A page from Charles Burns’s “Final Cut.”
How a Gen X Graphic Novelist Reinvented the Romance Comic
By Sam Thielman
The page is divided into a vertical grid of three panels. At top, a group of young people is gathered around a campfire. In the center, a close-up of a male hand grasping for a female hand. At bottom, a young woman waves goodbye to the group.
Charles Burns loves a doomed romance. This has been true throughout his career as a graphic novelist, and it remains so in his remarkable new book, “Final Cut.”
Burns tells this latest story using a visual style that he has honed over decades of comics, designs and album covers. He has frequently found ways to connect old pop culture and fine art, but here, he incorporates and criticizes his own work, too.
The viewport zooms out to show a wider view of the page with more panels.
It’s a complex book, especially because Burns is so adroit at telling a story with pictures that undermines and ironizes the story he’s telling in text. To understand it, we have to look at the way it’s rendered.
The viewport centers on another three frames. At top, a young man looks at a woman with red hair. In the center, a close-up of the woman’s face. At bottom, the young man waves goodbye to the woman.
In “Final Cut,” published in September, one of the book’s two narrators is Brian, a high schooler who loves doomed romance just as much as Burns does. The object of his desire is Laurie, a friend and the lead actor in the sci-fi movie that Brian, an amateur filmmaker, wants to direct. It’s a pretty corny movie — we see a young couple flirting at a campfire, the foreboding silhouettes of trees, and then … the monster! But this is only the surface.
Laurie, like many of the women in Burns’s books, is externally flawless — beautiful and magnetic. But she’s also a normal person with a complex inner life Brian refuses to consider, despite his obsession with her. He’d rather subsist on his own vivid fantasies, rendered in Burns’s perfect feathers of ink.
Here, those smooth, gentle lines give way to complex variegation on the surface of Brian’s imagined alien monster. Eventually, that monster will make a perfect duplicate of Laurie, à la “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.”
The viewport pans to a part of the page that shows a strange pink alien shape.
It’s a weird monster. That pitted, brainlike, meaty surface of this flying … thing … is vaguely obscene, as is the orifice between the tentacles underneath and the white, maggoty pods emerging from it.
A cover of a magazine titled “Famous Monsters of Filmland.” A female astronaut in a silver body-suit is being attacked by a green, tentacled monster with one eye.
In interviews, Burns has often said that he loves B-movie monsters. Like many of his contemporaries, he drank in every lurid page of the popular magazine devoted to their conception and fabrication, “Famous Monsters of Filmland.”
His influences are readily apparent and he has never tried to hide from them: A few years ago he published another zine, self-deprecatingly called “Swipe File,” citing several artists whose work he studied.
A cover of a comic book titled “Young Romance.” The cover shows a man in a blue dress coat speaking to an impassive woman. The speech balloon reads: “We’ve got to keep our love a secret, Marge.”
Among them was Jack Kirby, who created not only the Fantastic Four and the X-Men but also the romance comic genre — and heavily influenced the Pop Art movement.
For Burns, and for many fine artists, the tragic romance comics of the 1950s and ’60s are genuinely important.
A collage by the artist Richard Hamilton, depicting a living room in which a muscled man holds a Tootsie Pop. On the wall is a poster of “Young Romance” — the cover that we have just seen.
Pop Art saw something dreadful lurking beneath their surface; that same sense troubles Burns’s art as it did Roy Lichtenstein’s and Richard Hamilton’s. You can see a Kirby cover lurking in the background of Hamilton’s famous collage, “Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing?”
A comic book cover, with the title “Unwholesome Love.” A sweating man holds a woman in his arms; her eyes are crazed and she seems to be resisting his attention. In the background, two men witness the scene.
And though Burns’s introspections owe much to a bygone era’s culture, that culture’s accidental surrealism remains potent. As the past becomes less recognizable, its uninhabitable strangeness comes into sharper focus, which we see in Burns’s recent book “KOMMIX,” a collection of covers for imaginary romance comics.
