"I guess what I’m saying is, I base stories on things that have happened to me. They may be far removed by the time they turn into a story, but the impulse behind the story is something from real life." – Charles Burns (in an interview conducted by Darcy Sullivan, 1992)
"It takes me a while to figure out, but at some point I realize I'm drawing a self-portrait." – Brian, protagonist of Final Cut by Charles Burns (Pantheon, 2024)
The drawing is titled "Chrome Toaster," and it shows an alien with a human torso and a craggy rock for a head, sitting down and drawing. It is drawn during a party, though Brian himself is safely secluded in the kitchen, far from the social heart of it all. For all he cares, the party can go to hell – he certainly doesn't feel as safe around people as he does looking at the titular kitchen appliance and letting his pencil move against the paper.
Initially released in French over three albums (Éditions Cornelius, 2019; 2021; 2023) under the title Dédales (labyrinths, or mazes), Final Cut is Burns' latest attempt to answer the question that all artists must, from time to time, grapple with: Who am I, in relation to my art, and in relation to the art of others? But in order to understand the self-imposed prison of Brian's art, we must go back and see things through the eyes of a child – specifically, through the eyes of Tony Delmonto, also known as Big Baby.
The four stories starring Burns' alien-looking boy protagonist all operate on the same principle — supposed fiction becoming reality—with each story upping the proverbial ante. In his eponymous debut, essentially a two-page dry-run originally published in Raw (vol. 1, issue #5, 1983), he stages a make-believe war between his toys that results in him setting one of the plants on the porch on fire; the horror-anthology television series he watches in "Curse of the Molemen" is an undercurrent that mirrors his reality both literally (aliens under his neighbor's house, taking humans prisoner and sexually exploiting them) and metaphorically (his neighbor, Mr. Pinkster, physically and psychologically abusing his wife). The horror comic he reads in "Teen Plague" appears to cross over into reality, as an STD transferred among the town's teenagers turns out to be a form of alien enslavement. "Blood Club," the final story of the bunch, eschews the pop-culture and entertainment motif and starts from a place of urban legend (the supposed ghost of a boy who went to Big Baby's summer camp years prior, which everyone takes to be false until Big Baby himself sees the ghost and is compelled to investigate).
When Big Baby was being serialized in local weekly newspapers, Bill Watterson was offering readers a much more palatable take on the hyper-imaginative boy-protagonist in Calvin and Hobbes. But, although Watterson and Burns often pulled from the same broad well of mid-20th-century pop culture and genre fiction, they diverged in one key fashion: Calvin's imagination is ultimately contained; Hobbes, we will always be reminded, is just a doll who does not come alive outside of Calvin's mind, and the time machine will always be just a cardboard box.
Burns, by contrast, revels in the spillage from imagination into reality: after Mr. Pinkster dies toward the end of "Curse of the Molemen," the young boy finds the antenna that he chopped off the head of one of the subterranean monsters, and keeps it as a souvenir. In this way, Burns manages to romanticize the figure of the child, if only because his exploits operate on one unwavering rule: no matter how lurid and horror-tinged his conceptions of the world, Big Baby must ultimately turn out to be correct. It should come as no surprise that the Big Baby stories were based, by his own admission, on the author's view of his childhood self – the protagonist bears within him the seed of the ideal artist, as articulated by Burns: an obsessive through and through, who will seek, always, to be devoured whole by the act of creation.
And yet the Big Baby serials hold within them the first seed of Burns' broader problem: all too often, he falls prey to his own aesthetic evocations. Of the four Big Baby comics, it is "Teen Plague" that most compels me, in part because it is a comic whose mechanical saving grace is also, paradoxically, the reason it falls apart. Although the story itself goes back and forth between the "real world" and the horror comic that Big Baby becomes obsessed with, Burns takes little measure to modify his visual style to depict the comic in question, creating an interesting effect: given that both the real world and the in-world comic read in more or less the same way, they are granted the same level of relative realism. To us, Big Baby may just as well be reading a photo-comic.
