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Last Look Trilogy #1
X'ed Out
Doug is having a strange night. A weird buzzing noise on the other side of the wall has woken him up, and there, across the room, next to a huge hole torn out of the bricks, sits his beloved cat, Inky. Who died years ago. But who’s nonetheless slinking out through the hole, beckoning Doug to follow.
What’s going on? To say any more would spoil the freaky, Burnsian fun, especially because X’ed Out, unlike Black Hole, has not been previously serialized, and every unnervingly meticulous panel will be more tantalizing than the last...
What’s going on? To say any more would spoil the freaky, Burnsian fun, especially because X’ed Out, unlike Black Hole, has not been previously serialized, and every unnervingly meticulous panel will be more tantalizing than the last...
56 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2010
About the author
Charles Burns
114 books940 followersCHARLES BURNS grew up in Seattle in the 1970s. His work rose to prominence in Art Spiegelman's Raw magazine in the mid-1980s and took off from there, in an extraordinary range of comics and projects, from Iggy Pop album covers to the latest ad campaign for Altoids. In 1992 he designed the sets for Mark Morris's restaging of The Nutcracker (renamed The Hard Nut) at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. He illustrated covers for Time, The New Yorker, and The New York Times Magazine. He was also tapped as the official cover artist for The Believer magazine at its inception in 2003. Black Hole received Eisner, Harvey, and Ignatz awards in 2005. Burns lives in Philadelphia with his wife and two daughters.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 416 reviews
July 1, 2021
charles burns has got quiiiite a racket going...
i blame comic book nerds for this and for everything. charles burns seems to think that now that graphic novels have "arrived" on the NPR scene, and literate adults with the love of a good pencil line and a more complex storyline than "zap" or "pow" will still somehow retain the same collectivist impulses of pimply comicbook preteens who buy two copies and immediately slip one into a protective mylar cocoon. he is counting on the collector tendencies.
this twenty-dollar hardcover is only the FIRST in an open-ended SERIES which will probably eventually be compiled and given a reasonable price tag, but for now it is like letting charles burns into your pocket to write a blank check. me, i bought this one like some wide-eyed ingenue before i read the fine print. and i will probably have to keep buying the other volumes because i can't even stop myself, even though i could read it at work in under a half hour. but i have already broken the seal, as it were, and i don't want this volume to get lonely, do i?? do they even make mylar bags this size??
charles burns, don't you know how poor i am?? and how quickly i read, especially graphic novels?? don't tell me about "collector's markets" and "a lifetime of memories." i live in a book-crammed studio apartment; the likelihood of this book falling over and getting dented are like 92%. so it isn't going to be in any kind of condition to pay for my nursing home and morphine drip and robot pet.
but i couldn't help myself—it looked like something i should have.
this is a still from an awesome movie charles burns was involved with:
oh, right—technology—here is the trailer.do you see the charles burns?
richard mcguire has my favorite segment in that movie, but charles burns is a close second. and richard mcguire never pulled no "collect all four...or more" bullshit on me, so extra points for him.
this book is good. it is titillating. i have a good sense of what is going on, despite all the ambiguities, but i want to see what all he does with it—where he will take his kooky charles burns self. after he goes to the bank with my money, that is...
come to my blog!
i blame comic book nerds for this and for everything. charles burns seems to think that now that graphic novels have "arrived" on the NPR scene, and literate adults with the love of a good pencil line and a more complex storyline than "zap" or "pow" will still somehow retain the same collectivist impulses of pimply comicbook preteens who buy two copies and immediately slip one into a protective mylar cocoon. he is counting on the collector tendencies.
this twenty-dollar hardcover is only the FIRST in an open-ended SERIES which will probably eventually be compiled and given a reasonable price tag, but for now it is like letting charles burns into your pocket to write a blank check. me, i bought this one like some wide-eyed ingenue before i read the fine print. and i will probably have to keep buying the other volumes because i can't even stop myself, even though i could read it at work in under a half hour. but i have already broken the seal, as it were, and i don't want this volume to get lonely, do i?? do they even make mylar bags this size??
charles burns, don't you know how poor i am?? and how quickly i read, especially graphic novels?? don't tell me about "collector's markets" and "a lifetime of memories." i live in a book-crammed studio apartment; the likelihood of this book falling over and getting dented are like 92%. so it isn't going to be in any kind of condition to pay for my nursing home and morphine drip and robot pet.
but i couldn't help myself—it looked like something i should have.
this is a still from an awesome movie charles burns was involved with:
oh, right—technology—here is the trailer.do you see the charles burns?
richard mcguire has my favorite segment in that movie, but charles burns is a close second. and richard mcguire never pulled no "collect all four...or more" bullshit on me, so extra points for him.
this book is good. it is titillating. i have a good sense of what is going on, despite all the ambiguities, but i want to see what all he does with it—where he will take his kooky charles burns self. after he goes to the bank with my money, that is...
come to my blog! 
September 13, 2023
A surreal trip of discovered identity...Charles Burns is the master of alienated youth trying to find a meaning in life. There is a kind of suspension of disbelief to all of his works; 'quicksandish' in ability to take you down slowly; very effective in scope. A very creepy work well worth reading!
