X'ed Out: Charles Burns

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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! 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 As a reader who doesn't necessarily figure out what it is I want until after I've already got it or not, this was a good ending for me even if I leave it feeling somewhat unsatisfied. (Thinking critically about trades of comics is a weird process.)

Like Alice in Wonderland, Doug starts off following an animal into a hole that leads into a fantasy land. Rivers of green water, ruined houses, talking lizardmen, noseless monsters and strange red and white eggs, populate the eerie landscape as Doug tries to figure out what’s happening through a fugue state brought on by drug abuse and/or head trauma. Nightmarish but oddly innocent… some of his most visually mesmerizing and handsomely presented work to date.”— Santa Cruz Metro 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. I could get more into some of the specifics of Sugar Skull, but the thing is, the X’ed Out trilogy doesn’t unfold in a traditional linear narrative. With each volume, Mr. Burns presents bits and pieces of a mosaic of five different storylines, and it’s up to the reader to figure out how they all add up. 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.Doug meets a girl at a party, an artist, and eventually falls in love with her. She is trying to extricate herself from a bad relationship. And that is the heart of this first volume, as far as I can tell on a couple readings. But I mean, I think that — again, it’s like that kind of fascination for that kind of other world that I delved into as a child, because he’s always going to exotic places, you know — something that looks middle-eastern, or… wherever he goes, there’s something kind of exotic and foreign about it, even then. That sort of thing plays into the story, but — but it may be some visual references, but it really has nothing to do with the Adventures of Tintin, it has nothing to do with the series at all, other than some kind of visual characteristics of his face and that sort of thing. Potaknut ovom odličnom recenzijom, odlučio sam se ponoviti Posljednji pogled. Iako je prošlo skoro tri godine od prvog čitanja, sjećao sam se više-manje svega pa sam se ovaj put mogao prepustiti polaganom, detaljnom ��itanju i proučavanju. Nakon što sam ga po drugi put zaklopio, postalo mi je jasno da je u pitanju strip koji neizbježno ostavlja udarac, bez obzira na protok vremena i ponovljena čitanja.

Xavier Guilbert: Is it the same idea for the romance comics? I wouldn’t say they wouldn’t be so alien to you, as for that matter this is something that clearly belongs to American comics.

No sé que decir del color, yo creo que Burns gana mucho más en blanco y negro. Sin embargo conjunta bien con la línea clara que necesariamente tiene en su lápiz. Burns’s comics are fluid, smooth and as solidly built as a vintage TV set, but they shudder with the chill of the uncanny.”— New York Times Book Review 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: Obviously, there’s a reference to Tintin, so making it in full color was probably linked to that, but — how much time did you take to understand how color would work? I haven't read anything like this since my college years when I frequented a book and music store that carried underground comics, where I read my share of Zap Comics, Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, and Death Gasp. This has the look and feel of those experimental tomes.

And, though the story is as mysterious and unsettling as a David Lynch film, X’ed Out is so well-written, presented, and drawn that not knowing exactly what’s happening doesn’t matter because it’s so enjoyable. 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. Xavier Guilbert: Do you have the impression that over the successive days, you’ve kind of warmed up to it? Because I’ve seen some of the things you’ve done for the 24 minute exercise, and in the first ones there’s pencil and some ink, and then I have the impression that, little by little, you freed yourself from your usual way of doing things. Long awaited first chapter in what promises to be a trippy, wildly experimental and typically disquieting epic.”— npr.org Last Look drops you into a nightmarish Upside-Down version of Tintin where the mysteries, instead of getting solved, only become more grotesque and confusing, in a blasted landscape full of sewage and inhabited by foul-mouthed aliens. And yet it's never weirdness for weirdness's sake: these scenes are intercut with a narrative from ‘real life’, where a messed-up boy called Doug is coming out of an opiate-induced stupor and recovering groggily from a head-wound.Xavier Guilbert: One of the main novelties, I’d say, is color. A couple of your books have been published in color — I’m thinking of two stories of Big Baby ( Curse of the Mole Men and Blood Club). The feeling throughout these books is the sort of regretful fatigue we experience in anxiety dreams. "Reality is for those who cannot sustain the dream," Slavoj Zizek has said, and while Doug grows up biologically, he threatens to repeat his – and his father's – mistakes unto the generations. "I've got a good life," he thinks prior to visiting Sarah for the first time since her pregnancy. In truth, he's a recovering alcoholic subsisting on an adolescent diet of cigarettes, Pop-Tarts, and coffee as he pores over old photos and patronizes his girlfriend, who strongly resembles his pre-Sarah squeeze. Burns is gifted at rendering a peculiar mix of lust and innocence…The brilliance of this volume of X’ed Out is that Burns’s mirroring of Herge’s visual and thematic motifs never seems heavy-handed…a masterful volume”— Book Forum