Random Thoughts

X’ed Out/The Hive/Sugar Skull by Charles Burns (230x303mm)

After Burns had been doing comics about diseased teenagers for a few decades, X’ed Out arrived out of the blue. 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 remember being really excited about X’ed Out, but… I remember nothing about the subsequent volumes (that arrived with a two year gap between).

But let’s open the first volume.

Ooh, cool.

Ooh, nice!

Oooh!

OOoh whaaaa!

Now that’s the way to do a book. Burns sets the tone from the moment you flip open the cover: The endpapers are perfect, then there’s some mysterious squares, and then we’re dropped right into some very mysterious action indeed.

It wouldn’t be Burns without plenty of body horror.

And then… we’re out of that universe and into the “real world”, and everything seems to reference everything else. It’s great! It’s gripping!

Those squares at the start? They’re used to mark shifts between time periods or worlds, and we slowly but surely are given more and more information about what’s really going on here.

Perfect first volume, and shows a lot of growth from Burns.

And then… the second volume. Burns adds more time levels, and adds more body horror in the Tintin-verse… but… we get more melodrama, and things start seeming less like a kick ass comic than the storyboards to a post-Lynch indie movie.

Burns does have a lot of fun with bringing romance comics into the proceedings — while the “real world” gets progressively more like an indie drama movie.

Finally, in the third book, he lost me. Everything ties together so neatly — we started with nothing but mystery, and we end with everything being made exceedingly clear. And it turns out that what we’ve been reading wasn’t that interesting, really.

Even Burn’s inhumanly fabulous artwork starts looking trite.

Burns is usually such a consummate perfectionist and amazing storyteller that pages like these are a real disappointment.

The post-ending (after the plot ends and everything is resolved) is pretty nice, though.

Exactly!

Sugar Skull was an immensely disappointing let-down to what has otherwise been a fascinating series. Charles Burns explains everything in this final volume of his X’ed Out Trilogy, which is something you’ll either appreciate, because you hate any ambiguity at the end of a story, or dislike because that’s not consistent with the way this has been written thus far.

But worse – far worse – is the disproportionate balance between the apocalyptic, messed-up, heightened tragedy of Doug and Sarah’s story, that has been built up now over two volumes, and the bafflingly banal and truly uninspired reveal of the secret at the heart of this series.

This blog post is part of the Punk Comix series.

Inkstains #4 & #5 (170x261mm)

Since so many of the artists I’ve covered in this blog series have been at the School of Visual Arts (and I’ve talked about the Bad News anthology here, here, and here, which was done by students and teachers at the SVA), I thought it might be fun to have a look at some of the more recent student publications coming out of that school. Well… er… “recent”: These are almost twenty years old, so…

They apparently do a yearly portfolio, but that’s for the illustrators — Inkstains seems to be more for the people on the comics side of things. And there doesn’t seem to have been a comics anthology for quite a while.

These were presumably comics that were just handed out to people? But gives the students a chance to see their work in print.

The work is, indeed, studentey, but with a wide variety of approaches (Stevey Uy.)

None of these seem to be, like, class assignments — “do a strip featuring this theme using that style”, but are instead just… er… stuff? (Damian Demartino.)

And here we have somebody illustrating the lyrics from a Metallica song, as you do at that age. (Mike Zagari.)

Many of the artists here have got a quite distinctive style, but the stories leave something to be desired (Mike Patrissy.)

Aaaand… Raina Telgemeier (who’s also listed as the co-publisher and co-editor). Whatever happened to her, eh? Eh?

The fifth issue has a very nice cover by Dash Shaw as the high point…

It’s not that the rest is without interest… (Jamie Kelly.)

But… nothing seems to go anywhere interesting. (Larry Chy.)

But then again, it’s student work, so…

So it’s financed by the Visual Arts Student Association? That makes sense, I guess.

And then Faryl Dalrymple does the back cover.