July 10, 2016
Since I just read Burns's masterpiece coming-of-age horror comic Black Hole, which was serialized in something like eight issues from 1995-2005 (yup, that slowly), I thought I would return to this second great story, a three volume story released about a year or so a volume. Burns's work might be described as alternative, experimental, hallucinatory, surreal, horror, but while this does not reflect on adolescence, there still seems there may be some ties to his Seattle life. Maybe.
So this was highly anticipated, and right form the first you can see it is signature Burns: bizarre, spooky, cartoonish/nightmarish in some of the drawing that almost comically masks a lot of ambiguity and insanity, hallucination. Is Burns going mainstream? Nope. It would appear Burns is going to keep going farther out, maybe.
I loved Black Hole, and didn't fully understand it, and that it part of why I loved it, that it is beyond reason, logic. But it is recognizably about adolescence, and sexuality, the dark loneliness and pain of it, filtered through a haze of drugs and alcohol. That's the point of the disjointed narrative, to disorient you, throw your narrative sensibilities off-kilter. And some tenderness survives.
But X'Ed Out moves even more in the direction of the bizarre, though we are still grounded in real human events. A guy named Doug who might be a guy from Black Hole, a few years down he line, wakes up from a stoned sleep and sees Inky, a cat he thought had died, and follows her through a black hole (ha!) in the wall of his bedroom to emerge into some sort of apocalyptic scene, which becomes a dream/nightmare world with green one-eyed distorted men, dwarves, worms, (apparently) aborted foetuses; and eggs, a lot of eggs. It's a drug-induced nightmare. This is the m.o. of this series, that we tack back in forth between a dream world and reality. Both seem as "real" as the other, in a sense. The past would seem to infuse these dreams. Something bad has happened to Doug, or he did something bad he feels guilty about.
Doug meets a girl at a party, an artist, and eventually falls in love with her. She is trying to extricate herself from a bad relationship. And that is the heart of this first volume, as far as I can tell on a couple readings.
After reading all three, I see what he is doing and there IS a pay off, it is worth hanging in there! Some of what he is about can be deduced or indicated from recurring images: A man’s face; dead foetuses; eggs; a pink blanket; television screens, and so on. But you need to spend a little time to begin to figure it out. It's experimental. It's like poetry in that things are not spelled out for you. Images, and dream/nightmare images, drive the tale.
This is a revision of a confused review I did in October 2012 when I first read it. I had to read the whole thing all the way through to see the coherence in it, that it's about this couple, Sarah and Doug, like many conventional stories, it's about their relationship, like many conventional stories, but the nightmare/dream/surreal is as present in their experience as eating and sleeping and working. That's unique and interesting, right? I thought so.
So this was highly anticipated, and right form the first you can see it is signature Burns: bizarre, spooky, cartoonish/nightmarish in some of the drawing that almost comically masks a lot of ambiguity and insanity, hallucination. Is Burns going mainstream? Nope. It would appear Burns is going to keep going farther out, maybe.
I loved Black Hole, and didn't fully understand it, and that it part of why I loved it, that it is beyond reason, logic. But it is recognizably about adolescence, and sexuality, the dark loneliness and pain of it, filtered through a haze of drugs and alcohol. That's the point of the disjointed narrative, to disorient you, throw your narrative sensibilities off-kilter. And some tenderness survives.
But X'Ed Out moves even more in the direction of the bizarre, though we are still grounded in real human events. A guy named Doug who might be a guy from Black Hole, a few years down he line, wakes up from a stoned sleep and sees Inky, a cat he thought had died, and follows her through a black hole (ha!) in the wall of his bedroom to emerge into some sort of apocalyptic scene, which becomes a dream/nightmare world with green one-eyed distorted men, dwarves, worms, (apparently) aborted foetuses; and eggs, a lot of eggs. It's a drug-induced nightmare. This is the m.o. of this series, that we tack back in forth between a dream world and reality. Both seem as "real" as the other, in a sense. The past would seem to infuse these dreams. Something bad has happened to Doug, or he did something bad he feels guilty about.
Doug meets a girl at a party, an artist, and eventually falls in love with her. She is trying to extricate herself from a bad relationship. And that is the heart of this first volume, as far as I can tell on a couple readings.
After reading all three, I see what he is doing and there IS a pay off, it is worth hanging in there! Some of what he is about can be deduced or indicated from recurring images: A man’s face; dead foetuses; eggs; a pink blanket; television screens, and so on. But you need to spend a little time to begin to figure it out. It's experimental. It's like poetry in that things are not spelled out for you. Images, and dream/nightmare images, drive the tale.
This is a revision of a confused review I did in October 2012 when I first read it. I had to read the whole thing all the way through to see the coherence in it, that it's about this couple, Sarah and Doug, like many conventional stories, it's about their relationship, like many conventional stories, but the nightmare/dream/surreal is as present in their experience as eating and sleeping and working. That's unique and interesting, right? I thought so.
