X'ed Out: Charles Burns

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Like Alice in Wonderland, Doug starts off following an animal into a hole that leads into a fantasy land. In each version of the stories Doug is telling, romance comics play a part, and, mirroring this series and his own life, there are issues missing in between the comics Sarah is reading so she’s not getting the whole story.

Elsewhere in the fantasy world, he’s still the young Tintin lookalike Nitnit but he’s now working in the Hive alongside the lizardmen to supply the breeders with romance comics. Given that we’re only in the first third of “X’ed Out,” drawing conclusions about where it’s all going just isn’t possible. Fans of Burns, who haven’t seen a major work out of him since 2004’s “Black Hole,” will be happy to know he’s in fine form. 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. X’ed Out” centers on Doug, a twentysomething performance artist who’s recuperating in his mother’s house from what looks like a brain operation and a break-up.I don’t look back at my work and disregard earlier things I’ve done, and there are hints of things bubbling up to the surface in some of my older stories, but there was a shift when I became more interested in developing my characters. The second trilogy is about dystopian futures and begins with Brazil and continues with 12 Monkeys (1995) and concludes with the recently released Zero Theorem (2013). I look forward to reading the second episode, The Hive, to see where this strange-adventure-down-the-rabbit-hole leads me. 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. In the early 1990s, his Dogboy stories were adapted by MTV as a live-action serial for Liquid Television.

The pig foetus reappears though this time it’s coming out of Sarah’s stomach in a self-inflicted C-section, and the Tintin-esque eggs make another appearance.It ends with Doug retreating back to his fantasy as Johnny 23 and reverting back to the same imagery of the opening pages of the first book.

The book ends with the man in an alternate universe with one eyed humanoids and green humanoid aliens in business attire. In Sugar Skull, Nitnit now discovers the connection between these huge eggs and the awful cries of the breeders in the dead of night – though, alas, he roundly fails the test that this moment of clarity brings. Burns has said that the disease is a metaphor for adolescence, but I prefer to read it as a simple horror story. 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. It’s odd how we haven’t seen Doug’s mother yet and that Burns seems to be moulding Doug into his father’s image ever so slowly.

Then, in a warehouse full of red and white eggs (Tintin fans will recognize their alien coloring from Hergé’s “The Shooting Star”), he encounters salamander men (in office attire) who toss him out onto the street. I mean, if you wanted to show an illiterate or stupid person in a movie you’d show them reading a comic.