Yet, at the same time, the comic is not a sufficiently fleshed-out piece of art that it feels like it has any existence outside of the mechanical need to move the story along. In a 1992 interview for The Comics Journal conducted by Darcy Sullivan, Burns remarked, "I don’t want to do my version of an EC story, even though I’ve come close at times. I don’t have that admiration for trying to recreate some traditional story. Whatever horror imagery comes out in some way relates to my own personal vision of horror." In "Teen Plague," though, we see what happens when the cartoonist does attempt the common ground of referentiality; it is not only that Burns' riff on the comics of his childhood do not read like any comic that actually exists – it reads, plainly and simply, like a Charles Burns comic contained in a Charles Burns world.
***
In her recent biography of Elaine May, Miss May Does Not Exist, Carrie Courogen submits the argument that it was May's growing environment — her parents were Yiddish theater actor Jack Berlin and actress and logistical-support-provider Ida Berlin, and young May occasionally took to the stage herself to play some bit part or another — that led to May's later tendency to reconfigure the facts of her life as she pleased: the contradictory interviews, the expertise in framing and omission (and occasional outright lie). As screenwriter and May collaborator Jeremy Pikser told Courogen in an interview, "[spending one's earliest years enmeshed in the crafting of fictional worlds] can't be good for your sense of reality."
An artist "from day one" (in the cartoonist's own words), I suspect Charles Burns would find room to agree with this assessment. 2010 saw the release of X'ed Out, the first installment of Burns' Last Look trilogy, released simultaneously in English (from Pantheon) and in French (from Cornelius). X'ed Out is noteworthy in that it demarcates very clearly the three-act structure of Burns' bibliography: the opus that came before it, Black Hole, reads like ten years of an explicit exegetical crossroads, reveling in the contrast between the seedy horror of the cartoonist's earlier shorts and his desire to move away from shock-factor pastiches into the realm of (more-or-less) grounded interpersonal drama. Eighteen years after "Blood Club," the new trilogy sought to return to that Burnsian principle of the child's total artistic immersion – and extend it into adulthood.
Some eight years ago — long enough for it to feel like a past life — I was at a large group dinner with Klaus Janson. Though most of that evening is now lost beyond recall, the one thing I do remember is Janson saying that the sign of an effective penciler is that his mark-making on the page is deep enough that, were you to spill ink on the sheet of paper and shimmy it around, the ink would settle exactly where it needed to go. This is an axiom that applies perfectly to Burns' work: the cartoonist's work in black and white is so smotheringly rich that it puts me in the mind of Hino Hideshi, or Martí – artists with ink lines so clean that they go right back to feeling dirty again. It should make sense, then, that Last Look was the first time Burns had colored his own comics since, I believe, the first run of Raw: his coloring here is calm, sedate; it is not 'for adult readers' but simply adult.
When we first meet the protagonist, Doug, he is in a bad way. Having sustained a mysterious head injury, he uses his dead father's leftover opiates in an attempt to overdose, musing about 'how it all began.' Doug, you see, is a sad-sack art student who appears largely dissatisfied with every aspect in his life – particularly with his girlfriend, Colleen, and with the lack of interest in his performance art (cut-up poetry increasingly outmoded as the Beat '60s give way to '70s punk). Doug ultimately finds pleasant company in Sarah, a troubled but kindred spirit whose photography captivates him.
Doug's own art, for the most part, relies on reference, or at the very least on the disproportionate recognizability of influence. His poetry is a sub-Burroughs cut-up routine, and his Nitnit/Johnny 23 persona is evidently based on an actual in-world comic (Doug is shown reading an album titled Nitnit: The Secret of the Hive in a throwaway panel). Sarah's work, however, is far more visceral in its concepts, incorporating slashed veins and dead pig fetuses in formaldehyde. This daring, no-holds-barred sensibility is what initially compels Doug to seek out Sarah's company, yet he fails to make the connection between the boldness of Sarah's art and the circumstances of its creation: her collaborator, Larry, also her abusive boyfriend, who repeatedly chases after her and tries to intimidate any man he thinks she might be sleeping with.