August 24, 2018
I did not get this, I'll be honest. I enjoy surreal, but not really horror surreal. I didn't know what was going on and I didn't like the art and I didn't like the story. I see all the reviews and people enjoy this. I guess I need someone to explain it to me. It is not my cup of tea. I'm not saying it's terrible, but it's not in my wheel house I suppose.
I will not be going on with this story. I leave it to those smarter than me.
I will not be going on with this story. I leave it to those smarter than me.
December 7, 2014
Before the story even begins, Charles Burns invites comparisons to Kubrick’s 2001 and Kafka’s Metamorphosis with a page of black and red panels followed by a picture of our protagonist, Doug, looking through a window at a vegetable monster lying in bed. This will be an unusual book.
And, with the beginning of the story where a Tintin-lookalike character (the cover’s homage to The Shooting Star is an indicator of one of this book’s key references) with a bandage on his head, waking up in bed, it’s clear Burns is aiming to place the reader on the same uncertain footing as Doug with his deliberately choppy narrative style. Is this a dream? A hallucination? What's real and what isn't?
Like Alice in Wonderland, Doug starts off following an animal into a hole that leads into a fantasy land. Rivers of green water, ruined houses, talking lizardmen, noseless monsters and strange red and white eggs, populate the eerie landscape as Doug tries to figure out what’s happening through a fugue state brought on by drug abuse and/or head trauma.
The story then switches to our world and Doug’s appearance changes from the cartoony look to a more realistic face. We’re presented with fragments of his earlier life as an unsuccessful performance artist called Nitnit (Tintin backwards), who reads Burroughs-esque cut-up poetry (a nod perhaps to the way Burns has written this book?) over discordant music while wearing a Tintin-like mask.
Scenes of his sickly father, his disturbed art photography love interest Sarah, and foetus after foetus - human, pig, alien - pass by. The mood is tragic, doomed, violent and dark, though it’s unclear (so far) what the story is. It’s possible that this is how Doug is dealing with heartbreak from losing Sarah, and maybe the miscarriage of their baby is responsible, especially as a Sarah lookalike enters the fantasy land at the end and is introduced as a “breeder”, a new Queen for the Hive.
And, though the story is as mysterious and unsettling as a David Lynch film, X’ed Out is so well-written, presented, and drawn that not knowing exactly what’s happening doesn’t matter because it’s so enjoyable. The swiftly moving story sweeps you up and you want to know more, you want to find out what’s happening and how it’ll end, and that’s the mark of a great story.
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? - especially as it seems like it will read much better as a whole rather than individually. But it’s still a brilliant comic that’s ambitious, thoughtful, creative and compelling, and definitely worth reading.
And, with the beginning of the story where a Tintin-lookalike character (the cover’s homage to The Shooting Star is an indicator of one of this book’s key references) with a bandage on his head, waking up in bed, it’s clear Burns is aiming to place the reader on the same uncertain footing as Doug with his deliberately choppy narrative style. Is this a dream? A hallucination? What's real and what isn't?
Like Alice in Wonderland, Doug starts off following an animal into a hole that leads into a fantasy land. Rivers of green water, ruined houses, talking lizardmen, noseless monsters and strange red and white eggs, populate the eerie landscape as Doug tries to figure out what’s happening through a fugue state brought on by drug abuse and/or head trauma.
The story then switches to our world and Doug’s appearance changes from the cartoony look to a more realistic face. We’re presented with fragments of his earlier life as an unsuccessful performance artist called Nitnit (Tintin backwards), who reads Burroughs-esque cut-up poetry (a nod perhaps to the way Burns has written this book?) over discordant music while wearing a Tintin-like mask.
Scenes of his sickly father, his disturbed art photography love interest Sarah, and foetus after foetus - human, pig, alien - pass by. The mood is tragic, doomed, violent and dark, though it’s unclear (so far) what the story is. It’s possible that this is how Doug is dealing with heartbreak from losing Sarah, and maybe the miscarriage of their baby is responsible, especially as a Sarah lookalike enters the fantasy land at the end and is introduced as a “breeder”, a new Queen for the Hive.
And, though the story is as mysterious and unsettling as a David Lynch film, X’ed Out is so well-written, presented, and drawn that not knowing exactly what’s happening doesn’t matter because it’s so enjoyable. The swiftly moving story sweeps you up and you want to know more, you want to find out what’s happening and how it’ll end, and that’s the mark of a great story.
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? - especially as it seems like it will read much better as a whole rather than individually. But it’s still a brilliant comic that’s ambitious, thoughtful, creative and compelling, and definitely worth reading.
February 9, 2013
Looking forward to a few more GNs in 2013. Not looking forward to attempting reviews of these GNs. Other than “nice ink-work” and “clever panel structure” I have little to offer to the burgeoning field of GN criticism. This first in a trilogy contains nice ink-work and clever panel structure. And worm-like alien things that live in omelettes. And postironic Tintin parallels.
