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From Scars to Monsters: The Worlds of Charles Burns |
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You can’t
really be blamed for assuming Charles Burns had a fucked up childhood. Within
his dark graphic novels (a.k.a. comic books), you find extra large babies (Big
Baby), mutant teenagers, old men with baby bodies, gender twisting lovers, a
teen who wants to become a robot, a man who acts like a dog, and even a
flatulent Mexican wrestler/Sam Spade (El Burbah). However, turns out that
Burns had an average childhood and when you read a little deeper, you begin
to see that under this Dick Tracy influenced surface, we find a fairly
realistic portrait of the world. For all
Burns sci-fi/horror themes, works like Big Baby and the recent Black Hole,
offering succinct portraits of the fears, insecurities, and desires of
growing up. In a state of fluted
monotony, his scarred rank of characters stagger and skulk through an
intricate and shadowy world. Enhancing the noir atmosphere is Burns’ cool,
chiarscuro like graphics that reflect the duality and plasticity of his
characters. Not your
usual comic book material. Then again, maybe it is. Like animation, the comic
world has been compartmentalized by the mass population and is typically
viewed as little more than kiddie feed. Hell, most of us grew up watching
Bugs Bunny, Super Friends or reading Marvel and DC comics. How were we to
know that they were representing a SERIOUS art form? For those of you who
still think comic books are mass fodder for a meager subculture or haven’t
read the work of Charles Burns, thanks to Fantagraphic Books you’ve got an
opportunity to uncover a shaded darkness far from Spidey and Shazam. In
addition to Burns’ new series, Black Hole (to date there are 8 of about 12
issues printed), Fantagraphic is releasing The Charles Burns Library. The
Library is comprised of four hardcover books featuring Burns’ pre-Black Hole
work. Currently, two volumes, Big Baby and El Burbah, have been released.
Later in 2001, expect to find Skin Deep and Bad Vibes on a shelf near you. Once
Charles Burns was born. Uneventful. Family lived in the successive yawn of
suburbia. Pops studied the sea. Mom did what Moms did in the 1950s. Burns
was, as the story usually goes, in love with comics as far back as memory
breathes. His parents neither loathed nor encouraged his habit. Nevertheless,
Burns knew pretty early on that comic books were to be the path. Says Burns,
“It was one of those things. Somehow I really keyed into them and enjoyed
them from a really early age. I stuck with them while other people grew out
of them.” Throughout
his teens, Burns continued to explore the world of sci-fi and horror comics
and movies, but his interest in comics started to dissolve by the late 1960s.
“Nothing new was happening at the time. I was bored with all the comics
around.” Then, seemingly, out of nowhere came Robert Crumb. Crumb not only
revolutionized comics but changed Burns’ life. “He took comics into a
completely new arena. He was dealing with more humane issues.” Influenced by
the whole underground scene, Burns began appropriating his heroes for his
high school literary magazine. Determined
not to follow the stagnant superhero route, Burns went to fine arts school in
order to expose himself to different ideas and graphics. He nurtured this
interest and talent at Evergreen College along with fellow comic artists
Lynda Berry and Matt Groening. After graduate studies, Burns tried his hand
at videos, photography, music, painting, but it wasn’t until the early 1980s
that Burns got his break. He had submitted some graphic work to Art
Spielgman’s RAW magazine. The Maus creator liked Burns’ work and accepted a
submission. For Burns, Spielgman’s approval meant finally being taken
seriously. RAW sprung
the doors for Burns. He started doing strips for both RAW and a Seattle
tabloid called The Rocket. During this time Burns created his first regular
character, El Burbah. Morphing
the world of Raymond Chandler and El Santo, Burns creates the ultimate
invincible hero. In a gentle inversion of our idea of heroism, ala Bond and
Superman, Burbah can solve any mystery and defeat any villain. However,
unlike our usual heroes, he’s also a flatulent, overweight, immoral asshole.
Strange thing is that he’s among the nice people. Each
adventure sees El Burbah hired by a member of wealth to find a loved one.
