Charles Burns: Final Cut (2024)•
Charles Burns (1955- )Charles Burns: Final Cut (2024)
[Objectspace Book fair, Ponsonby - 15/6/25]:
Burns, Charles. Final Cut ['Dédales,' 2019; 'Dédales 2,' 2021; 'Dédales 3,' 2023]. Jonathan Cape. London: Vintage, 2024.
It's curious that the Goodreads site should refer to Charles Burns' three Dédales books as the "Dedalus trilogy." Yes, the reference is to Daedalus, the fabulous artificer of the Ancient World (and father of the unfortunate Icarus), but only in his capacity as a builder of labyrinths. A better translation might be "Mazes" - or, for that matter, "Labyrinths" (not quite the same thing).
The difference between mazes and labyrinths is that labyrinths have a single continuous path which leads to the centre, and as long as you keep going forward, you will get there eventually. Mazes have multiple paths which branch off and will not necessarily lead to the centre.I'm not sure if Burns actually composed these three albums in French - à la Samuel Beckett's bilingual experiments. It seems more likely that he wrote them in English, then had them translated. Who knows, though? Given that Burns lived in France for much of the 1980s, he's presumably fluent in the language.
In a maze, you can get lost, but in a labyrinth, you can’t.
In any case, the title he chose for the collected edition, Final Cut, shifts the focus to cinema, conflating the Borgesian "labyrinths" theme with the multiple pathways available to a film director when they view their raw footage.
My own first encounter with Charles Burns' work came from an old issue of Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly's ground-breaking comics magazine Raw (11 issues: 1980-1991). I bought it in a second-hand shop in 1992 for (I see on the inside cover) $7.50, and it introduced me to a whole world of crazy creators I'd been hitherto quite unaware of.
This journal of "required reading for the post-literate" included the vital chapter 9: "And Here My Troubles Began," from Spiegelman's own Holocaust memoir Maus, as well as a brief, uncredited account of artist Henry Darger's epic Child Slave Rebellion - I'd never heard of him before, either.
There was material there by future luminaries such as Kim Deitch and Chris Ware, as well as a bizarre, truly off L'il Abner-style comic from the 1940s called "Babe, Darling of the Hills" by some madman called Boody Rogers. I think that was the greatest strength of Raw, actually - that instinct to recuperate as well as innovate.
Charles Burns contributed only the endpapers for the issue, but you can see from the images above that it contains all his characteristic themes and obsessions: doomed 1950s teenagers, horror movie clichés, and Belgian artist Hergé's "ligne claire" style of drawing.
Fast forward thirty years or so, and what do we find in Final Cut? Disturbed teenagers; mini-horror flick epics filmed on Super-8; and weird, spacey imagery reminiscent of the strangest of all of Hergé's Tintin adventures, The Shooting Star:
Funnily enough, Charles Burn's previous extended epos the Last Look trilogy (2010-14), also includes imagery even more directly attributable to those spotty cosmic mushrooms from The Shooting Star. You can see it on the cover of X'ed Out, the first in the series:
So what precisely am I saying? Is Charles Burns just a one-trick pony? As a reviewer of my own first book of short stories - Monkey Miss Her Now (2004) - remarked rather caustically:
Outside of literati farm, this sort of thing has a very limited life expectancy ... Can Ross move beyond this? Does he choose not to?
I do think there's a big difference between repeating yourself and continuing to mine the same territory - especially when you're convinced there's still paydirt to be gleaned from it. After all, the same complaint might be made about Kafka - and there is a certain Kafkaesque air to the heavy sense of dread underlying Charles Burns's earnest young heroes and heroines.
Burns will move on when he knows he has to. In the meantime, he shows no signs of creative exhaustion. It's true to say that I did feel a bit unsure of Final Cut when I first read it, but a rave review in The Guardian went a long way to assuage any lingering reservations I had:
I love everything about this book: the story, the drawings, its way with all things extraterrestrial ... It’s wraparound wonderful, as close to immersive as any comic could be. Here are crimson, squid-like figures falling from an azure sky; here are delicately monochrome evocations of the B-movies of the past.Wow! That's the kind of notice any author would dream of - empathetic, astute, and just about as completely upbeat as a critic could be ...
But don’t be too seduced by its surfaces, however alluring they may be. Final Cut is richer and deeper than it seems at first, a book to be read and reread. Burns is so sympathetic towards his young characters, so attentive to their muddled, nascent feelings, which here play out against the hugeness of the American outdoors ... His books have always seemed to me to be pretty sinister, even dystopian, in the past. Final Cut, though, is just a bit different, the narrative performing a kind of balancing act, teetering on the edge of an abyss without ever toppling in. I can’t be sure, but I think its author is trying to tell us that the end of a movie, at least if you’re making it yourself, can always be changed.
