X'ed Out: Charles Burns

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That's because while he was sleeping, the world was reorganized, or perhaps reverted to its natural status--a status E. Eugene Helpmann (Peter Vaughan), the current deputy minister was Jeremiah’s friend, and also in love with Sam’s mother Ida (Katherine Helmond) and has offered repeatedly to give Sam a promotion out of the records department. This is the first part of a trilogy, and I expect the later volumes to hopefully offer an explanation of what is going on. I certainly wasn’t expecting a kinda surreal Tintin-referencing book from Charles Burns: It’s in the classic European hardback album format, looking very classy. 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 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. Someone with a whole life to look forward to” is reflected in his dream encounters with his father as “someone I could barely recognize. I have the same reaction to the first installment of his new novel, which I bought only because his cover and first frame references Tintin, and he added Inky (a handsome black cat more interesting than his other characters) a page later.

For the most part this book is a bit more straightforward than the first though an uneasy sense of despair continues to hang over proceedings. Kurtzmann appears in his dream as a giant stone figure with long arms, trying to hold him down and says “Sam, don’t go. But I like that feeling of collecting puzzle pieces with the hope that by the end I'll have some understanding of the bigger picture. Terry Gilliam says that the role of Sam Lowery was originally written to be a younger character, but he decided to change because Pryce did so well.

The past decade has been huge for him with the release of Black Hole in 2005 and then the X’ed Out trilogy following in quick succession — all of which received critical acclaim. And to think, it all started because his damn dead cat, Inky, came back to life and led him through some hole in a wall, in some place where Doug has no idea, is. Between 14 and 15 I was starting to be seduced by underground comics and Robert Crumb’s work, and some of that I’d have to tuck under my coat and smuggle into the house because I didn’t want it to be found. Now with X'ed Out, Burns goes even further: pig fetuses, worms screaming their way out of meat, lifeless aliens.Burns’ art is on point though; the illustrations are always crisp and viscerally disturbing (when necessary.

Like most graphic novels, even the brilliantly executed, its telling seems stuck in some tormented masturbatory adolescence.Burns has said that the disease is a metaphor for adolescence, but I prefer to read it as a simple horror story. X’ed Out” is Burns’ first full-color book, and seeing him leave black-and-white comics is like watching Hitchcock or Nicholas Ray make the leap into 1950s Technicolor. In “X’ed Out,” the first volume of a trilogy, Burns continues his personal mission of finding the limits of creepiness possible on a comics page. X’ed Out’s short episodic nature is what keeps it from being a masterpiece - maybe after Black Hole Burns didn’t want to make something quite so lengthy? Doug on the other hand does not have the refuge of a dreamworld, but he does have the potential to become a better person.