Graphic Novelist Charles Burns Talks About Compiling a Decade's Worth of His Work

Since 1995, graphic artist Charles Burns has been releasing serial installments of a dark tale, set in Seattle in the 1970s: A sexually transmitted "bug" is passed from teenager to teenager. No one talks about it openly, but the bug causes mutations ranging from violent?boils, tails, skin folds, melted faces?to the more easily disguised. Burns follows the story of a few teenagers?some infected, some not (and some about to be)?as they move from the safe grounds of their suburban homes to the runaway refuge in the woods outside the city, founded by the most deformed. Through precise black-and-white drawings and pitiless dialogue, Burns portrays a world of teenagers that is as violent as it is melancholy, in which the fears and alienation felt by adolescents take on a literal form.

The comics, released once or twice a year by Fantagraphics, have develolped a devoted fan base, making the full collection, Black Hole, which arrives in stores tomorrow, one of the most eagerly anticipated books of the year. Story continues below, followed by a Q&A with Charles Burns ?

Burns, who in some circles is as famous for his illustrations and graphic art as for his comic books?he's done covers for Time, The Stranger and Iggy Pop's album Brick by Brick?himself grew up in Seattle in the 1970s and went to college with fellow comic greats Matt Groening and Lynda Barry. In a telephone conversation with The Book Standard recently, Burns talked about the traumas of adolescence, raising kids while drawing kid-inappropriate comics and compiling a decade's worth of work.

The Book Standard: Your publisher, Pantheon, has issued a press release that calls this book "semi-autobiographical." Do you think this might make some readers a little anxious for you?

Charles Burns: I guess so! I mean, a little alarming for me, too. But you know, I didn't write that, so. . . . What can I tell you? I think almost any writer that I'm aware of certainly puts themselves into their fiction one way or another. My adolescence certainly was not anything like what I've depicted in my book. On the other hand, there is an emotional tone that does kind of reflect that period of my life, and maybe there are some incidents that are similar to my adolescence. So I would call it semi-semi-semi-autobiographical. But I didn't know any girls that had grown tails, or anything like that.

TBS: But you did go to high school in Seattle in the '70s, and characters from your adolescence also appear in the book, don't they?

CB: Some characters, some characteristics, some situations, some dialogue are based on real life, on people I knew. In the front, there are drawings that are based on high-school photographs, and those are certainly based on real people. They're from my own yearbook.

TBS: Really? What about the mutilated, post-bug images of those kids in the back?

CB: Oh yeah. That's the problem. I'm going to be giving a talk in Seattle, and there's always that off chance that someone's going to walk up to me at a book signing, and they'll be upset about the depiction of themselves. I mean, there are some people that I felt perfectly happy altering, and there are other people?a couple of very sweet, cherub-faced girls?that I altered, that I feel kind of bad about. Eh. What are you gonna do?

TBS: One of the things that I really enjoyed about the book is how you make the darkness and the confusion of adolescence?especially surrounding drugs and sex and independence?literal. What was the thinking behind doing that?

CB: I know that I could have told the story just totally straight. I mean, I could have told a similar story. But I wanted to have something that kind of pushed it to an extreme. So I worked with the idea of how, in adolescence, you're going through these transformations not only physically, but also emotionally, intellectually, trying to learn what it is to be an adult. I wanted to have something that would push those transformations further, make them even more extreme, and make that kind of alienation that they experience more literal. I also like playing with the idea that some people can hide their affliction. It's under their clothing, and they can pass for normal.

TBS: Is that why the kids who seemed already to be outcast seem to get more extreme manifestations of the bug? The kind of geeky kids?

CB: The idea is that it could be random. For example, there's one girl who's overweight, who's out in the woods with the kids who've run away, and she never shows any real afflictions, other than that she's kind of overweight. So I liked the idea that maybe she's found these people who are more accepting of her. That even thought she has no real reason to run away, she does it just to be with some kids who will accept her.

TBS: You have two daughters?how old are they now?

CB: My eldest daughter is 18, and my youngest daughter just turned 16.

TBS: Does observing your daughters going through adolescence also help you connect with aspects of the story?

