X'ed Out: Charles Burns

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richard mcguire has my favorite segment in that movie, but charles burns is a close second. and richard mcguire never pulled no "collect all four...or more" bullshit on me, so extra points for him. This ending moves along at a nice pace as things are explained, but by the time it goes too far, a sizable chunk of the established ambiguity is lost and, with it, perhaps the heart of the book. The plot is something you’ve come to expect from Burns—a premise loaded with darkness and mystery with potential for a great deal of humor…With a creator like Burns, you know whatever you get will be good.”—Broken Frontier.com Again and again the same themes and motifs recur – foetuses, eggs, violence, fatherhood, aliens, regret, sexual perversion, jealousy – above all, perhaps, a particular kind of male guilt. And the artwork plays with these elements in remarkable ways. Through each work in this trilogy— X’ed Out, The Hive, and Sugar Skull— Burns keeps us visually unnerved with surreal dreams meeting warped realities. The epic benefits from being collected here as a single set of inspired weirdness.” —The Washington Post

For his new book "X'ed Out," available this week from Pantheon, Burns is serializing his new story in three volumes - and he's working in color. CBR News spoke with the acclaimed creator about his latest project.Xavier Guilbert: Would you say it’s because he’s a child, and therefore his personality still some kind of work in progress? Or would it be overanalyzing it? First of all, nobody’s dead. All of the dead foetus imagery was a red herring, or actually it’s just to do with their “art”. Doug does get Sarah pregnant but she doesn’t have an abortion or a miscarriage, and even her psycho ex, who we discover is named Larry, doesn’t follow through on any of his threats of murder.

I enjoyed working with them in the past. They have a great collection of authors that are doing comics. It was just a matter of enjoying working with them and thinking that I was going to give this book its best chance to get out in bookstores. A haunting first chapter in what promises to be a spellbinder…Burns’ control of the story is masterful…it will leave you begging for the rest of the story.”— Publishers Weekly This really is a very rewarding comic to revisit now that it’s complete. With the way so much of the story repeats on itself throughout The Hive, it feels like it’s building up momentum and the truth is about to come out. It’s an entrancing mystery told expertly by Burns and drawn in an utterly beautiful way - a masterclass in experimental fiction, challenging comics, and imaginative storytelling. Will Doug find the missing issues he needs to make sense of it all - and what part does the Sugar Skull play? Enough questions - onto the final book and (hopefully) the answers! I really enjoy Charles Burns’ illustration style, it always reminds me of Shin-hanaga(新版画) woodcuts and photos of the Pacific Northwest in the late 70s-early eighties. The color and type in this series are great, and really do a great job of informing the tone and assisting the narrative of the story. If you like this type of comic book, you’ll like this comic book. If you have to hunt down a good bookstore to find a comic book you like, this is a comic for you. If you listen to my recommendations, then I recommend this. And, with the beginning of the story where a Tintin-lookalike character (the cover’s homage to The Shooting Star is an indicator of one of this book’s key references) with a bandage on his head, waking up in bed, it’s clear Burns is aiming to place the reader on the same uncertain footing as Doug with his deliberately choppy narrative style. Is this a dream? A hallucination? What's real and what isn't?After reading all three, I see what he is doing and there IS a pay off, it is worth hanging in there! Some of what he is about can be deduced or indicated from recurring images: A man’s face; dead foetuses; eggs; a pink blanket; television screens, and so on. But you need to spend a little time to begin to figure it out. It's experimental. It's like poetry in that things are not spelled out for you. Images, and dream/nightmare images, drive the tale.