Charles Burns

Complete Charles Burns Cartoon Library

1 El Borbah (Misc. shorts). [From Fantagraphics: Years before bands such as Southern Culture on the Skids and Los Straightjackets began to pay homage to masked Mexican wrestlers, Burns gave us El Borbah. The mask wearing Private Dick chain smokes, swills beer and gets into fist fights with just about everyone. Bizarre and beautiful. For those who love B-Grade Sci-Fi, Mexican wrestlers and Film Noir, this is a must have.]

2 Big Baby (Misc. shorts). [From Fantagraphics: BIG BABY collects, for the very first time, all of Burns's "Big Baby" stories in one handy collection, in glorious and oversized black and white. It includes "Teen Plague" (from RAW Vol. II #3), which served as the inspiration for Burns's current masterpiece, the ongoing BLACK HOLE. It also features the very first appearance of Big Baby from RAW #5 (never-before collected) and the classics "Curse of the Molemen" and "Blood Club" (here restored to the pristine black-and-white malevolence they were destined for). BIG BABY is, of course, a odd young boy named Tony with a hyperactive imagination and fear of the dark. Rightfully so, as the stories in this book indicate...]

3 Skin Deep: Tales of Doomed Romance (Misc. shorts). [From Fantagraphics: Charles Burns is the Harvey Award-winning cartoonist and illustrator whose work became legendary in Art Spiegelman's RAW magazine. SKIN DEEP is the third (following EL BORBAH and BIG BABY) of a hardcover series of four volumes reprinting his acclaimed oeuvre up to his current magnum opus, the ongoing BLACK HOLE comic book series. SKIN DEEP includes Burns' popular character, Dog Boy (a red-blooded all-American boy with the transplanted heart of a dog), and the classic strip "Dog Days," in which a hash-slinging vixen wags her tail at our fearful hero. The book also collects "Burn Again," which features a strange fella named Bliss Blister, claiming to bring the Word of God, but some fear he brings something evil and profane. In "A Marriage Made in Hell," a young wife's flesh tingled with passion, but the sight of her made her husband's skin crawl. Was the love-knot she tied really a hangman's noose? These tales of doomed romance set a tone for the rest of SKIN DEEP. In addition to the work collected, SKIN DEEP features new covers and endpapers, as well as several pages of new illustrations reprinted from Burns' sketchbooks as well as covers and other illos from foreign editions of Burns' work that have never previously appeared in the U.S.]

One or two more volumes are forthcoming.

Black Hole (12-issue mini). [From Pantheon: Suburban Seattle, the mid-1970s. We learn from the out-set that a strange plague has descended upon the area's teenagers, transmitted by sexual contact. The disease is manifested in any number of ways - from the hideously grotesque to the subtle (and concealable) - but once you've got it, that's it. There's not turning back. As we inhabit the heads of several key characters - some kids who have it, some who don't, some who are about to get it - what unfolds isn't the expected battle to fight the plague, or bring heightened awareness to it , or even to treat it. What we become witness to instead is a fascinating and eerie portrait of the nature of high school alienation itself - the savagery, the cruelty, the relentless anxiety and ennui, the longing for escape. And then the murders start. As hypnotically beautiful as it is horrifying, Black Hole transcends its genre by deftly exploring a specific American cultural moment in flux and the kids who are caught in it- back when it wasn't exactly cool to be a hippie anymore, but Bowie was still just a little too weird. To say nothing of sprouting horns and molting your skin...] Book of the Week 10/19/05: First, this is a beautiful book (typical of Pantheon). Beautifully printed, beautifully bound, and the physical package is a nifty metaphor for the content itself. On the surface, there's a conventional dustjacket. Take it off, and printed on the book itself is a second cover, darker, creepier, more subversive. Black Hole looks conventional, with its finely detailed art in the tradition of Jaime Hernandez or Adrian Tomine. But underneath, it is a subversive tale of indescribable genre (coming-of-age? Horror? Mystery? All of the above, but not really). Set in the 70s, featuring a group of high school students and some older kids, the story (such that it is) involves a sexually-transmitted disease that makes its victims freaks to a lesser or greater extent. The victims become social and in many cases physical outcasts, with their own sub-culture beginning to develop in their deep-woods hide-out, and in the few places in town they can still hang out. Episodic, mysterious, and haunting, Black Hole examines the relationships among these outsiders. Sex, drugs, and ultimately murder form the plot-points of a story that is really more about a mood—I've never read a comic that gets across such a creepy feeling of alienation and despair, with just the faintest seasoning of hope. Hard to find in singles, this hefty hardcover is a bargain, especially at online discount prices.