The cartoonist Charles Burns’s talent for crafting images and stories that are both stylish and repulsive will soon be on full display, with the release of two new books, “Kommix” (Fantagraphics), in July, and, in September, the long-awaited “Final Cut” (Pantheon), his first full-length graphic novel since the beloved “Black Hole” (Pantheon).
Burns began creating absurdist “fakes” long before artificial intelligence developed the capacity, and his images continue to capture the oddities of being human. In “Kommix,” he compiles dreamlike scenes, stylized to look like the covers of love comics from the nineteen-fifties and sixties, cheap pulp and porno zines, or exoticized foreign-looking publications. A punk Tintin, together with his black cat, discovers a large and fleshy appendage in the woods; a couple’s intimate moment is disrupted by a perky intruder; and romantic teen-age scenes of passion and jealousy play out with a cast of all-male youngsters.
Burns’s latest graphic novel, “Final Cut,” employs many of the same tropes—estrangement, fear of body processes, the sudden apparition of extraterrestrials—to convey a story of deep alienation and isolation. The book follows Brian, a young artist and would-be filmmaker, and his attachment to Laurie, whom he recruits to play the film’s leading lady. Brian’s desire to make a sci-fi horror film takes him to a remote cabin in the mountains, where he is joined by his childhood friend and longtime collaborator Jimmy, in addition to Laurie and some other friends. When Laurie’s desires deviate from Brian’s imagined plot and meticulously drawn storyboards, he must face the limitations of his own fantasies. Will he find a way to overcome the emptiness he finds in messy human relationships, or will he retreat into the safer comforts of horror and fantasy?
In the excerpt below, Brian’s friends come over to watch a clip of his work, and unexpectedly meet his mother.
—Françoise Mouly and Genevieve Bormes
This is drawn from “Final Cut.”