X'ed Out: Charles Burns

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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. Brazil is the story of a man named Sam Lowry, a low level government bureaucrat trapped in an Orwellian dystopia whose only means of escape is through his dreams. The dreams of both Doug and Sam contain elements of chivalric romance in that the women in the dreams are both idealized and imprisoned, and the men go on a quest to save them.

In 1991, choreographer Mark Morris commissioned him to create illustrations that were then used as a basis for his version of Tchaikovsky's The Nutcracker, The Hard Nut.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. Soon, Burns found fans out East in Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly, who published him in their comics anthology “Raw” and later put out his first books, “Big Baby and Hard-Boiled Defective Stories. For Doug, his own disappointment comes not just from becoming like his father, but also from never trying to push himself as an artist, especially when compared to Sarah. 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. One figure he sees stands out from all of the others because of his distinct lack of strangeness, an old man sitting in a room wearing the same clothes as Doug.

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. In volume three, Doug and Suzy are spending time together in her room in the Hive when her stomach suddenly starts to swell. The comics that Doug brings to Suzy tell the story of Doug’s relationship with Sarah, but like the memories in X’ed Out, the story is broken up and out of sequence, with large pieces missing. Early in X’ed Out, Doug/Johnny 23 finds himself wandering through the surreal streets in his dreamworld.

But it is recognizably about adolescence, and sexuality, the dark loneliness and pain of it, filtered through a haze of drugs and alcohol.