November 2, 2010
The first issue in Burns' next long-form story, X'ed Out reads like a conflation of his own Black Hole moved on to 20-somethings with Naked Lunch (Burroughs gets a direct nod inside) and some kind of dismal-exotic Tintin adventure. It's a real intriguing start, building up unsettling, eye-catching motifs from the first page and slipping fluidly from conscious-present to remembered-past into subconscious-dreamworld collisions of the two. Sort of like the structure of Irvine Welsh's Marabou Stork Nightmares. But it's just a real intriguing start right now, with the next issue probably years off still, and so hard to judge just yet, without a little more idea where we'll be going. But I'm certainly curious to find out.
April 9, 2012
I find Charles Burns deeply unsettling. When I first read Black Hole, I had to put the book down every few pages, because I would start to feel nauseous. Even with the innocuous panels, just looking at the characters' mouths slightly agape, the bulbous pimples on their faces...it was too much. Now with X'ed Out, Burns goes even further: pig fetuses, worms screaming their way out of meat, lifeless aliens. It wouldn't be so bad if all this grotesquery were in service of something, but X'ed Out is all build-up with no payoff. 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.
January 15, 2022
This sure is weird.
October 16, 2017
A short, weird book that reads like a drug-addled nightmare deconstruction of The Adventures of Tintin. Depressing and dense, and just a bit too pretentious for my tastes. Burns’ art is on point though; the illustrations are always crisp and viscerally disturbing (when necessary.) While I had a hard time understanding what is going on, I discovered this volume is the first in a trilogy, and I liked it well enough that I wouldn’t mind seeing how the rest of the story played out.
September 27, 2020
bizzaro trip through dreams & memories.
December 1, 2010
To judge Charles Burns' X'ed Out immediately would be unfair; being the first of a series, it's kinda hard to tell where this one is going. Sure, the first installment always sets the tone, always, for what will be one's lingering, nagging initial impression of it all, the one opinion that, no matter how long and dragging or short and succinct the entire series is, you will never be rid of.
And, this being my first view of Charles Burns' work (I just got around to reading Black Hole), I don't want to pretend that I know what I'm talking about.
Let me try to share what I've so poorly grasped from it: Doug wakes up in a room where he sees a black cat and subsequently follows it out a gaping hole on the wall. What follows is a mishmash of present-tensed, out-of-this-world story that involves a hive of sorts, and of flashbacks of 20-somethings and Doug's relationship troubles. Oh, and I must mention the eggs. Definitely the eggs.
I don't want to sound like a phony and use the world 'tantalizing' to describe Burns' artwork (just so-so, but then that's just me). The only X'ed Out residue that's managed to stick to my brain is my curiosity as to what the deal is with the eggs.
For lack of anything substantial to say, I'm actually just talking gibberish.
Considering that this might just be another coming-of-age series with real creepy stuff thrown in, I'm still waiting for the next part of X'ed Out before actually making a judgement. That, and the fact that I still have more Charles Burns to read. So, Chapter Two, I'll be on the lookout for you. Then we'll see.
Originally posted here.
And, this being my first view of Charles Burns' work (I just got around to reading Black Hole), I don't want to pretend that I know what I'm talking about.
Let me try to share what I've so poorly grasped from it: Doug wakes up in a room where he sees a black cat and subsequently follows it out a gaping hole on the wall. What follows is a mishmash of present-tensed, out-of-this-world story that involves a hive of sorts, and of flashbacks of 20-somethings and Doug's relationship troubles. Oh, and I must mention the eggs. Definitely the eggs.
I don't want to sound like a phony and use the world 'tantalizing' to describe Burns' artwork (just so-so, but then that's just me). The only X'ed Out residue that's managed to stick to my brain is my curiosity as to what the deal is with the eggs.
For lack of anything substantial to say, I'm actually just talking gibberish.
Considering that this might just be another coming-of-age series with real creepy stuff thrown in, I'm still waiting for the next part of X'ed Out before actually making a judgement. That, and the fact that I still have more Charles Burns to read. So, Chapter Two, I'll be on the lookout for you. Then we'll see.
Originally posted here.
October 20, 2012
In the tradition of Charles Burns’ past work, Black Hole, comes X’ed Out, again with gorgeous artwork, only this time, rendered in beautiful color. In this new graphic novel, however, it’s unfair to review it because it is the first installment --in I believe a trilogy-- and is totally, completely fucked up in it’s fever dream-esque sensibilities, jumping around from an alternate reality where there’s alien/lizard-like worker-bee creatures, and giant, splotchy robin-color egg harvesting with said alien/lizard baby-fetus’ inside --- to a beaten down, drug-induced present time that seems insistent on forgetting what happened in the past --- to the dreary and alienating past where no one understands him and the only thing that’s maybe worth anything is that quiet, mysterious girl, Sarah, who’s a photographer that takes nude bondage portraits of herself with dead animal babies. Not to mention, the appearance of our protagonist, Dougy --or, Doug, as he likes to be called now--changes (or, evolves?) as the story maneuvers between the different times and places. Plus, there’s the possibility of his future-self speaking to his former-self?
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.
