Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds: An Art Book, by comic-book artist Reinhard Kleist

The songs are Deanna (from the Cave and the Bad Seeds album, Tender Prey), The Good Son (the title song of the follow-up album), and Stagger Lee (from Murder Ballads). They, and their vivid treatment in these pages, remind you of music writer Mark Mordue’s remark about Cave’s narratively detailed works, that each is practically a Netflix series on its own.

“In the process of creating the graphic novel I did a lot of sketches ad illustrations and also some illustrated songs,” Kleist says from Berlin, where he has lived since 1996. “I put them on a website that I was feeding throughout that long process, but in the end my publishing house said, ‘Okay, let’s do an art book with all that stuff, because there are so many nice illustrations there'.

“It’s like [as if it’s] accompanying the graphic novel but it’s also standing for itself, because it contains a lot of illustrations of songs: I took Nick Cave and put him as the main character in them.”

Kleist is not alone in believing that Cave is an outstanding writer of songs. “What fascinates me the most about him as a writer of lyrics is that he’s an amazing storyteller, although a lot of his stories are not really clear: they leave a lot to the imagination of the listener. Many people have different versions about what is actually happening in the song, and that’s what makes it so interesting. But he always creates very vivid images in his songs, and very vivid pictures come to my mind when I listen to his lyrics.”

Kleist first came across Cave in the 1990s. His music tastes, however, lay in other directions at the time, and Cave always sounded “very dangerous to me.” The first Cave/Bad Seeds album that “really brought me towards him” was Murder Ballads, the magnificently dark 1996 collection of songs that includes Stagger Lee, and Where the Wild Roses Grow (on which Cave duets with Kylie Minogue, his fellow Australian).

Kleist is a successful comic-book artist. His 2006 biography of Johnny Cash – Johnny Cash: I See a Darkness – was translated into 15 languages. His subsequent books included The Boxer, about the Jewish boxer and Holocaust survivor, Harry Haft. There was a book about Fidel Castro, and Berlinoir, a series about vampires in Berlin. He has also staged workshops in there was Mexico, Japan and Brazil, with the Goethe Institute.

When he began giving thought to another comic-book biography of a musician, he alighted on Cave, “because he’s such a good storyteller. So I listened to all the [Cave] stuff I’d missed when I was more into electronic music. And I thought, damn, these are really good records – I’d missed them when they first came out.”

He approached Cave’s assistant only to learn that the singer received many such suggestions. Cave, however, surprised him by emailing to say it was an interesting idea. He said he had read the Cash book, and he suggested that Kleist cast the book as legend and mythologise the singer’s life.

“I think he knew I was capable of doing such a thing,” Kleist says when asked why Cave responded so positively to his proposal for a biography. “He gave me some suggestions about the direction he was thinking of, and that helped me a lot in the beginning. He trusted me a lot and gave me all the freedom I needed. He was always very supportive and when I asked him something we had a lot of conversations and he would answer emails very quickly. I got the feeling that he was very much into this work.

“I knew, when I wanted to create a book about Nick Cave, that I had to go in a different way from the way I did Cash,” he added. “My first attempts to write the biography of Cave, creating a framework for the book, were not really good or interesting.”

He laughs at the memory. “When I sent it to Nick he was not very excited about it: he just wrote back, yeah, it’s all right. So I knew that I had to go in a completely different way and that’s why I invented this ambitious framework for the story, and also this idea of letting the characters come to life and confront them with their maker.”

Cave and his wife Susie suffered an appalling tragedy in July 2015 when their 15-year-old son, Arthur, fell from a cliff in Brighton. The following April, Kleist went to see Cave at a London recording studio to present him with material for the book. Cave and the Bad Seeds were recording a studio album, Skeleton Tree. It was obviously a very difficult time for Cave, and Kleist was understandably apprehensive.

“I remember that I was walking up and down the road in front of the studio, trying to calm down, because I was not really sure what he would be saying to me, if he would still be interested in the project, if he would still like it.

“But after that meeting I was very happy to see him in a good way. We laughed a lot and he was making funny remarks about some drawings. It was a very nice situation and that gave me a lot of confidence for the last work.

“It was very difficult creating the book because I had so many ideas to put into it.” In the end, Kleist was aware that Cave was “very happy with the book, and that made me feel really good.”

It so happens that Cave himself has spoken of his lifelong admiration for Johnny Cash. As a nine- or ten-year-old in Wangaratta, his hometown in Victoria, he would watch The Johnny Cash Show on the family television set. “I watched him,” he wrote in 2003, “and from that point I saw that music could be an evil thing, a beautiful, evil thing.”

Does Kleist see any similarities between Cash, the original Man in Black, and Cave? “There are a lot of similarities. Both are fantastic storytellers, both of them are using their music to illustrate the lyrics of their songs. I know that Cave was very much influenced by Johnny Cash. Even in his early days he was introduced to Cash’s song Folsom Prison Blues when he was kid and he was really fascinated by the dark image of the song.”

Live, Nick Cave is a formidable presence, as those fans who attended his most recent UK concerts can attest. Kleist saw three of Cave/Bad Seeds shows last year, “and all of them were absolutely fantastic. As a live performer he’s at the peak of his [craft]. It was very intense. I saw people standing next to me crying at one song, and in the next moment Cave was screaming and yelling at the audience - he was a completely different character. He’s really celebrating something, and that’s what I found amazing about the show … I also had the feeling that he’s demanding something from the audience, and the people are willing to give it to him.

“There was a very touching moment when he sings a song, I Need You, from Skeleton Tree. I think it’s actually about his wife, but the way he performs it, it’s about the audience. Everybody was feeling that, it was very touching.”

Finally, is there something about the way Cave looks and dresses, and the worlds he conjures up in his songs, that makes him a gift for comic book artists such as Kleist?

“Absolutely,” comes the reply. “He’s the perfect comic-book character. I wonder why there are not so many attempts to use him as one. I think there’s one, by an English artist, and it’s really funny. In the drawings you can see that it is so easy to transform Nick Cave into a comic book character.

“Nick himself is making a lot of drawings about himself,” Kleist adds. “But he’s quite nasty with his outer appearance.”

Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds: An Art Book, by Reinhard Kleist, is published in hardback at £24.99 by Self Made Hero. http://www.reinhard-kleist.de