That point about his previous books seeming "pretty sinister, even dystopian" is well taken, also. There's no avoiding the fact that any reputation Burns has is firmly based on his 12-part, turn-of-the-millennium magnum opus Black Hole:
This is ground zero for Charles Burns appreciation. And, incidentally, it's also where I came in. The Auckland Central Library had a copy on its display rack of graphic novels, and I read it there as I did so many other oddball comics in the late 90s and early 2000s. Later I bought my own copy, mind you.
Back then, graphic novels still tended to be reviewed in batches. This is what Roger Sabin had to say in a 2005 Guardian review:
Far from juvenile is Black Hole, a horror story by Charles Burns. In suburban Seattle in the mid-1970s, a strange plague is infecting the area's high school students, transmitted by sexual contact. The victims develop symptoms ranging from mild rashes to the sprouting of horns and tails: 'Some were so messed up it would be impossible to ever recognise them ... ' Is this some phantasmagorical manifestation of their alienation, fuelled by too much dope at parties? Or is it really happening?Well, he wasn't to know. Though quite accurate and insightful in parts, it reads, now, like one of those reviews of Moby-Dick from the 1850s, the ones which praised the verisimilitude of the whaling descriptions but were at a loss to account for the rest of this unholy mess of verbiage.
It would be easy to read the story as an Aids parable but this is clearly not what Burns wants us to do. Instead, his main reference point seems to be the Seventies psychosexual movies of David Cronenberg, complete with vaginal metaphors (there are a lot of black holes in this book). Like those movies, it comes close to being gynophobic at times, but manages to avoid this by keeping the emphasis on the emotions of the infected kids - caught in a moment of post-hippie confusion when Bowie was experimenting with 'mutation' ('His new album's kinda weird stuff') and when drugs were leaving too many people 'unrecognisable'. Burns's beautifully eerie inkwork keeps things menacingly ambiguous. A complex Christmas spine-tingler.
Charles Burns is, admittedly, inimitable. But that doesn't mean that he hasn't had an influence. His complex, spacey comics have helped to empower a whole generation of oddball artists, whether it be Englishman Julian Hanshaw's curious amalgam of cricket and space flight, Tim Ginger, or New Zealander Tara Black's metafictional thought-experiment / memoir This is Not a Pipe.
More to the point, while Emil Ferris would probably still have composed her two-volume masterpiece My Favorite Thing Is Monsters in exactly in the same way, it's hard to imagine the reading public being so receptive to its raw power without the previous training they'd received from the troubling mindscapes of auteurs such as Burns.
Charles Burns clearly has more to say to us still, witness the collection of "80 comic books that never were" he published recently under the title Kommix. Pop culture plus the nouveau roman plus a deranged sense of humour = something resembling Black Hole and Last Look.
But does his work to date constitute a maze or a labyrinth? Does it lead to a way out, or just threaten to circle round itself endlessly? Maybe the Guardian reviewer I quoted from above is right. Perhaps Final Cut does offer, in its final moments, some vestiges of hope.
Books I own are marked in bold:
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Comics and graphic novels:
- Big Baby (1985)
- Hardboiled Defective Stories (1988)
- Curse of the Molemen (1991)
- Blood Club (1992)
- Modern Horror Sketchbook (1993)
- Black Hole (1995-2005)
- Black Hole 1 (1995)
- Black Hole 2 (1995)
- Black Hole 3 (1996)
- Black Hole 4 (1997)
- Black Hole 5 (1998)
- Black Hole 6 (1998)
- Black Hole 7 (2000)
- Black Hole 8 (2000)
- Black Hole 9 (2001)
- Black Hole 10 (2002)
- Black Hole 11 (2003)
- Black Hole 12 (2004)
- Black Hole [12 vols, 1993-2004]. Pantheon Books. New York: Random House, Inc., 2005.
- El Borbah (1999)
- Big Baby (2000)
- Skin Deep: Tales of Doomed Romance (2001)
- Last Look (2010-2016)
- X'ed Out (2010)
- The Hive (2012)
- Sugar Skull (2014)
- Final Cut (2019-2024)
- Dédales (2019)
- Dédales 2 (2021)
- Dédales 3 (2023)
- Final Cut ["Dédales," 2019; "Dédales 2," 2021; "Dédales 3," 2023]. Jonathan Cape. London: Vintage, 2024.
- Free S**t (2019)
- Kommix (2024)
- [with Partners and Son] Unwholesome Love (2024)
- [with Gary Panter] Facetasm: A Creepy Mix and Match Book of Gross Face Mutations! (1998)
- One Eye [collection of paired photographs] (2007)
- Permagel [black & white prints] (2008)
- Love Nest [pop imagery from the 50s to the 70s] (2016)
- Vortex [extra imagery from "Last Look"] (2016)
- Johnny 23 [parody pirated version of "X'ed Out"] (2010)
Art only:
- category - Comics & Graphic Novels: Authors
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