If Doug can be said to be performing, in practice, the separation between art and artist, it is entirely in favor of his own art and to the detriment of Sarah – the artist and the person. Toward the end of the second volume of the trilogy, The Hive (2012), Doug takes Sarah to his parents' still-furnished house, where she photographs him in dead father's robe. Later, as he dozes off on the couch in the basement, she photographs him again, but he becomes furious when he is finds out; to be photographed while being given instructions is one thing, but in his sleep he has no choice but to be authentic. To Doug, this is a viscerally upsetting notion – in an argument-ending barb Sarah says, "Maybe I should have taken photos of you wearing your little mask… maybe that would have made you happy."
In one of the most devastating emotional beats in Burns' career, Doug fails to understand the gravity of this remark, taking it as an artistic critique — "Once you got past the gimmick of me wearing my stupid little mask, there wasn’t much [to my photography work]," he narrates — rather than a desperate plea for actual, unmediated contact. When he later gets Sarah pregnant, he responds by retreating further into his art, referring to Sarah's past encouragement that he "dig a little deeper" into the visceral subconscious. Instead of supporting her in a material, emotional way, he creates art that increasingly reminds her of the work she had done with her abusive ex. Sarah, we know, was forced by her ex Larry to get several abortions, which resulted in profound mental distress; her relationship with Doug was supposed to signify the beginning of a better life (mirroring her love for the romance comics of the '50s and '60s, simplistic histrionics and all) – one that Doug, in his inattention and immaturity, could never provide. Before their relationship fizzles out, he takes a polaroid picture of them together ("proof that we'd been together… that we'd been in love"). In the photograph, Sarah is asleep.
Which brings us back to the beginning: Doug, in the basement of his parents' house, after sustaining a head injury. In the third book of the trilogy, Sugar Skull (2014), we finally learn what immediately preceded this scene: his relationship with Sarah swiftly declining, her ex, Larry, finally catches up with him – and beats him within an inch of his life, sending him to hospital with severe injuries. Having been "planning [his] escape [from Sarah] in the back of [his] head," Doug uses this as the ultimate invitation to retreat from the world, aided by his dead father's leftover painkillers.
But there's another half, you see, interspersed with Doug's story. In a fugue state, he melts into his Nitnit persona, and wakes up in an otherworldly desert-city centered around The Hive, where women serve as 'breeders' whose eggs sustain the hardworking men of the city. Nitnit is left to maneuver the hostile city, surrounded by ciphers from his past life (the purple robe he wears is the same robe Doug wears in the photoshoot with Sarah, the one that belonged to his father). Quickly, he finds himself working as a Hive laborer, serving the "breeders" (representations of Doug's own real-life exes); even more quickly, he finds himself getting closer to them than he is supposed to. Things come to a head in Sugar Skull, as Nitnit comes to serve Suzy, the representation of Sarah, whom he brings chocolates (even though her diet is closely guarded). When the chocolates mess up her fertility cycle and she begins to lay eggs, Nitnit runs away, too afraid to help.
Through the trilogy, Doug largely goes from one romantic partner to another – starting with Colleen (with whom Doug seems dissatisfied by the time we meet her), through Sarah (whose art interests Doug more than her personhood), through Tina (who is repeatedly frustrated by how much Doug talks about Sarah, and has little sympathy for what she describes as Doug's "'Oh, I'm so lonely, please fuck me' routine"), then ending with his wife, Sally ("the one who saved me from myself"). Burns' early work has been occasionally criticized for its sometimes-depthless representation of women, which Burns himself had ascribed to his depthless representation of everyone, a treatment of characters as ciphers rather than 'real humans,' so one can't be faulted for reading the breeders as the cartoonist's attempt to push back on this conception: by placing the women in his life on the pedestal of his attraction, Doug ends up inadvertently dehumanizing them, as it becomes their duty to hold him up and piece him together.
The Nitnit storyline thus becomes Burns' evident disavowal towards escaping into imagination. Once an act of what Doug presumably perceived as edgy détournement, the cleanness of Nitnit, like the cleanness of the romance comics that Sarah is obsessed with, signifies something that is not only out of reach but utterly inconsistent with the rest of the world. It will forever be sullied by the guilt of the real world. Doug does try, too late, to make amends with Sarah. Toward the end of Sugar Skull, he seeks her out and finds her, with her — their — child, Danny, on their way back from trick-or-treating. He asks to keep in touch with her, to be involved with Danny. But Burns, to his credit, is too realistic to give his reader the cotton-candy weightlessness of a happy ending; he is told, summarily, that it is time for him to leave. Sarah had immediately tried to reach out, to contact him, when he was hiding at his parents' house, yet he failed to recognize these pleas for what they were. Doug's modus operandi will only ever rely on the retrospective alleviation of his guilt.
