Charles Burns: Black Hole, Xed Out, Big Baby and other phantasmagorias

(btw Douglas, I enjoyed noticing your blurb on the last volume of Finder that I read!)

dustcover design: really awkward and hideous by comparison

personally, I'm not a huge fan of all his stuff, story wise, but this book is the culmination or something.

i was suprised he wasnt...

Part of my mind kept getting annoyed that the story was being told in a vacuum, i.e. I was wondering things like "Is this a widespread phenomenon? Is the media aware of it? If the kids weren't so ashamed could they get treatment?" But of course it's not about the bigger picture, it's about the kids and the sex and especially the guilt/stigma.

The ending seemed a little abrupt for a story ten years in the making, but I think I'm coming to expect that from GNs.

Beautiful. Just beautiful.

am too sleepy to post opinion now, beyond that i like it

!!! Where?

they didn't have any other copies by the way

<a href="http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117981202.html?categoryid=13&cs=1&nid=2563";>David Fincher</a>! (Neil Gaiman & Roger Avary?)

OMG BBCODE EAT ONE

Man, I love this book. If Fincher takes a similar direction with the movie as he did with Zodiac, could be a very nice fit. OTOH, they will probably severely rework the structure of the book's plot to make it more cinematic, and it'll lose all the subtlety and depth of the linework, but... still, hopes are good.

OMG BBCODE EAT ONE

You've gotten rusty in your absence.

No, I've always been rusty.

I have high hopes and am happy to hear about this if only because it means Charles Burns is gonna get rich.

Dude, those OK Cola cans probably made him enough to buy at least a really nice hubcap.

i adore this book.

(Curious if anyone reading this thread hasn't read the book yet...)

I have it and keep meaning to get around to it. (Ditto Bone.)

it's dialogue-light and you can read it in an afternoon.
maddening reading it as it came it out--slowly over the course of a decade.

In an afternoon? No way! But I don't know, personally I found it just so crawly, I had to take decent breaks between reads. Took me a couple of months to finish it.

one of my co-workers is OBSESSED by Black Hole. I liked it good. Probably my favourite b/w comic about ugly teenagers.

So magnificent. Just picked it up today after reading it from the library a year ago or so, loving reading it slowly. How is it so cheap? It's beautifully bound, even in paperback. Kinda annoyed at DC etc for what they charge for smaller/more cheaply made books.

It's totally X-Men obv, that guy with the glasses is Magneto

this was pretty good; I'm glad I didn't get sucked into it as it trickled out over the years and waited until it was collected. it kind of 'stops' more than 'ends', doesn't it? I wonder what fincher will change when he makes the film

dunno, Zodiac was pretty open-ended too

wonder what fincher will change when he makes the film

Probably less than Gaiman and Avary change when they write the film.

I'm sure they will change the pacing severely, especially wrt/the murders that happen towards the end. As much as I love Black Hole, if they're going to adapt it to a film (knowing Fincher it will be ~150 min) they probably need to change up the pacing and chronology to tighten it up. It did come out over a decade -- and comes out pretty well structured nonetheless, but there's some slack in that regard.

http://biblioklept.files.wordpress.com/2010/09/xedout.jpg?w=500&h=500
Charles Burn + Tintin = I will be buying this

i did. It's .... good? art is perfect, format is great but it's SLLLOOOOOOWWWW getting going and I want five hundred pages not sixty five once every year for four years.

Yeah, i flipped through it in a bookshop during the week. Does seem a little on the slim side but it'll just look so cool on my shelf. Lame i know.

kinda hoping he does one for every tintin book.

http://www.avclub.com/articles/charles-burns,47913/

Picked up an amazing thing today: "Johnny 23"--Burns' "bootleg"/"remix" of "X'ed Out"--a monochrome "pirated" edition, with all the art chopped up and rearranged (and actually a bunch of art that's not in "X'ed Out" too), all the text translated into that "alien" typeface. I kind of want to translate it back into English. Also, the front cover is Burns' riff on "The Black Island."

johnny 23 is incredible... i ordered it straight from france as soon as i heard about it, but now it seems like some comics shops in the US are going to start carrying it, which means that i probably wasted some money on international shipping and converting dollars to euros. the fact that burns developed a whole alphabet and then had it digitized just for the hell of it makes me really happy.

the thing about x'ed out is that it's one of those tip-of-the-iceberg comics, in that it's pretty slim and a quick read, but burns has made it clear that there is so much more to this world. stuff like johnny 23, the comics he's been doing in the believer, a bunch of standalone prints that riff on other tintin covers, and even drawings that have been published in books and anthologies over the past 2 or 3 years are all part of it.

I have to say both Black Hole and X-ed Out left my cold (although I guess that's partially the point). Has he done anything without the gribbly stuff?

I had a bit of an antipathy to Charles Burns and thus no interest in Black Hole until I read about it in Douglas Wolk's book. Now I am interested but still have not read it.