The viewport opens up to a collage of images. At the top, a still from a movie in which an ape holds a copy of “Black Hole.”
Over the years, Burns has become part of the culture he criticizes. The success of his graphic novel “Black Hole,” which made a cameo in “Dawn of the Planet of the Apes,” was the culmination of years of work …
The viewport pans to a collage that includes a cover of “RAW” magazine, an album cover titled “SUB-POP-200,” a label for the brand OK Soda, and a still from the production of “The Hard Nut.”
… but its success was also a product of Burns’s decades of low-voltage ubiquity — on MTV, in Art Spiegelman’s comix anthology “RAW,” on the cover of the tastemaking music label Sub Pop and elsewhere.
The viewport pans to a collage that includes three pages from Burns’s past books; each page includes frames that put a female character in contact with dark, gross or monstrous material.
But Burns always returns to comics. For years, his central preoccupation has been the contrast between the body and the world, whether it’s the deformed body of a B-movie monster shambling through hedge-trimmed suburbia, or the beautiful body of a young woman amid junk.
The heaps of baffling and sometimes repulsive cultural detritus around his characters contrast sharply with the people he draws; they’re even textured differently. It’s as though the light falls differently on the worst parts of Burns’s worlds and on the characters who must pass through them.
In the pages of “Final Cut,” Burns seems to be asking himself whether he’s diminishing his heroines by forcing them to live in his nightmare worlds. The form and content are always working together to tell the story. In sections narrated by the Burns-like Brian, Laurie is often all but hidden — as though she’s been added as an afterthought or nearly cropped out of the frame by our hero, who is overwhelmed with his enthusiasm for his monster.
The viewport pans to another page from “Final Cut.” The page is divided into three horizontal panels. At top, a woman is seen on a zig-zagging path, with a large red foreign object looming over; in the middle, a close-up of the woman looking upward towards the object; at bottom, a man’s face fills the frame while a shadow of the woman lurks behind him.
What if Brian, with his passionate crush on Laurie, has completely misunderstood who Laurie actually is? What if, instead, she’s alienated in a way that simply doesn’t include him at all?
It’s not Laurie who receives the bulk of Brian’s attention, after all — it’s the strange, tumor-like monster he’s imagining, the one that dispenses a cocoon with a physically perfect alien duplicate of Laurie inside.
Another page from “Final Cut,” divided into three horizontal panels. At top, a hand is seen touching the surface of a red organic mass; in the middle, a wider view, showing the man’s face and naked torso as he touches the mass; at bottom, the base of the mass is seen on the ground, a white goo oozing out.
Late in the book, Brian dreams of a tragic death — but it’s not Laurie’s. It’s the destruction of the meat-monster he’s spent so long imagining.
In the dream, Brian confuses Laurie for his mother and is plagued by thoughts of the filthy home he doesn’t want to return to.
But the realest, most carefully rendered object is his fantasy creature, which leaks an anonymous fluid as Brian comfortingly touches its suppurating surface. This, it seems, is his true love: the thing that brings forth a version of Laurie that conforms to his fantasies.
Another page from “Final Cut.” The page is divided into six panels, showing a scene back at the campground. The young woman with red hair is joined by a young woman with yellow hair. In the last panel, the two walk hand-in-hand to a tent. The young man is shown peripherally in a few frames, no longer central to the story.
Laurie spends the book immersed in a romance of her own — a real romance, with Tina, a flesh-and-blood person, around the same campfire Brian daydreams about, rather than watch the movie he and his friends have made.
Laurie’s strand of “Final Cut” is the nearest thing to a straight romance comic Burns has ever done, set during the years when he himself was a young man, featuring a character much like Burns.
And Burns has carefully composed that character to be not merely unworthy of love, but incapable of the kind of selflessness love requires. It’s a tragic self-portrait, drawn with the kind of ironic hindsight that a Warhol or a Lichtenstein would envy.