Aptly, the first El Burbah story neatly foreshadows all of Burns’ work. In Robot Love, El Burbah is hired by a
family to find their missing boy. Turns out the boy, frustrated by their need
to tame and control him, has joined a group of kids who are being turned into
robots. The boy leaves one dull
atmosphere for another. By the end, El Burbah has returned the reluctant boy
to his parents who in turn reveal that they are already fully robotic. So,if
you’re not already an automatron, you’re eventually going to become one. In Living in The Ice Age, a widow hires our hero to
investigate some shadowy dealings at a company hired to freeze her husband’s
body. What evolves is a hilarious and bizarre tale about rich old coots who
try to buy immortality by having their saggy old heads fused with the bodies
of babies. Burns gives us a truly grotesque metaphor of individuals who have
pissed one life away while trying absorb another. In a sense they are whoring
humanity and consuming false ideologies of salvation to avoid dealing with
the mundane reality of mortality. Echoing
film noir, each story concludes disarmingly. The characters are no better than
they were at the start. The boy can find no real freedom, because he has no
idea what freedom entails. The old man achieve immortality, but only through
the mutation of their own flesh. In truth, the old men are not themselves
anymore, so what is left?. The only one who ever wins in these tales is El
Burbah, who counts his cash, drinks his swill, and moves on. El Burbah lives,
quite simply, in the moment, not for the moment. In 1983,
Burns created a one shot gag featuring a bald, freaky looking grown up in the
clothes of a toddler. To the side we hear a voice say, “Aahh, you’re nothing
but a big baby.” By 1986, Burns’ next character, Big Baby, was born and
appearing in syndicated comic strips. Once again, Burns turned towards his
youth for inspiration, but unlike El Burbah, Big Baby is a little closer to
home. “I guess I have to own up
to the fact that Big Baby is in many ways an abstracted reflection of my own
childhood growing up in middle class suburban America.” Despite
the mutant appearance, Big Baby is actually a gentle, almost loving ode to
the confusion of childhood. Big Baby (Tony) is constantly mixing up his
fantasy play worlds with the real worlds. In the first and arguably strongest
Baby story, Curse of the Moleman,
Tony believes that Moleman are living underneath his neighbours’ swimming
pool The
success of Burns’ work is that he does not clearly delineate between fantasy
and reality. We are seeing this world primarily through the eyes of a child.
The adult world becomes at once alien and scary. In Moleman, it turns out
that there likely aren’t any creatures lurking in the ground, however there
is a far more horrific act taking place in the adult world. Tony’s neighbour
is a paranoid abusive husband who suspects his wife is copulating with anyone
with a dick. His brutal and violent behaviour towards his wife is far
creepier than anything Tony’s imagination (neatly parallelled by horror
movies on late night TV) can conjur up. In Teen Plague (an obvious inspiration
for the current Black Hole series), Tony confuses teen sex with alien
infestation. First, his babysitter arrives with a hickey in toe. Later it
turns out that her boyfriend has developed a terrible, infectious rash.
Sexual diseases, utterly alien to Tony, become in his mind linked to a group
of aliens attempting to take over earth by infecting hyper sexual teens.
While it becomes clear that Tony is confusing a science fiction film with
reality, Burns again presents this world through the eyes of the boy and in
doing so uncovers the horrors of the adult world. The
blurring of imagined and real events carries Burns work beyond mere classical
narrative. In Marriage Made in Hell (from Skin Deep), we are introduced to a
woman who is writing a pulp romance book. We are taken into the world of the
book and a very twisted tale of gender bending as a woman discovers that her
husband is actually…sort of…a woman. At the end of the story, we discover
that the woman is not actually a ‘professional’ writer and only creates to
escape from her abusive marriage.
Art and fantasy become a necessary escape from hellish reality. One of
Burns’ most accomplished stories is the controversial, Burn Again (Skin Deep). We follow the rise and fall of a young
boy who is used by his father for unethical evangelical pursuits. The father
brands the boy with an image of Christ and cons folks into believing that the
boy is a miracle worker. The
story takes place in the course of the boy’s life leading to a bizarre twist
revealing god as a cycloptic prick. Burn Again
is one of Burns’ darkest works, but again beneath the sci-fi template, we see
a pretty accurate depiction of the religious infrastructure and a very sly
reference to Abraham’s sacrifice. Burns presents a disturbing world where
adults are willing to destroy their creations for the sake of material
wealth. Not surprisingly, the homeland of the puritanical did not respond
kindly to Burns’ story and he was forced to discontinue the story as a comic
strip. In
general, Burns is no alien to controversy. Some people find his work sexist,
but truth be told that all of his characters are objects. The men are as
phony as the women. Burns gives us a society of people who give up their
individuality for membership in the fill in the blank community. Within this
sheltered life, they remain hidden from the ills of mortality while embracing
the solitiude of a singular invention. In 1995
began his new series, Black Hole.