I've always had the nagging suspicion that Black Hole is a work where the subject has been so worked out that there's virtually no subtext. Burns' work is always lovely to look at though, so one day, one day...

Big fan of Burns' art. Actively dislike his scripting and stories.

TS: Black Hole vs Asterios Polyp
I'd go with Asterios for formal rigor/layout/color and Black Hole for story/art

weirdly, it was always the art that put me off Charles Burns.

http://29.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lccf80eMGT1qzs4cyo1_500.jpg

So if that says 'Johnny 23', it ought to be possible to use deduction to work out the rest of the characters, and then translate the alien dialogue from X'ed Out. Presumably if we wait a bit, some obsessive out there on the net will do this.

If I can get my hands on Johnny 23, I think I would like to be that obsessive. Anyone know where to get a copy in the US?

floating world comics in portland has them. you can also get it from directly from le dernier cri pretty easily (no outrageous international shipping fees) - my copy from them was about $30 with shipping.

i just came back from a brooklyn comics fair and i bought a signed copy of johnny 23 directly from burns for twenty bucks... and he threw in a piece of original pencil art from xed out for free! there's a brooklyn shop nearby (desert island i think?) that had copies for 25 bucks.
i talked to him a bit and he said that as far as he knew, no one had translated it yet. That he was waiting for it to happen. That it's a one-to-one letter translation so it's not impossible to do. That it's not the script from xed out but just random thoughts and pieces from burroughs' cut-ups BUT that because he had used a program that rendered the info on the screen as he was typing (rather than translating after the fact) he knew he would occasionally mistype so that it's likely that several errors in "spelling" made it into the book... so added degree of difficulty for accidents.
lots of good stories from this alt con by the way.

oh and when i asked him when i should expect the next installment he said "when i finish it"

he was real friendly and nice. super low key.
i saw lynda barry wander by and i yelled "i love you" at her and she said "Oh! I love you too!" so that was super awesome.

oh man, i wanted to go to the the brooklyn fest so bad, but i suffer from living on the opposite coast. i was going to ask someone to pick me up a signed copy of j23 and mail it to me, but i didn't.

it was a great time! i blew about 170 bucks in fast motion. such a neat collection of people and booths. Robin and i had a watercolor picture done by http://sally-bloodbath.livejournal.com/ for a buck and it looks awesome.
These guys: http://www.rosebudarchives.com/wp/books/ blew my mind; had never heard of them and was astounded by the Harrison Cady book they had. Ones to watch.

Thanks for the info; I'm pretty much housebound for the next month so getting up to the city isn't really an option, but I've ordered a copy direct from the publisher. Unless someone beats me to it, I'll start work as soon as it comes in and try to get as much as possible figured out and posted online before the end of the month (both Johnny 23 and the "coded" dialog in X'd Out).

It came! I haven't had a chance to give it a proper read (or "read," really, at this stage) yet, but it's a gorgeous book- it's all printed in this queasy off-purple mimeograph-looking ink, and my copy came with a little print/bookplate of Nitnit and Inky in nauseatingly hypersaturated red/green/purple. I hope to get started on it tonight.

thank god you're doing it and i don't have to.

I don't know if I should be admitting this level of obsession, but I did "translate" the alphabet (though not the whole book yet.) The part i have gone through so far is only marginally sensical...sort of like dream talk, it seems. For anyone who wants some hints, here is the translation of the first part:
(Code cracking spoiler alert!)
"Nothing good will come of this" "There will be tears" "Nothing can become of nothing" "all hearts will grow cold and weary"
Enjoy! (I got my copy at the Brooklyn Fest, had a brief chat with Charles Burns and got it signed, and then a couple of days ago my friend's dog chewed the corner of the book off! Sad, though he didn't chew through any content, which I appreciate.)

Nice work, Rafkelman! Are you planning on doing the rest?

can a mod change title to "Charles Burns (Black Hole, X'd Out, etc)"?

i did. It's .... good? art is perfect, format is great but it's SLLLOOOOOOWWWW getting going and I want five hundred pages not sixty five once every year for four years.

OTM

I did dig this tho.
Except I didn't realize it was part of a series until the v v end and was like, "How is this going to resolve itself?????"

Now I want to get Johnny 23 thanks to this thread. You guys.

http://i1.cdnds.net/12/18/300x398/comics_the_hive.jpg

oh wow that looks like burns + hellstrom's hive!

anybody else love DEFECTIVE COMICS?