Yet, in spite of the remarkably sensitive approach to character, Burns is once again tripped up by his aesthetic mechanisms. On the one hand, his decision to base Doug's alter-ego in Last Look on Tintin cleverly reveals the latent Hergé influence in his style (perhaps even revealing a subconscious lineage between Tintin and Burns' old character Dog Boy, with his button nose and sparing features). What's more, although his characters are suffused in dramatic ink, Burns has always drawn the more mechanical elements of the world — cars, architecture — much more neutrally, in a manner so exempt from drama, so boxy and clean-cut, that it readily fits within a ligne claire aesthetic. The choice to work in color is also a great aid, as Burns opts for a flat, no-gradients approach where the lighting feels universal and all-encompassing.
Except, by elevating the parts of his style that feel seamlessly integrated, the cartoonist winds up underlining the parts that don't fit in. In the second book of the trilogy, The Hive, we are 'introduced' to another character in the Nitnit world, Lily (the subconscious representation of Colleen, Doug's quickly-done-away-with girlfriend from the first volume), who is given the exact same face as Nitnit himself (contrast that with Hergé, who, for all his congruous stylization, kept each face entirely distinct), whereas two employees in the titular hive, wearing respirators and industrial-grade headphones look like they might have belonged in any Charles Burns story. Burns' neat coloring, too, applies itself far more readily to the Nitnit storyline than to the real world. By retaining an identical coloring style in both storylines, the color winds up feeling like a taming element that stiffens his brushwork while also underscoring the occasional shorthands that he takes to emulate the peaks of his artwork.
Likewise, consider Burns' approach to page structure. Burns, who has long expressed his admiration for the Kurtzman approach of utmost clarity, establishes his page on a fixed three-tier structure – a structure that persists in both storylines. One wonders what might've happened had Burns, in order to further delineate the "otherworldly" nature between the two storylines, had initially opted to draw these on a different tier system – namely, the four-tier structure used in the collected albums of Tintin. Last Look, as it stands, operates in a manner similar to "Teen Plague" – there is no real sense of duality, no balance between the worlds. What aesthetic divergences exist are thin enough to all-too-readily reveal the mechanical function for which they were devised.
Now, this might sound like mere pedantry ("This Charles Burns book looks too much like Charles Burns!"), but what comes to mind is Barry Windsor-Smith's critique of Joe Kubert's Fax from Sarajevo (from Gary Groth's interview with Windsor-Smith): "I am looking at the drawings and I see a Joe Kubert explosion. And there is no sense of horror in it whatsoever. Because frankly I saw Sgt. Rock get blown up a load of bleeding times, and he hasn’t died." The problem with style, any style, is that, if the artist fails to interrogate it (and what exists outside of it) over time, it will inevitably collapse in on itself, straying farther and farther away from what it tries to depict. This becomes even more of a problem when you attempt to evoke someone else's style. Burns, for his part, appears indecisive as to the extent to which he wants to diverge from himself, and in what direction, instead gesturing toward a different approach while being entrenched in his own.
***
It is in this context that his recent artbook Kommix, published by Fantagraphics and expanding on his earlier Caprice (Cornelius, 2023), becomes pertinent. Comprised of 80 "covers" of nonexistent comics, the art book continues the motif of art-within-art while completely eschewing the interplay between fiction and reality — and consequent hyperreality — on which Burns often relies.
