X'ed Out: Charles Burns

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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. In the lecture, Burns describes a sequence that appears in The Secret of the Unicorn being the first time that he ever saw an intercom: “I don’t know what an intercom is…When I’m looking at it, I see this voice coming out of the wall…this mouth that’s embedded into this wall. A weird buzzing noise on the other side of the wall has woken him up, and there, across the room, next to a huge hole torn out of the bricks, sits his beloved cat, Inky. By the end of The Hive, Charles Burns cranked this beauty up to top speed - then in Sugar Skull he ran it smack into a brick wall.

I had some vague idea that I’d spend four years in college and then when I got out I’d be an artist and make a living. I'm about to read The Hive next—if I can glimpse a narrative among the hairless mole-people, maybe I will go back and retroactively give this book another star.This desire though is subconscious because consciously both Doug and Sam appear to be content with their lives.

This book, which is apparently the first in a series, is brief and bold and, unlike Black Hole, brightly colored. Burns does have a lot of fun with bringing romance comics into the proceedings — while the “real world” gets progressively more like an indie drama movie. 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.I remember being really excited about X’ed Out, but… I remember nothing about the subsequent volumes (that arrived with a two year gap between). After he gets out of the hospital, Doug moves back into his parents’ house where he spends his time in his father’s basement taking pain medicine, sleeping, and avoiding any contact with the outside world, including Sarah.

The story, such as it is so far, revolves around slacker teen, Doug, and both his real life world, but also a nightmare reality which reads like Tintin gone wrong. Like most graphic novels, even the brilliantly executed, its telling seems stuck in some tormented masturbatory adolescence.At the same time Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly were launching RAW in New York, gearing up for a revolution in underground comics. This subreddit is for alternative comics, art comics, gekiga, and underground comix; for independent comics please visit r/indiecomics. Its effect on the comics landscape was profound and launched the careers of many of the artists it published, including Charles.

It is only after meeting Jill, the woman who appears to him in his dreams in the real world that he takes steps to advance his position by accepting his promotion to the department of Information Retrieval as a way to learn more about her and also ending his carefully cultured anonymity.But [when you’re young] you’re stepping off a diving board into something you don’t know, that you don’t understand. This book is nice to look at; the art is beautiful, but it failed to grab my interest - this kind of "weird" strikes me as pretentious and dull.