An extension of the earlier Teen Plaguestory, Black Hole takes place in a high school where many teens have
been infected by a mysterious disease. They can only be infected through sex
and some are left with minor scars while others turn into outright monsters.
There are a myriad of characters, but the story is told primarily through the
eyes of Chris (woman), Keith, and Rob. Black Hole
reflects a maturity and confidence lacking in his earlier work. The writing
continues to be minimal and clear, yet at times extremely poetic. The opening
image of a frog being dissected with the incision resembling at once a vagina
and a hole or womb or doorway. The scene neatly connects the themes of sex,
nature, death, and transformation. The next scene then introduces us to three
guys sharing a joint. Keith calls this area Planet Xeo which he notes is
“like being in a cocoon. A soft insulated green world.” This forested area
would later become a sort of cocoon for the infected. Burns’ deceptively
simple writing and use of ‘soft, insulated green’ immediately harken back to
the opening image of the frog being cut open. Burns attributes this new found
confidence to his refusal to cater to the needs or demands of his audience or
publisher. In the past, Burns often directed his style according to the
character of a publication. With Black Hole, Burns listens primarily to his
own guides and the result is a sharp, detailed work of art. Thematically,
we can spot the obvious sexual disease metaphor and notably the AIDS scare.
Sexually transmitted diseases are a timeless fear for youth and again,
echoing Tony’s mind in Big Baby, when we cannot fully comprehend, our
imaginations often take us to innovative, extreme places. Remember, for
teens, acne is among the most terrible diseases humanity must face. But Black
Hole is about something more terrifying and mysterious than any STD (except
AIDS): adulthood. At the core of Black Hole is a metaphor about the
transformation into the adult world where as Burns’ notes, “some have a few
scars, while others turn into monsters.” Throughout his work, the relation between mind and body
has been a central theme. The physical abnormalties of the characters mirror
an internal, chaotic mental state. Adulthood manifests itself as a physical
disease. Some can hack it, some can’t. As we exit
issue 8, Burns neatly shifts perspectives. We have followed Chris and Rob as
‘normal’ teens through to their infection. Where once we saw the infected as
other, we now begin to accept it as normal. In fact, there are suggestions
(after Rob is beaten) that there is something more terrifying beyond these
infected teens. In fact, as we are introduced to this new community of the
infected, we discover that they are normal people, what has changed is that,
shunned by society, they must now fend for themselves and learn to live as
self-sufficient individuals in an adult world. Black Hole is a search for identity within a world that
more often than not makes no fucking sense. In issue #2 called Racing Towards Something, Chris is swimming
along as if in darkness suspended in nothingness. For a moment she utters a
dry complaint in a held breath, “so this is where it all ends up.” She is alone, submerged, and
breathless. And really, for all the mysteries we surround ourselves with on a
daily basis, is there anything more mysterious and bizarre than adulthood? The
release of the Burns library is timely. When Spielgman’s Maus won the Pulitzer, it was thought that serious comics would
finally breakthrough and find a mainstream audience. It didn’t happen.
However, comics appear to be riding another wave. Recently, Daniel Clowes and
Chris Ware, have received heavy publicity for their respective books David Boring and Jimmy Corrigan. Clowes early work, Ghost World is also being adapted into a feature film. So perhaps
there is hope in this third wave that graphic novels will finely reach a
wider audience. But I wouldn’t hold your breath; both Boring and Corrigan
have found success, but only when costumed as hardcover books (a.k.a.
literature). For now, graphic novels like independent animation, remain shared secrets for us knowing few. They carry us to more stimulating worlds than Aquaman or some cute little shitless squirrel can ever imagine, and reflect our realities more than any corporate inspired dreampark or manufactured suburb can ever hope to . As Tony says in Teen Plague to his befuddled teacher, “You…you don’t understand! This comic…it is important. It’s what’s happening NOW.” This article originally appeared in Issue 14 (July 2001) of Mean Magazine © Christopher J. Robinson |