Of the covers compiled in Kommix, the best ones are those that engage in artifice in the form of mordant, mean-spirited satire. See the cover of Teen Diary, where an older-looking man in a suit and tie is holding a blonde girl wearing only a pink undershirt, her ass bare, in the middle of desolate-looking lot; there is little love here, only an unnerving power dynamic. The same is true for the covers of the magazine Sex Decoy (possibly inspired by Burns' ill-fated publication in the pages of Playboy), whose topless models have every reason to look unenthused, as the masthead bears log lines such as "Lost, lonely, and unloved" and "Sad girls with no future." The humor instantly calls to mind the fuck-you self-effacements of Raw ("The graphix magazine of postponed suicides" in its first issue, "High culture for lowbrows" in its last), its function is completely different. Sex Decoy, unlike Raw, is not an alternative to anything: its disdain is the force on which its mainstream operates.
Some of these covers are, in fact, dedicated to the previously-mentioned Nitnit, depicting the same alternate world as appears in Last Look. Here, however, Burns makes the noteworthy decision not to follow the (Tintin-copied) trade-dress cue that he himself establishes in The Hive, instead designing the Nitnit cover in a manner more in line with American comics of the golden and silver age (EC Comics certainly comes to mind here, as do the National/DC anthologies of the '40s): a topper band with an issue number in one corner and on-sale date in the other, a taller masthead with the title, the price in a small bubble on the title band's border. It's an interesting choice – although the "calligraphy" on these covers is rendered in the alien alphabet that dominates the alien city of The Hive, Burns nonetheless presents us with an explicit marriage between two traditions of comics, American and Francophone, that, though aware of one another, largely kept separate during the 20th century.
But trade dress is, of course, only part of what makes a cover. A good comic cover, especially of the classical mainstream-market variety, has to walk the delicate balance of being specific enough to raise questions (and thus encourage the reader to want to fill in the gaps) while also being broad enough that these questions have stakes (thus convincing the reader that the gaps are in truth worth filling). Even more than traditional standalone illustrations, a cover is a game of implication. In his "artifact" approach, Burns has the convenience of not needing to consider the particulars of his plot. The result is competent illustration work that often fails at its self-appointed "cover" designation. I know, having read the trilogy, that the cover in which Nitnit faces a street vendor selling old romance comics, is a reference to a scene in Last Look, but as a cover it fails to entice my imagination. So, too, does the cover that simply shows Nitnit holding his cat, Inky, while one of the mole-looking Hive workers tries to grab at his robe to get his attention. The same goes for the '70s-alternative riff Drug Buddy, whose cover — a young man with black hair, looking at the reader from over his shoulder, eyes half-dead and mouth ajar — invites little narrative other than the momentary, and is too pretty, too respectable, to reach the aesthetic it gestures towards.
More often than not, the motifs in Kommix are already well-trodden territory in Burns' world: sex that is not devoid of eros so much as it is outright robbed of it; fleshy alien masses and desolate lots. Repetition is an effective enough tool in comedy, but the more Burns uses these motifs as forces of violent alienation the less alien they feel, the more they ossify into rules of the world – negating themselves past the point of intrigue.
***
And so we return to Brian. In the aforementioned Darcy Sullivan interview, Burns reminisced on his childhood: "I remember […] kind of forcing friends to sit down and draw, to get involved in the stuff that I was interested in, forcing them to make their own comics, too. I was always much more obsessed with all that stuff than anybody I was around." It seems to me that his Final Cut trilogy emerged precisely from that last point: not only the obsession, but the isolation that emerges from its heart.
Brian's point-of-view shows us a very thin slice of what life is supposed to look like; like other Burns protagonists before him, he too is comfortable sequestering himself in art at the expense of any other form of living. Yet, unlike previous protagonists (Big Baby, whose "art" was the outward projection of imagination, and Doug, who dealt first in poetry and photography then in the crafting of the alternate universe of his subconscious guilt) Brian's chosen art-form, cinema, is inherently communal: to bring his art to life, he must submit himself to other people – only his friends, unlike him, are largely idle hobbyists, without any grand artistic presumptions.
Just as Last Look's Doug finds Sarah, Brian finds himself obsessed with Laurie, a friend of his childhood friend Jimmy. Laurie, for her part, makes a valiant effort to connect with Brian, but her success is limited, though he quickly falls in love with her, or at least with his projected image of her as a life-giving force (the two spend very little time on their own), Brian's vaguely-alluded-to mental health struggles cause him to slip into dissociative states, isolating him from his surroundings. Art is his preferred way to engage with the world, perhaps because it is a life stuck in amber that he himself can choose when to walk away from.
