X'ed Out: Charles Burns

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It's a real intriguing start, building up unsettling, eye-catching motifs from the first page and slipping fluidly from conscious-present to remembered-past into subconscious-dreamworld collisions of the two. In 1985, around the same time that Burns’ El Borbah (i) stories were appearing in the pages of Heavy Metal, Terry Gilliam released his fourth film Brazil, after much contention with the studio, Universal. So Sarah has Doug’s kid, Danny, but Doug’s such a baby himself that he can’t deal with any level of responsibility, let alone being a father, so he runs away and totally shuts himself away from Sarah. He has designed album covers for Iggy Pop and had a series of stories entitled Dogboy adapted for MTV. i have a good sense of what is going on, despite all the ambiguities, but i want to see what all he does with it—where he will take his kooky charles burns self.

It was where he hung out with his friends and the girl with whom he was most in love, but didn’t not end up marrying.

If “X’ed Out” feels short, on multiple levels of storytelling and art, Burns has still outdone himself in sheer ambition, and to this point, has pulled it off.

Small clues like the disembodied voice of Sarah’s psychotic ex threatening to murder them both and the buzzer through which he’s speaking gushing blood hints that perhaps Sarah was killed by him.

As for this story, it seems to be bracketed, meaning that at the beginning and the end we have this strange dream world that Doug is exploring, and then we move from the dream world to the world where he is stuck in bed with only four pills left, and then from there to that world where he had come into contact with the photographer (though he seems to jump back and forth a bit). On his first day in the department of Information Retrieval, Sam naps in his office and dreams about trying to save Jill. Its effect on the comics landscape was profound and launched the careers of many of the artists it published, including Charles. Sam at least believes he was able to save Jill and that they escaped the city to live happily in the countryside.

The fragments of the past collide with the reality of the present, nightmarish dreams evolve into an even more dreadful reality, and when you finally find out where all of this has been going, and what it means. And then… we’re out of that universe and into the “real world”, and everything seems to reference everything else.

Scenes of his sickly father, his disturbed art photography love interest Sarah, and foetus after foetus - human, pig, alien - pass by.

The protagonist, confined to bed, goes through a strange set of drug induced dreams and flashbacks of his recent life. But worse - far worse - is the disproportionate balance between the apocalyptic, messed-up, heightened tragedy of Doug and Sarah’s story, that has been built up now over two volumes, and the bafflingly banal and truly uninspired reveal of the secret at the heart of this series. From 1993 to 2004, he serialized the 12 chapters of his Harvey Award-winning graphic novel Black Hole (12 issues from Kitchen Sink Press and Fantagraphics Books). Burns's work might be described as alternative, experimental, hallucinatory, surreal, horror, but while this does not reflect on adolescence, there still seems there may be some ties to his Seattle life. In 1999 he moved to South Korea where he works as an English teacher at Dongguk University in the historic city of Gyeongju.

Burns adds more time levels, and adds more body horror in the Tintin-verse… but… we get more melodrama, and things start seeming less like a kick ass comic than the storyboards to a post-Lynch indie movie. This book, which is apparently the first in a series, is brief and bold and, unlike Black Hole, brightly colored.