X'ed Out: Charles Burns

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What all three states have in common is Doug, a young man who is an art student and also an aspiring performer. Like Doug, Sarah is an art student, though her work is much more intense and personal than his, featuring fetal pigs and bondage self-portraits. I mean, if you wanted to show an illiterate or stupid person in a movie you’d show them reading a comic.

In 1991, choreographer Mark Morris commissioned him to create illustrations that were then used as a basis for his version of Tchaikovsky's The Nutcracker, The Hard Nut. It’s so ordinary and unbelievably disappointing, not least because there’s no mystery, while the ending was terrible - it was an art school cliche! For Charles Burns fans, this is a massive month: Sugar Skull, the third instalment of the trilogy he began in 2010, is finally here – and with it the hope that we’ll at last be able to make sense of the first two books ( X’ed Out and The Hive, which followed in 2012). When he wakes up, his bedroom wall has a gaping hole in it, beside which sits his cat, Inky (who died years ago). 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.

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. He’s smoking, watching a flood – a dog, forepaws up on a log, drifting along a swollen river – reminiscing.

A true graphic milestone: the epic trilogy that began with X’ed Out, continued in The Hive, and concluded in Sugar Skull, now in a single volume. His early work was published in a Sub Pop fanzine, and he achieved prominence in the early issues of RAW. The comics that Doug brings to Suzy tell the story of Doug’s relationship with Sarah, but like the memories in X’ed Out, the story is broken up and out of sequence, with large pieces missing. 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. There were people at a recent book signing that were waiting for all three books to come out so they could read them together, or weren’t aware that there were previous books in the series.The stories I’m doing are reflecting what I think about, and unfortunately a lot of those things are not all that positive. I guess even though I never felt like I was censoring myself, there was an awareness that there were subjects I was uncomfortable writing about or drawing. Burns is usually such a consummate perfectionist and amazing storyteller that pages like these are a real disappointment.

I lived in California and was involved in the whole punk scene as it emerged in San Francisco in around ’77 or ’78 — and I was an art student. In Sugar Skull, Nitnit now discovers the connection between these huge eggs and the awful cries of the breeders in the dead of night – though, alas, he roundly fails the test that this moment of clarity brings. In the second dream state, Doug is slightly abstracted and goes by the name of Johnny 23/Nitnit (which is the name he performs under) and he finds himself in a world reminiscent of The Land of Ooo from Pendleton Ward’s Adventure Time series and Interzone from Naked Lunch. Sam eventually defeats the samurai, but in a nod to The Empire Strikes Back, discovers that it is his face behind the mask.Given Burns’ fascination with our messy lives, his signature grotesques are particularly striking in a Hergé-inspired world.

Later in volume 2 The Hive, Doug looks over all of his self-portraits and comes to the realization that he has never really pushed himself to improve, and that the work he has done is empty: “once you got past the gimmick of me wearing my stupid little mask, there wasn’t much there. I would suggest that the world of the comic book has entered into the era of the post modern, but in a way that had already happened with graphic novels such as Fun Home.Book two: entitled The Hive will begin by explaining what the mysterious building is where we see the queen being led to.