Although much of his early work is characterized by stiff, detached irony, I do feel that Burns has largely tried to move away from these instincts in favor of a more profound human warmth. Burns' characters come with remarkable emotional nuance – though their actions are often contemptible, Burns never allows himself to feel less compassion for them. Yet where in other works he had the detachment of aesthetic — the body horror of Black Hole, the pastiche at the heart of Last Look — to rely on, in Final Cut he relies more than ever on "straight" character drama – to mixed results.
One of Burns' biggest weaknesses in his storytelling is tempo, perhaps a vestigial element of his strip-serialization days. He is exceedingly unlikely to linger on even the most dramatically poignant moments for more than is absolutely necessary, giving his scenes a sense of breathless utilitarianism. Toward the end of the second installment there's a moment when Tina, a free spirit jokester forever at odds with the uptight, prone-to-dissociation Brian, accosts him for being the only one not drinking, then mocking his alcoholic mother (whom she also laughed at earlier that volume). Laurie finally stands up for Brian and tells Tina to stop making fun of him. Her narration in one panel: "… and that's it. It's over. We all just sit there in silence…" Then, in the next: "it's a silence that feels like it's going to last forever… until Brian finally speaks up." In truth, only one of the sequence's panels has no dialogue, and even that one still has narration. Granted, at a total of roughly 180 story pages (approximately half of Black Hole), Burns does not have too much real estate for this sort of scene. Yet the result is that, where previously it was in-world art that received insufficient space to come alive, here it is the real world itself that feels stilted, stiff. It feels almost natural that Brian should seek to escape it.
In Brian, Burns finds the same outlining distresses and hang-ups as he did in Last Look's Doug. Like Doug, Brian also slips in and out of reality in dissociative daydreams. He also becomes obsessed with a woman he knows very little about, comes from a troubled familial background, and, most importantly, he also suffers from the two-pronged frustration of not being able to find in reality the same fleshed-out satisfaction he finds in other people's art while also not being able to make his own art at his desired level of refinement, "on his own terms." Here, then, is Charles Burns' "type": men who rely on escape while failing to acknowledge what they are escaping from and where they are escaping to.
This convergence in theme is contrasted by a divergence in form and structure. Where Last Look (like "Teen Plague" before it) creates an ambiguity of fiction and reality by weaving back and forth between its fictional/symbolist storyline and the corresponding literal/"real" plane, the movies of Final Cut are only ever constrained, physically and formally, to the screen; they are rigid, not at all immersive (it's worth noting how none of the movies that Burns depicts have any sound). These are divided into two contrasting categories: the movies that Brian makes and the real movies that inspire him (Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Last Picture Show). Note the way Burns renders the latter category whenever it appears: he labors over light values and closely-referenced likenesses in ways that make these movies more real, more solid, than his own characters – certainly more than Brian's home-camera productions. There is a distinction here, a diminution: for the first time in Burns' career, his protagonist's art is a force of inherent, insurmountable insufficiency.
Note, too, the contrast between Brian's and Jimmy's respective views of the childhood film they made together, The Claw. As Brian tries to discourage Jimmy from screening the film — it's late at night, and of the three guests now at his home, Jimmy, Tina, and Laurie, it is only the latter that he was expecting or wanting to see — Jimmy insists, and so Brian must look on in embarrassment as his friend emphasizes every single bit of MacGuyveresque artifice: the titular claw, possessed by a neighborhood maniac, is a gardening tool stuffed up a classmate's sleeve; as the madman kills a woman (played by Jimmy's cousin) in the shower, we can see that she isn't truly nude, as her bathing suit is in the shot. Just a few pages earlier, opening the trilogy's second album, Brian narrated: "How do I film this? How am I ever going to capture any of this? I've got all of my sketchbooks and storyboards and endless notes but none of that's going to do me any good, is it?" – and now here he is, reminded of the humiliation of an artistic vision that goes uncomplemented by actual, practical means. It is only in his literal dreams that Brian reaches the fullness of his imaginative potential. In his waking life, he's too busy seeing the papier-mâché and wires.