Very surreal, very demented, and very cool. I look forward to reading the second episode, The Hive, to see where this strange-adventure-down-the-rabbit-hole leads me. Mr. Burns, you have my attention. And to quote another famous Mr. Burns, that’s Excellent (with finger thumbing).
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.
Very surreal, very demented, and very cool. I look forward to reading the second episode, The Hive, to see where this strange-adventure-down-the-rabbit-hole leads me. Mr. Burns, you have my attention. And to quote another famous Mr. Burns, that’s Excellent (with finger thumbing).
April 23, 2011
Reading X'ed out is like staring at a Salvador Dali painting. The familiar mixed in with the morbid. The real mixed in with the surreal. There are no linear plot lines here. On no sir. X'ed out is almost manically multi layered.
Starting with the cover, the callbacks to Herge's Tintin stand out. The protagonist is an artist named Doug whose alter ego 'Nitnit' spits out William Burroughs influenced hipster poetry to the accompaniment of recordings of traffic and TV noises. The title seems to describe the narrative's major characteristic. Disconnection, dream sequences and flashbacks. Everything is more or less x'ed out, or x'ed out and put in somewhere else.
The book is the first in a projected series of 3. And does largely nothing in terms of telling us what it is about really, but one can tell its not about anything insignificant. The protagonist, confined to bed, goes through a strange set of drug induced dreams and flashbacks of his recent life. He is trying to forget. And often repeats "and this is the last thing i'll remember, waking up and not knowing where i am" effectively trying to X out a few things of his own.
The fetus is a repeating motif. Add to that Doug's obsession with seeking out female understanding, the strange state of his family (which is not quite fully explained when things end) screams out something Freudian. There is also an obsession with birth and fertility.
Crazy aliens, kindly dwarfs and frightened edible worms permeate his dreams. Along with a long dead pet ('inky' the cat. yes more Tintin parallels) and red-splotched eggs (a la Tintin and the Shooting Star).
The artwork is amazing. The colors are vivid and stained glass-like. And the panel sequences are used to covey the surreal feel in a way that is just right. Not too subtle, yet not too trying-too-hard ish. And the pace, very fast and movie-like. The ending is cliff hanger which sneaks up on you with all the stealth of a (insert clever reference to something very stealthy that also draws a sneaky parallel to what i've been talking about above). I am floored.
Starting with the cover, the callbacks to Herge's Tintin stand out. The protagonist is an artist named Doug whose alter ego 'Nitnit' spits out William Burroughs influenced hipster poetry to the accompaniment of recordings of traffic and TV noises. The title seems to describe the narrative's major characteristic. Disconnection, dream sequences and flashbacks. Everything is more or less x'ed out, or x'ed out and put in somewhere else.
The book is the first in a projected series of 3. And does largely nothing in terms of telling us what it is about really, but one can tell its not about anything insignificant. The protagonist, confined to bed, goes through a strange set of drug induced dreams and flashbacks of his recent life. He is trying to forget. And often repeats "and this is the last thing i'll remember, waking up and not knowing where i am" effectively trying to X out a few things of his own.
The fetus is a repeating motif. Add to that Doug's obsession with seeking out female understanding, the strange state of his family (which is not quite fully explained when things end) screams out something Freudian. There is also an obsession with birth and fertility.
Crazy aliens, kindly dwarfs and frightened edible worms permeate his dreams. Along with a long dead pet ('inky' the cat. yes more Tintin parallels) and red-splotched eggs (a la Tintin and the Shooting Star).
The artwork is amazing. The colors are vivid and stained glass-like. And the panel sequences are used to covey the surreal feel in a way that is just right. Not too subtle, yet not too trying-too-hard ish. And the pace, very fast and movie-like. The ending is cliff hanger which sneaks up on you with all the stealth of a (insert clever reference to something very stealthy that also draws a sneaky parallel to what i've been talking about above). I am floored.
September 4, 2011
I'm not quite sure what to make of this... in a good way. Charles Burn's "Black Hole" is one of those comics that I always direct friends to who want something that's both visually striking and intellectually or emotionally compelling. It's strange blend of nightmare imagery and adolescent awkwardness somehow manages to be both alien and intimate. And, in those regards, X-ed Out seems like a companion piece... but that's pretty much where the similarities end.
This book, which is apparently the first in a series, is brief and bold and, unlike Black Hole, brightly colored. The story, such as it is so far, revolves around slacker teen, Doug, and both his real life world, but also a nightmare reality which reads like Tintin gone wrong. I'm still not sure where its all leading, but its compelling enough that I look forward to the next volume.
I want to briefly address the word "nightmare" since I've used it a couple times in this review. Generally speaking, I think that dream imagery is overused in stories, and that very few people know how to use it correctly. Burns is definitely on that small list of people who wield it well. There's a Lynchian "ickiness" to it that feels authentic. And, furthermore, the way that this ickiness seems to bleed over into the "real world" parts of his comics seems to be strangely appropriate for the teen characters that inhabit those sides of his stories.
This book, which is apparently the first in a series, is brief and bold and, unlike Black Hole, brightly colored. The story, such as it is so far, revolves around slacker teen, Doug, and both his real life world, but also a nightmare reality which reads like Tintin gone wrong. I'm still not sure where its all leading, but its compelling enough that I look forward to the next volume.
