X'ed Out: Charles Burns

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And then… we’re out of that universe and into the “real world”, and everything seems to reference everything else. Raw Books also published two books of Burns as RAW One-Shots: Big Baby and Hard-Boiled Defective Stories. A green lizard man (looking strangely like Richard Widmark in Panic in the City) grabs him by his lapels, threatens him and throws him out into what looks like a brighctly lit Turkish street.

Charles Burns explains everything in this final volume of his X’ed Out Trilogy, which is something you’ll either appreciate, because you hate any ambiguity at the end of a story, or dislike because that’s not consistent with the way this has been written thus far.It’s odd how we haven’t seen Doug’s mother yet and that Burns seems to be moulding Doug into his father’s image ever so slowly. Very little is ever revealed about her apart from her job which is a truck driver and that she lives above the Buttles.

The swiftly moving story sweeps you up and you want to know more, you want to find out what’s happening and how it’ll end, and that’s the mark of a great story.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. Currently, New Zealand’s Karl Wills uses the look in his punk “Jessica of the Schoolyard” series, and filmmaker Steven Spielberg’s Tintin adaptation is supposed to appear as a 2011 Christmas release. Sounds simple enough, but Charles also folds complex paternal relationships, violent sexual histories and addiction into the mix, complicating things further by having the characters leap forward and backward in time and from the real world to the imaginary in a matter of panels. A weird buzzing noise on the other side of the wall has woken him up, and there, across the room, next to a huge hole torn out of the bricks, sits his beloved cat, Inky, who died years ago.

It’s possible that this is how Doug is dealing with heartbreak from losing Sarah, and maybe the miscarriage of their baby is responsible, especially as a Sarah lookalike enters the fantasy land at the end and is introduced as a “breeder”, a new Queen for the Hive. 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. The story itself (and this is only part one, which is really annoying because the story does not come to some conclusion but is left on a cliff hanger, which seems to have annoyed some readers, though by glancing through the other commentaries there seems to be the strong suggestion that this is the nature of the work of Charles Burns) certainly has a beginning, but where the actually story begins not not necessarily all that clear in this album. That's the point of the disjointed narrative, to disorient you, throw your narrative sensibilities off-kilter. His meticulous working process and ultra-polished imagery have served as inspiration for a swathe of kids keen to try their hand at making pictures for a living — myself included.

And, furthermore, the way that this ickiness seems to bleed over into the "real world" parts of his comics seems to be strangely appropriate for the teen characters that inhabit those sides of his stories. But X'Ed Out moves even more in the direction of the bizarre, though we are still grounded in real human events. In 2014, Pantheon Books published Sugar Skull, the third volume in Charles Burns’ X’ed Out trilogy that began with X’ed Out, published in 2010 and The Hive, published in 2012. But pick up any one of his numerous graphic novels or serialised strips and the workings of his brain spill out to be pored over and dissected, serving up all the ammunition needed for an hour-long interview. This book is nice to look at; the art is beautiful, but it failed to grab my interest - this kind of "weird" strikes me as pretentious and dull.

Doug’s memories primarily tell about the beginning and the end of his relationship with another student named Sarah. Hold this book in your hands, then, and you instantly feel like a child again (I mean this in a good way). 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. Based on the content of these books it’s easy to picture the author as some kind of depraved madman, churning out works of high-school horror from his North American lair. This is the first part of a trilogy, and I expect the later volumes to hopefully offer an explanation of what is going on.Not sure if I'm going along for the ride, but I might check to see if the county library has copies of the next two volumes or the complete collection. It is only after meeting Jill, the woman who appears to him in his dreams in the real world that he takes steps to advance his position by accepting his promotion to the department of Information Retrieval as a way to learn more about her and also ending his carefully cultured anonymity.