EL BORBAH!

http://www.book.hipopotamstudio.pl/?p=1389

anyone else read The Hive yet? i liked it a lot. it was more coherent to me than X'ed Out, although i think that's just because the reappearances of certain visual elements make more sense (dream logic sense) the fifth, sixth, seventh times you notice them.

i was ultimately let down by black hole ... it was a great set-up and very "real" and pitch-perfect for the setting and time, but i felt like it kind of petered out at the end rather than coming to a real climax, i think maybe he wanted to set up a kind of circular structure (seems like one of his things) and that's why it seemed that way to me

we should have a clowes vs burns t/s

i've read black hole three times and i still can't keep any of the plot in my head, just images

i felt similarly about the last few chapters of black hole. the jonny 23 stuff (x'ed out and the hive) seems like it's going to avoid that fate, though. in the first two entries in the series he's already shown us the beginning and the end of the protagonist's story, and has clearly hinted that something deeply fucked up happened in the middle, to be revealed in future entries. looking forward to finding out what happened!

i think one weakness of black hole is that the female characters kind of blend together (not a problem w/ the dudes) both because they are drawn similar and because their personalities aren't as strongly sketched out as the dudes

i think burns would win a clowes vs burns t/s handily, what do you guys think?

no way!

hmmm ... maybe i should start that thread though i haven't read any clowes in a long time

clowes gets some points for coining SUNROOF!

and obv "velvet glove cast in iron" is up there w/ the best of burns

no way!

― Number None, Monday, 15 October 2012 07:42 (2 hours ago)

never liked 'velvet glove' all that much - just seemed like 2nd-hand david lynchisms - but the rest of eightball (and esp ghost world) is soo much better than burns (who is an immaculate draughtsman but a fairly limited - or repetitive - writer, imho)

feel like there's a level of misanthropy in clowes that turns me off, burns seems like the gentler soul

fair enough, tho' i think that that one of the most...moving?...things abt clowes is the way he's trying to reconcile his misanthropy w/ real human feeling/compassion (you cld even say that's one of the themes of ghost world) - i guess i just identify more w/ that position!

plus Clowes is a billion times funnier

I've always been critical of Clowes because of his misanthropy (though in his better works, like Ghost World, it felt like he acknowledged how limiting such a worldview can be), so I was pleasantly suprised by the recent Mister Wonderful, where he finally seems to have gotten over it.

clowes IS much funnier, true

funniest thing burns ever did was use the Marvel Try Out Book for some of his layouts

have never quite understood why so many ppl seem to automatically object to any hint of 'misanthropy' in art -- obv there are tons of idiots who do it poorly but some of the greatest artists of all time (swift, voltaire, kubrick, bunuel, blah blah insert your favorites here) were pretty contemptuous of their fellow men in a way that makes clowes look like frank capra. that said i do agree that clowes has come a long way in terms of generosity and subtlety since his 'here is a list of things i hate' stories.

<3 capra

;-)

haha don't get me wrong i am the biggest frank capra stan ever, it was just first name that popped to mind.

So one thing about The Hive that's bothering me: I can't really place where the scenes with the iteration of Doug on the cover take place. He's gained a lot of weight (from the meds?) and his hair is longer, and the scenes he's in make it seem like he's no longer with Sarah, but I was under the impression that immediately post head-injury was the "present" of the story. Not that flash-forwards are off-limits, but it's a bit disorienting (more so than the rest of the book, I mean).

man, this was so great. just sorta skimming past the burns vs clowes arguments upthread, right now i'd vote for burns over most anybody (it's cool, i haven't read building stories yet), just because of how singular he is; i don't know that clowes does anything that's so distinctive in terms of mood - that's the obvious thing to wheel out in praise of burns, & maybe my lack of attention to horror & suspense as genres means that it's just distinctive to me, but as period pieces & as a bildungsroman & in catching the weird, self-aware sadness of youth, love that keeps you awake, it's really uniquely rendered i think. i enjoyed it so much, anyway. there's a kind of alex katz quality to the images, too; so clean & fresh. it's so moving to see the interactions between the book's characters and the comics they read, because he observes both so well, & with different emphases. i sorta want the first row of this on my wall.

http://i2.cdnds.net/13/46/618x861/comics-charles-burns-sugar-skull-teaser.jpg

hahaha yesssss

Clowes was funny for a couple years in the 90s. By contrast, Burns has several decades of really unique, quality work behind him.

"clowes was funny for a couple years in the 90s" was the name of a subforum on the old comics journal message board, i think.

this is out!

this one is the end of the trilogy right?

yep.

psa: it rules

this guy is a treasure

just read X'ed Out and The Hive from the library, they don't have Sugar Skull in yet

i highly recommend getting all three and reading it start-to-finish in one sitting.

Just finished doing the above and, not to get too much into spoilers, I'm not sure how to feel about the conclusion. It seems to wrap things up neatly in a way I really didn't expect based on Black Hole and that doesn't ring entirely true with the setup of the first two volumes. I can appreciate it as a commentary on immature, self-obsessed indie comic heroes, but I don't know if that's enough of a payoff. Maybe there's more ambiguity intended but it def doesn't seem that way from the last few pages.