| | | |  | Introduction
At the juncture of fiction and memory, of cheap thrills and horror, lies the dark world of Charles Burns. His stories, which first attracted notice in the pages of RAW during the early 1980s, take comic book clichés - wiseacre kids, sinister scientists, tough-as-nails detectives, teenage lust and EC-style horror - and rearrange them into disturbing yet funny patterns. Beneath this interplay of familiar iconography lurks the real traumas of childhood, traumas of loss and alienation.
Similarly, Burns’ ice-cold artwork polishes a 'conventional' comic look to the nth degree, underlying the artificiality of what we take for normal. At times, Burns’ work suggests that our worst fears about mainstream comics are true: that they are stamped out by machines programmed by someone who is going slightly insane.
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|  | Black Hole Collected SC
It's here: Charles Burns' epic story of existential horror, over ten years in the making.
Reprints: Black Hole #1-12
And you thought your adolescence was scary. Suburban Seattle, the mid-1970s. We learn from the outset that a strange plague has descended upon the area's teenagers, transmitted by sexual contact. The disease is manifested any number of ways - from the hideously grotesque to the subtle (and concealable) - but once you've got it, that's it. There's no turning back. As we inhabit the heads of several key characters - some kids who have it, some who don't, some who are about to get it - what unfolds isn't the expected battle to fight the plague, or bring heightened awareness of it, or even to treat it. What we become witness to instead is a fascinating and eerie portrait of the nature of high-school alienation itself - the savagery, the cruelty, the relentless anxiety and ennui, the longing for escape. And then the murders start. As hypnotically beautiful as it is horrifying (and, believe it or not, autobiographical), Black Hole transcends its genre by deftly exploring a specific American cultural moment in flux and the kids who are caught in it - back when it wasn't exactly cool to be a hippie any more, but Bowie was still just a little too weird. To say nothing of sprouting horns and moulting your skin...
Web Price: £11.99 | |
|  | Charles Burns Library Vol 01 El Borbah SC
Meet El Borbah, a 400-pound private eye who wears a Mexican wrestler's tights and eerie mask. Subsisting entirely on junk food and beer, El Borbah conducts his investigations with tough talk and a short temper. He smashes through doors and skulls as he stalks a perfectly realized film-noir city filled with punks, geeks, business-suited creeps and mad scientists.
El Borbah features five science-fiction and true-detective episodes: In "Robot Love," rebellious kids in nightclubs replace their "parts" with mechanical substitutes as part of a new fad, only to find that their parents have been automating themselves all along; in "Love in Vein" a mad visionary sperm donor plans a master race and turns "his" kids against their parents; "Bone Voyage" details the exploits of a cult called the Brotherhood of the Bone, a kind of cross between the Masons and the Mansons. The fantastic plots take up the weird fears of a scientific society, but the action is pure pulp. Charles Burns effortlessly spins yarns with gritty punchlines and pictures so perfect they must have existed in some collective memory of junk drama. And through it all crashes El Borbah, trying to make an honest buck from dishonest people. 96-page black-and-white softcover
Web Price: £10.99 | |
|  | Charles Burns Library Vol 02 Big Bay SC
by Charles Burns From the creator of the 2005 hit graphic novel, Black Hole, comes this new softcover edition of his other masterpiece of modern horror. Big Baby is a particularly impressionable young boy named Tony Delmonte, who lives in a seemingly typical American suburb until he sneaks out of his room one night and becomes entagled in a horrific plot involving summer camp murders and backyard burials. Burns' clinical precision as an artist adds a sinister chill to his droll sense of humor, and his affection for 20th century pulp fiction permeates throughout, creating a brilliant narrative that perfectly captures the unease and fear of adolescence.
Web Price: £10.99 | |
|  | Charles Burns Library Vol 03 Skin Deep HC
Web Price: £16.99 | |
|  | One Eye TP
Writer:Charles Burns
Artist:Charles Burns
After the incredible success of BLACK HOLE, Charles Burns returns with this unique collection of photographs. The photos are paired two per page and capture the strange undertones of a staggering range of objects and locales. From urban and pristine landscapes to flesh and food, the visual combinations are at the same time ambiguously uneasy and starkly coherent. ONE EYE is Burns’ world digested through a lens, and evidence of the scope of his visual language.
Web Price: £9.99 | |
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