The woodcut lines and visceral surrealism of the Philadelphia cartoonist Charles Burns figure in three hardcover collections reprinting nuggets from Pantheon’s Hard-Boiled Defective Stories and various issues of Art Spiegelman’s Raw magazine. Burns’ unsavoury fairy tales typically centre on any number of comic book clichés (–sinister scientists, dogged detectives and teenage lust feature regularly-) before slowly warping into luridly compelling cautionary tales. Familiar pulp iconography is given new resonance in Burns’ cartoon laboratory, his oddly gripping narratives evoking childhood’s intrigues, fantasies and fears. His characters inhabit a world that is cold, seedy and grim, an unsettling background hum of something monstrous pervading even the most innocuous of scenes. This is not the world inhabited by Charlie Brown.

El Borbah  follows the adventures of a masked, overweight Mexican wrestler turned private eye. Big Baby blurs suburban unease with extraterrestrial STDs and other B-movie nightmares, while Skin Deep  features doomed romance, architectural hairstyles and the pitfalls of interspecies transplantation. Any one of these collections would serve as an excellent starting point for those unfamiliar with the artist’s singular mix of black humour and droll, stylised draughtsmanship. For Burns enthusiasts and those with a taste for the artfully bizarre, a complete set is a must. Two further volumes, completing Burns’ oeuvre, are scheduled to follow shortly.

© David Thompson 2002

Big Baby, El Borbah & Skin Deep are published by Fantagraphics, $24.95 each, 104 pages, hardcover

Mail order: 001 206 524 1967

Published in Eye: the International Review of Graphic Design #43, March 2002