I want to briefly address the word "nightmare" since I've used it a couple times in this review. Generally speaking, I think that dream imagery is overused in stories, and that very few people know how to use it correctly. Burns is definitely on that small list of people who wield it well. There's a Lynchian "ickiness" to it that feels authentic. And, furthermore, the way that this ickiness seems to bleed over into the "real world" parts of his comics seems to be strangely appropriate for the teen characters that inhabit those sides of his stories.
November 16, 2010
I confess that I don't have a catholic taste in graphic novels. My list of 5-star favorites would include It's a Good Life, If You Don't Weaken by Seth; Jar of Fools by Jason Lutes; most definitely Alison Bechdel's Fun Home; and anything by Loustal & Paringaux. (None of which I've reviewed on GoodReads, for some reason.) But it's a short list.
I picked up Charles Burns' Black Hole a few years ago when it first appeared, and was amazed by his drawing, which elevates into art a style I first discovered in Jack T. Chick's fundamentalist cartoon tracts when I was about 12. (Chick's insane, graphically subversive comics were somehow approved by the church I grew up in, and they still flourish online.) In the same way, Burns manages to infuse an obsessive pathology into every line he draws. But the story's DOA. Like most graphic novels, even the brilliantly executed, its telling seems stuck in some tormented masturbatory adolescence. 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. Suffice it to conclude: I'm underwhelmed.
Which no doubt says more about me than Burns. I'm probably the wrong audience.
I picked up Charles Burns' Black Hole a few years ago when it first appeared, and was amazed by his drawing, which elevates into art a style I first discovered in Jack T. Chick's fundamentalist cartoon tracts when I was about 12. (Chick's insane, graphically subversive comics were somehow approved by the church I grew up in, and they still flourish online.) In the same way, Burns manages to infuse an obsessive pathology into every line he draws. But the story's DOA. Like most graphic novels, even the brilliantly executed, its telling seems stuck in some tormented masturbatory adolescence. 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. Suffice it to conclude: I'm underwhelmed.
Which no doubt says more about me than Burns. I'm probably the wrong audience.
January 3, 2016
As first book in the series this did just enough to make me want to get the second one. I haven't read any Burns before, but I'm liking his style so far. It's creepy and original, but a little too angsty in some places. I'm hoping that the series will move away from the angst and go deeper into the weird.
The cover of this was what sold me on trying it. I was a huge Tintin fan and seeing the cover of L'Etoile Mysterieuse done in Burns' own style was awesome. You can see Herge's influence throughout the book too, especially in the dream sequences where the main character, Doug, looks like a Tintin version of himself.
Aside from Herge, apparently this takes a lot from Naked Lunch: The Restored Text, so I'm going to have to read that one before the next one in the series comes out!
The cover of this was what sold me on trying it. I was a huge Tintin fan and seeing the cover of L'Etoile Mysterieuse done in Burns' own style was awesome. You can see Herge's influence throughout the book too, especially in the dream sequences where the main character, Doug, looks like a Tintin version of himself. Aside from Herge, apparently this takes a lot from Naked Lunch: The Restored Text, so I'm going to have to read that one before the next one in the series comes out!
February 6, 2011
R. Crumb's blurb on the back cover says it all: 'It's almost as if the artist...as if he weren't quite...human!'
This is really just a ritzy comic book, the same length as the ones I used to buy for a dime, enlarged in page size, enhanced with gorgeously lush color, encased in hardcover, going for twenty bucks.
It's worth it (easy for me to say, because I borrowed it from my library).
A young man wakes up, at first remembering very little except that he doesn't know where he is. That's because while he was sleeping, the world was reorganized, or perhaps reverted to its natural status--a status E.O. Wilson might find familiar. Is he dreaming? He wakes up again, and again. Each time, things get stranger and stranger.
It's a spooky, weird tale, even more so than 'Black Hole.' And that's saying something.
Thanks to the superb draftsmanship and the expansive imagination of Charles Burns, 'X'ed Out' is a most wonderful spooky, weird tales.
This is really just a ritzy comic book, the same length as the ones I used to buy for a dime, enlarged in page size, enhanced with gorgeously lush color, encased in hardcover, going for twenty bucks.
It's worth it (easy for me to say, because I borrowed it from my library).
A young man wakes up, at first remembering very little except that he doesn't know where he is. That's because while he was sleeping, the world was reorganized, or perhaps reverted to its natural status--a status E.O. Wilson might find familiar. Is he dreaming? He wakes up again, and again. Each time, things get stranger and stranger.
It's a spooky, weird tale, even more so than 'Black Hole.' And that's saying something.
Thanks to the superb draftsmanship and the expansive imagination of Charles Burns, 'X'ed Out' is a most wonderful spooky, weird tales.