I’m not sure what I expected here, but it does seem like the offerings here are much more… commercial… than I thought they would be? And nobody here really seemed to have anything to say.

That’s my interpretation, anyway.

They had to draw something, but were unwilling (or unable) to put anything personal into any of the pieces. I had expected some autobio or whatever, but instead it’s Metallica lyrics and O. Henry stories about devils and murder.

This blog post is part of the Punk Comix series.

Satiroplastic by Gary Panter (107x157mm)

This book has a kinda cool strip of paper around it, where the title is done as holes in the paper.

Apparently Drawn & Quarterly planned a three volume set, but only this one was published.

This is a facsimile (sort of) of Panter’s sketchbook from 1999 to 2001.

I say “sort of” because he’s added a couple things (I’m guessing), like this contents page (or that may already have been in there)…

… but I’m guessing this introduction wasn’t there.

But then it’s on to the sketches, and they’re pretty cool. They’re presented in no particular order (which is how he drew them, at a random blank page in the book), but they’re all dated.

It’s pretty varied.

And a couple seem to have been worked over on several occasions.

Did he fill these pages in with black marker and then paint with white-out?

These sketches are quite unlike his comics, I have to say. Still pretty, though.

Oh, yeah, then that happened.

Jimbo!

So — that’s a pretty neat little book. (It’s very small.)

I can’t find many reviews of this on the intertubes, but here’s something:

And, also luckily, Panter’s trademark distressed line is sensitive to all his surroundings, bringing a city street to life as easily as a country vista. Panter is an engaging, funny and insightful visual companion, and this work offers an illuminating look into the mind of a creative visionary.

And this:

Compared with other cartoonist-artists who have published work from their sketchbooks (in no particular order, Adrian Tomine, Peter Kuper, Seth, R. Crumb, Chris Ware, Hernandez Brothers), Panter’s sketches are on the whole far less refined—in the best sense of the expression. But then, Panter is…different. And the raw reflections of Panter’s inner world are a welcome change from the more stiff and fastidious approaches of other artists.

This blog post is part of the Punk Comix series.

Amy + Jordan by Mark Beyer (146x204mm)

This was published by the same people who did Gary Panter’s Dal Tokyo the year before. It’s in the same format, and again, it’s a French book with un-translated English text.

The book is a mainly a subset of the stuff later reprinted in the 2004 Pantheon book, so I’m not going to re-read this book now, but just note a couple things.

As with the Panter book, it’s got big flaps…

… and a “hidden” illustration.

Then the title…

… and then it’s onto the strips, which are all printed like this, which sometimes makes it hard to read the dialogue that falls in the gutter.

But hang on… that top strip there wasn’t included in the Pantheon edition?

Neither was the top one here? Or am I just misremembering? That could well be, but the other strips are super familiar (I just read the Pantheon book), and certain strips don’t ring a bell.

Again, the top strip here seems unfamiliar.

So… I ended up sitting down to read this book, and it’s a surprisingly engrossing read. I mean, considering I’d just read most of these strips a few hours ago, in a larger and clearer format. There’s something about seeing these strips in this format that’s really appealing: The yellowing paper and the gutters cutting each strip in two makes it seem like I’m reading some strange artefact.

I don’t recognise the strip on the bottom there, either… It’s totally possible that my Old Timer’s Disease is kicking in, or Beyer (or Pantheon) edited out some strips in that collection.

Neither of these strips seem familiar… I flipped back to see whether there’s anything in particular that would make anybody remove some of these strips in particular, and the top one here I could see them being uncomfortable with, but the rest are pretty normal Amy + Jordan strips.

I guesstimate that there’s about a dozen strips here that’s not in the Pantheon volume.

Then we get a career overview…

Copyright page…

And it’s over.

That’s a really good book. Kinda perfect? I’ve had it since the late 90s… I think I happened upon a copy at… er… perhaps Lambiek?

This blog post is part of the Punk Comix series.