on collage, texture, and restless formal experiment. So when generative AI arrived, McKean did the most McKean thing possible: he dove all the way in.

Prompt: the experiment

In 2022 McKean spent weeks in deep dialogue with Midjourney and published the results as Prompt: Conversations with Artificial Intelligence — part art book, part crisis diary, interrogating what the technology meant for a lifetime of craft. Discussing the project at London’s Comica festival in March 2023, he was unsparing about the experience: the tool, he suggested, was misnamed, because “it should be called ‘EndResult’ because there is no journey.” Of the fashionable term AI Art he said: “There is nothing there. There is no life there, there is no spark there.”

The nuance is that McKean is no dismissive outsider — he called the technology “a sort of evolutionary step into another place” and acknowledged continuing to use generators as a powerful tool for generating raw material. But his conclusion from the inside was bleaker than most critics’: when a write-up framed him as making a case for AI, he objected publicly that the technology stood to make traditional art and creativity extinct. Having run the experiment, he swore off treating its output as finished work.

His verdict carries unusual authority in comics and illustration circles precisely because it rests on practice rather than principle — a conclusion reached the same way James Gurney and other veteran illustrators reached theirs: by looking hard at what the machine actually gives back.