The third part of Final Cut is an interesting interplay of expectation and reality. Briefly, Brian finds himself excited to make a movie with his friends, and especially with Laurie. He's off his medication, and he's just watched The Last Picture Show, leaving him inspired and invigorated. Yet Laurie is not Sarah of Last Look, not reduced to victimhood and a romantic pursuit of a better life. Her love for Brian does not come at the cost of self-abnegation. What breaks Brian and causes him to retreat for the last time is the discovery that Laurie is having sex with someone else. Though we as readers know that this someone else is Tina — who seems genuinely remorseful for her cruel treatment of Brian — Brian doesn't seem to know this. All he knows is that he is, demonstrably, not the center of her universe. All he knows is that he is not the only person who exists.
When, soon thereafter, we finally see the raw cut of the movie Brian and his friends labored on, it is about what we, and Brian, would expect it to be – shabby, poorly acted, and not much of anything at all. But the footage of Tina and Laurie goofing off in front of the camera is also a reminder of what it was always supposed to be – just a pastime to be shared between friends. When Brian narrates that he doesn't know what he was expecting "but nothing this bad," it is clearly the latter part that bothers him more. The last thing we see, then, is Brian's vision of his "real" movie, an alternate life where Laurie, seeking safety from an alien invasion, finds a secluded house – the house where Brian, her love and savior, lives.
Brian's retreat into imagination is rather an inversion of Doug's in Last Look. Although the parallel world of Doug's guilt is an act of failure and brokenness, it is also, fundamentally, an act of life, of progress (of a biographic manner if nothing else). Doug's present self has worked several jobs, had several girlfriends, got married, gone through addiction and recovery. He's not whole — he's glaringly imperfect, if anything — but there is a distinct movement. Brian, on the other hand, is a lot more like Big Baby, to whom imagination is indistinguishable from reality and so retreat into imagination is viewed as a personal triumph. After we've seen him slip into dissociative fugue states that separate him from his reality, the end of Final Cut sees him embrace this dissociation and pull away voluntarily. "That’s what he always does," Jimmy warns Laurie about Brian: "he always walks away." Brian's final decision proves this assertion correct.
Note the almost circular motion: Big Baby is about youth unfettered, whereas Black Hole deals with the transition from youth to adulthood, followed by Last Look, which deals with the adult's accountability for their former youth. Final Cut brings it all back, discarding adulthood entirely. It rejects the dream of eternal youth by simply living in it and showing us the results.
***
The more I consider Charles Burns —and as you can imagine from this essay, dear reader, I have had quite a bit of time to consider him — the less I know how to define his body of work. Don't get me wrong – it is, if anything, remarkably cohesive, its flow from one project to the other perfectly organic. Not long ago, for this esteemed publication, I wrote about the early works of Luke Pearson, which, taken as a whole, paints a bleak portrait of the Artist (both Pearson himself and the social archetype) as someone who shudders at the notion of life being examined through a lens outside of art – the notion of existing in the world of people. It seems to me that Burns, 32 years Pearson's senior, appears to have devoted many of his projects to following Pearson's points to their logical conclusion: a total divorce not only from external reality, but from the inner self, from inner emotion, as well.
Just as Brian sees himself in "Chrome Toaster," it is inevitable that Burns' characters should be judged in relation to their creator. As the cartoonist returns time and time again to stories about youth, he himself is getting older and his depictions of youth increasingly are prone to the interventions of time. The longer he lives, the more his characters seem afraid to do the same, their lives growing less and less vivid. Although the author would certainly regard their aversion to the real world as unhealthy, they seem more and more to live in a world where aversion is the only option that exists.
What do you do then, when you cannot imagine any other life but your own? What are you left with? Where do you even go? Forty-something years into his career, the questions broached by Charles Burns — both intentionally and inadvertently — seem more pained, more lost, than ever. I'm afraid, my friends, that we're going to find the answers ourselves – and ain't that just a kick in the head?
The post Shall I project a world? The art, artists and artifice of Charles Burns appeared first on The Comics Journal.
Hello, my name is Jack Sparrow. I'm a 50 year old self-employed Pirate from the Caribbean.
No comments:
Post a Comment