May 20, 2011
X'ed Out is what life would be like if you were listening to Pink Floyd and reading Kurt Vonnegut while living in a David Cronenberg film. It is the first in a new series of books (definately Rated R) by author and illustrator Charles Burns. This is how Wikipedia describes him: "Burns is renowned for his meticulous, high-contrast and creepy artwork and stories." He has designed album covers for Iggy Pop and had a series of stories entitled Dogboy adapted for MTV. The storyline of this piece is almost indescribable. It begins with a man tormented by nightmares that we all morphed from strange events that happened in his life. The book ends with the man in an alternate universe with one eyed humanoids and green humanoid aliens in business attire. On the last two pages we are introduced to the alien's new human breeding "queen". Book two: entitled The Hive will begin by explaining what the mysterious building is where we see the queen being led to.
Read
January 19, 2016reserving judgement for when I finish the 3rd book
But so far... I'm in!
I accidentally read the 2nd book before this one, but it's possible that doing so only pulled me in more as I was trying to figure out what was going on. Then I read this 1st book and was like, ohhhhh. Nope, I still don't know what's going on. 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. And I happen to dig the particular pieces I've come across so far. Can't wait to read book #3.
But so far... I'm in!
I accidentally read the 2nd book before this one, but it's possible that doing so only pulled me in more as I was trying to figure out what was going on. Then I read this 1st book and was like, ohhhhh. Nope, I still don't know what's going on. 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. And I happen to dig the particular pieces I've come across so far. Can't wait to read book #3.
April 4, 2014
I just can't seem to enjoy Charles Burns' work. 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. The characters are as one-dimensional and lifeless as the ones in Black Hole and nothing really exciting happens plot-wise (which would have been fair if the author was building up suspense but he wasn't).
November 16, 2010
I'm intrigued so far by Charles Burns' new serial outing, which like "Black Hole" promises to be an unsettling mix of realistic coming-of-age tale with the fantastically grotesque, in a visual style here perhaps best described as Tintin having a bad opium trip. I'll be waiting until all the volumes are out, though, before doing a substantial write-up of the entire thing.
September 21, 2013
It's crazy how talented some guys are.
October 11, 2020
I haven't read anything like this since my college years when I frequented a book and music store that carried underground comics, where I read my share of Zap Comics, Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, and Death Gasp. This has the look and feel of those experimental tomes.
This is the first part of a trilogy, and I expect the later volumes to hopefully offer an explanation of what is going on. Not sure if I'm going along for the ride, but I might check to see if the county library has copies of the next two volumes or the complete collection.
Burns leaves plenty for the reader to figure out in X-ed Out. I read this with others as part of a monthly book club, and there were many theories expressed.
My guess is that the protagonist had a nasty accident (hinted at) or a traumatic experience (hinted at) that caused him to black out some of the memories. In his recovery, taking drugs (either prescribed or copped from his apparently deceased father) he drifts in and out of dream states where he utilizes a hole in his bedroom wall to enter another dimension of weirdness.
The art is stylistic, expressive and often quite disturbing. Prominent themes are fetal pigs, worms, bondage, alien fetuses, bullying lizard men, a dead cat with apparently one more life, eggs and more. Some images recall The Adventures Of Tin Tin, particularly the cover with the discovery of a bright giant egg in a devastated world.
I was entertained by this in spite of the strangeness.
This is the first part of a trilogy, and I expect the later volumes to hopefully offer an explanation of what is going on. Not sure if I'm going along for the ride, but I might check to see if the county library has copies of the next two volumes or the complete collection.
Burns leaves plenty for the reader to figure out in X-ed Out. I read this with others as part of a monthly book club, and there were many theories expressed.
My guess is that the protagonist had a nasty accident (hinted at) or a traumatic experience (hinted at) that caused him to black out some of the memories. In his recovery, taking drugs (either prescribed or copped from his apparently deceased father) he drifts in and out of dream states where he utilizes a hole in his bedroom wall to enter another dimension of weirdness.
The art is stylistic, expressive and often quite disturbing. Prominent themes are fetal pigs, worms, bondage, alien fetuses, bullying lizard men, a dead cat with apparently one more life, eggs and more. Some images recall The Adventures Of Tin Tin, particularly the cover with the discovery of a bright giant egg in a devastated world.
I was entertained by this in spite of the strangeness.
March 3, 2019
I love how Charles Burns weaved an absurdist dream-world with the “reality” of life, loss, and emotional turmoil. It’s exactly where I’m at in my life.
Read
March 29, 2021Very trippy. Definitely need to read the rest of the series.
September 16, 2021
Nightmare hellscape, beautifully drawn
January 25, 2020
Tintín se va de tripi y Charles Burns dibuja una historia, a juzgar por este enigmático primer volumen, en la línea de Agujero negro, con personajes que chapotean en un malestar hecho de carne y esperanzas juveniles a punto de irse a pique. Esta primera y delgadita entrega sabe a poco.
July 10, 2015
A post-modern Tintin
26 April 2014
The main reason that I picked this comic up was because there appeared to be some similarities with the Tintin albums that I loved as a child. For instance, there are the eggs and the mushrooms:
and then there are the main characters, Tintin:
and Doug:
though of course they have different coloured hair, and Tintin does happen to have a lot more than does Doug (at least at this point in the album).
