Charles Burns: Black Hole, Xed Out, Big Baby and other phantasmagorias

It came! I haven't had a chance to give it a proper read (or "read," really, at this stage) yet, but it's a gorgeous book- it's all printed in this queasy off-purple mimeograph-looking ink, and my copy came with a little print/bookplate of Nitnit and Inky in nauseatingly hypersaturated red/green/purple. I hope to get started on it tonight.

thank god you're doing it and i don't have to.

I don't know if I should be admitting this level of obsession, but I did "translate" the alphabet (though not the whole book yet.) The part i have gone through so far is only marginally sensical...sort of like dream talk, it seems. For anyone who wants some hints, here is the translation of the first part:
(Code cracking spoiler alert!)
"Nothing good will come of this" "There will be tears" "Nothing can become of nothing" "all hearts will grow cold and weary"
Enjoy! (I got my copy at the Brooklyn Fest, had a brief chat with Charles Burns and got it signed, and then a couple of days ago my friend's dog chewed the corner of the book off! Sad, though he didn't chew through any content, which I appreciate.)

Nice work, Rafkelman! Are you planning on doing the rest?

can a mod change title to "Charles Burns (Black Hole, X'd Out, etc)"?

i did. It's .... good? art is perfect, format is great but it's SLLLOOOOOOWWWW getting going and I want five hundred pages not sixty five once every year for four years.

OTM

I did dig this tho.
Except I didn't realize it was part of a series until the v v end and was like, "How is this going to resolve itself?????"

Now I want to get Johnny 23 thanks to this thread. You guys.

http://i1.cdnds.net/12/18/300x398/comics_the_hive.jpg

oh wow that looks like burns + hellstrom's hive!

anybody else love DEFECTIVE COMICS?

EL BORBAH!

http://www.book.hipopotamstudio.pl/?p=1389

anyone else read The Hive yet? i liked it a lot. it was more coherent to me than X'ed Out, although i think that's just because the reappearances of certain visual elements make more sense (dream logic sense) the fifth, sixth, seventh times you notice them.

i was ultimately let down by black hole ... it was a great set-up and very "real" and pitch-perfect for the setting and time, but i felt like it kind of petered out at the end rather than coming to a real climax, i think maybe he wanted to set up a kind of circular structure (seems like one of his things) and that's why it seemed that way to me

we should have a clowes vs burns t/s

i've read black hole three times and i still can't keep any of the plot in my head, just images

i felt similarly about the last few chapters of black hole. the jonny 23 stuff (x'ed out and the hive) seems like it's going to avoid that fate, though. in the first two entries in the series he's already shown us the beginning and the end of the protagonist's story, and has clearly hinted that something deeply fucked up happened in the middle, to be revealed in future entries. looking forward to finding out what happened!

i think one weakness of black hole is that the female characters kind of blend together (not a problem w/ the dudes) both because they are drawn similar and because their personalities aren't as strongly sketched out as the dudes

i think burns would win a clowes vs burns t/s handily, what do you guys think?

no way!

hmmm ... maybe i should start that thread though i haven't read any clowes in a long time

clowes gets some points for coining SUNROOF!

and obv "velvet glove cast in iron" is up there w/ the best of burns

no way!

― Number None, Monday, 15 October 2012 07:42 (2 hours ago)

never liked 'velvet glove' all that much - just seemed like 2nd-hand david lynchisms - but the rest of eightball (and esp ghost world) is soo much better than burns (who is an immaculate draughtsman but a fairly limited - or repetitive - writer, imho)

feel like there's a level of misanthropy in clowes that turns me off, burns seems like the gentler soul

fair enough, tho' i think that that one of the most...moving?...things abt clowes is the way he's trying to reconcile his misanthropy w/ real human feeling/compassion (you cld even say that's one of the themes of ghost world) - i guess i just identify more w/ that position!

plus Clowes is a billion times funnier

I've always been critical of Clowes because of his misanthropy (though in his better works, like Ghost World, it felt like he acknowledged how limiting such a worldview can be), so I was pleasantly suprised by the recent Mister Wonderful, where he finally seems to have gotten over it.

clowes IS much funnier, true

funniest thing burns ever did was use the Marvel Try Out Book for some of his layouts

have never quite understood why so many ppl seem to automatically object to any hint of 'misanthropy' in art -- obv there are tons of idiots who do it poorly but some of the greatest artists of all time (swift, voltaire, kubrick, bunuel, blah blah insert your favorites here) were pretty contemptuous of their fellow men in a way that makes clowes look like frank capra. that said i do agree that clowes has come a long way in terms of generosity and subtlety since his 'here is a list of things i hate' stories.

<3 capra

;-)

haha don't get me wrong i am the biggest frank capra stan ever, it was just first name that popped to mind.

So one thing about The Hive that's bothering me: I can't really place where the scenes with the iteration of Doug on the cover take place. He's gained a lot of weight (from the meds?) and his hair is longer, and the scenes he's in make it seem like he's no longer with Sarah, but I was under the impression that immediately post head-injury was the "present" of the story. Not that flash-forwards are off-limits, but it's a bit disorienting (more so than the rest of the book, I mean).

man, this was so great. just sorta skimming past the burns vs clowes arguments upthread, right now i'd vote for burns over most anybody (it's cool, i haven't read building stories yet), just because of how singular he is; i don't know that clowes does anything that's so distinctive in terms of mood - that's the obvious thing to wheel out in praise of burns, & maybe my lack of attention to horror & suspense as genres means that it's just distinctive to me, but as period pieces & as a bildungsroman & in catching the weird, self-aware sadness of youth, love that keeps you awake, it's really uniquely rendered i think. i enjoyed it so much, anyway. there's a kind of alex katz quality to the images, too; so clean & fresh. it's so moving to see the interactions between the book's characters and the comics they read, because he observes both so well, & with different emphases. i sorta want the first row of this on my wall.

http://i2.cdnds.net/13/46/618x861/comics-charles-burns-sugar-skull-teaser.jpg

hahaha yesssss

Clowes was funny for a couple years in the 90s. By contrast, Burns has several decades of really unique, quality work behind him.

"clowes was funny for a couple years in the 90s" was the name of a subforum on the old comics journal message board, i think.

this is out!

this one is the end of the trilogy right?

yep.

psa: it rules

this guy is a treasure

just read X'ed Out and The Hive from the library, they don't have Sugar Skull in yet

i highly recommend getting all three and reading it start-to-finish in one sitting.

Just finished doing the above and, not to get too much into spoilers, I'm not sure how to feel about the conclusion. It seems to wrap things up neatly in a way I really didn't expect based on Black Hole and that doesn't ring entirely true with the setup of the first two volumes. I can appreciate it as a commentary on immature, self-obsessed indie comic heroes, but I don't know if that's enough of a payoff. Maybe there's more ambiguity intended but it def doesn't seem that way from the last few pages.