Okay, maybe that was not the main reason why I picked up this album (or comic, though the term graphic novel probably best suits it) but rather because the album itself seemed to just be plain weird. I would suggest that the world of the comic book has entered into the era of the post modern, but in a way that had already happened with graphic novels such as Fun Home. I could also suggest that they had also entered into the adult world, but then again adults have been reading comic books since they first hit the shelves.
So, where does that leave X'ed out. Well the novel does seem to jump back and forth between the world of the ordinary and the world of the unknown, and there also seems to be some seething mystery in the world of the ordinary because we are left wondering what it is that resulted in Doug being left in bed with a massive bandage wrapped his head and only four pills left. Further, what is that strange world that Doug inhabits at the beginning and the end of the novel, and what is it that happened to his girlfriend (the one that he dumped his other girlfriend for).
In many cases there seems to be a disconnect with regards to the reality in the comic, and in some cases it seems to follow the format of Fun Home, where the story does not have some definite beginning or end, but rather seems to act within some sort of circular form, as can be expected from the new form of literature. The story itself (and this is only part one, which is really annoying because the story does not come to some conclusion but is left on a cliff hanger, which seems to have annoyed some readers, though by glancing through the other commentaries there seems to be the strong suggestion that this is the nature of the work of Charles Burns) certainly has a beginning, but where the actually story begins not not necessarily all that clear in this album.
To me, this is certainly post-modern in style in the same way that Tintin is not only modernist in structure, but in some cases borders on the absurd. Further, we have the suggestion that with regards to the American comic book industry, it is only the modern era that the comics started to become dark and critical, and while Tintin is not necessarily dark, it can be very critical in many respects, though some of them had certainly bordered on the absurd (with the Castafiore Emerald something that you would expect to come out of the mind of Tom Stoppard, at least in the years before he became corrupted by Hollywood).
As for this story, it seems to be bracketed, meaning that at the beginning and the end we have this strange dream world that Doug is exploring, and then we move from the dream world to the world where he is stuck in bed with only four pills left, and then from there to that world where he had come into contact with the photographer (though he seems to jump back and forth a bit). It is difficult to move much beyond that because, as mentioned, this novel seems to be only partly completed, and in a way, it also felt a little rushed, and somewhat confusing, however it is certainly on a level that is much greater than many of the other rubbish that you see around the place.
26 April 2014
The main reason that I picked this comic up was because there appeared to be some similarities with the Tintin albums that I loved as a child. For instance, there are the eggs and the mushrooms:
and then there are the main characters, Tintin:
and Doug:
though of course they have different coloured hair, and Tintin does happen to have a lot more than does Doug (at least at this point in the album).
Okay, maybe that was not the main reason why I picked up this album (or comic, though the term graphic novel probably best suits it) but rather because the album itself seemed to just be plain weird. I would suggest that the world of the comic book has entered into the era of the post modern, but in a way that had already happened with graphic novels such as Fun Home. I could also suggest that they had also entered into the adult world, but then again adults have been reading comic books since they first hit the shelves.
So, where does that leave X'ed out. Well the novel does seem to jump back and forth between the world of the ordinary and the world of the unknown, and there also seems to be some seething mystery in the world of the ordinary because we are left wondering what it is that resulted in Doug being left in bed with a massive bandage wrapped his head and only four pills left. Further, what is that strange world that Doug inhabits at the beginning and the end of the novel, and what is it that happened to his girlfriend (the one that he dumped his other girlfriend for).
In many cases there seems to be a disconnect with regards to the reality in the comic, and in some cases it seems to follow the format of Fun Home, where the story does not have some definite beginning or end, but rather seems to act within some sort of circular form, as can be expected from the new form of literature. The story itself (and this is only part one, which is really annoying because the story does not come to some conclusion but is left on a cliff hanger, which seems to have annoyed some readers, though by glancing through the other commentaries there seems to be the strong suggestion that this is the nature of the work of Charles Burns) certainly has a beginning, but where the actually story begins not not necessarily all that clear in this album.
To me, this is certainly post-modern in style in the same way that Tintin is not only modernist in structure, but in some cases borders on the absurd. Further, we have the suggestion that with regards to the American comic book industry, it is only the modern era that the comics started to become dark and critical, and while Tintin is not necessarily dark, it can be very critical in many respects, though some of them had certainly bordered on the absurd (with the Castafiore Emerald something that you would expect to come out of the mind of Tom Stoppard, at least in the years before he became corrupted by Hollywood).
As for this story, it seems to be bracketed, meaning that at the beginning and the end we have this strange dream world that Doug is exploring, and then we move from the dream world to the world where he is stuck in bed with only four pills left, and then from there to that world where he had come into contact with the photographer (though he seems to jump back and forth a bit). It is difficult to move much beyond that because, as mentioned, this novel seems to be only partly completed, and in a way, it also felt a little rushed, and somewhat confusing, however it is certainly on a level that is much greater than many of the other rubbish that you see around the place.
July 17, 2018
First volume of this fairly recent Burns trilogy. A quick read with crisp lines and good illustrations.
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