CB: I've been asked that before. And it makes me a little uneasy. It really was an internal story. It really did not reflect anybody other than myself and my experiences. There were things that I recognize in my daughters as they're still growing up that I went through. But as far as their actual experiences, they didn't really inform the book at all.

TBS: I'm sure that's also the answer they'd prefer to hear.

CB: Well, you know it's funny. I was working on Black Hole for a long time. And early on my daughters would come in to my studio, and there would be some page I was working on, and I would flip it over and be like, you know, this is just not really appropriate for kids. My daughter just turned 18, and I was joking with her about the fact that now she can legally read my book.

TBS: And has she read it yet?

CB: She's read portions of it. Again, they come in and see me working, and so they know the gist of it. My younger daughter said she really wasn't interested in reading it. And that's fine.

TBS: You've been publishing the book serially for about 10 years. Did you envision it as one story arc? Or was the serialized aspect important to the way you told the story?

CB: It had always been planned to be compiled into a complete book. Hopefully that's the way it reads. It's just the nature of the way I work and it really needed to be serialized, because that breaks it up into kind of manageable pieces that I could get out on a fairly regular basis, once or twice a year.

TBS: You went to college with Matt Groening.

CB: Yep.

TBS: Does that mean you went to school with Lynda Barry as well?

CB: Exactly. I spent the last year of undergraduate school at this place called the Evergreen State College, where both Matt and Lynda Barry were. I knew Matt because I was working at the little school newspaper, and he was working there writing, and in the second semester, he was the editor. I was pasting up ads and doing comics, and that sort of thing.

TBS: Was Lynda working for it as well?

CB: She was doing comics. I knew her because there was a gallery there, and she sort of helped put together a show that I did with my friends.

TBS: So Matt was your editor?

CB: Yeah, he was an editor for a semester. It's funny?he would do little doodles, like small little comics, but I never had a sense of him being like a cartoonist at all. He was more like a writer. His sense of humor was absolutely there, intact, from when I knew him. We worked on a parody of a local newspaper together, and if I read it now, there are portions of it that still make me laugh out loud. It was just odd, years later, because I thought I was the cartoonist and he was the writer. But he certainly proved that wrong.

TBS: Are you influenced by comic books that you read as a kid?

CB: There're a lot of things that contribute to it. Certainly the comics that I read growing up. In our household we had a lot of books, and a lot of art books, and we went to the library a lot?my parents went to the library every week, and came back with books and stacks of art books. My dad especially was interested in comics, so he would bring back collections of classic American comic strips, and I looked at all those things. I think there's a certain kind of line quality and a certain look, of comics from the '40s and '50s that certainly found its way into my work.

TBS: Did you have particular favorites as a kid?

CB: A lot of the things that affected me were comics and work that I looked at before I could actually read. Trying to make sense of what the stories were and what these characters were doing before I knew the references at all was important. I know that that had an effect on me, on my sense of storytelling. I would sit there and project myself into the artwork and create my own story.

TBS: Black Hole seems like such a personal work, and you've been doing it for so long. How do the professional illustrations you do for magazines compare to the work you've done on the novel?

CB: Well, it's still my work, and I am proud of it, but there's a difference in the content. One is an editor calling me up with a story that they want illustrated, so it's someone else's work. When I do my own stories, every inch of it's mine. I have control over every single aspect of it?the design, the storytelling, the pace, every single thing?so it is something that's much more personal on that level. It's also a story. And that's the part that's the most interesting to me, the story. So it's a difference between illustrating someone else's work and telling a story with comics.

TBS: Graphic novels have been getting more attention in the mainstream media over the past couple of years, but a lot of people still take that "The Comic Book Grows Up!" approach. What do you think of that?

CB: Well, eventually that will go away. I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that there was a lot of attention on graphic novels around the time that [Art Spiegelman's] Maus came out. And there were a handful of other big books that came out around that time. But there was kind of a void after that, because there really weren't any big interesting new graphic novels to come out immediately afterwards. I think more recently, there's been a more constant supply of more interesting books coming out and getting attention, as they should. I think eventually it will just reach a point where graphic novels, or whatever you want to call them, will be reviewed the same way many books are. Before, graphic novels were kind of a buzz word. The mainstream superhero publishers would repackage their Iron Man comics and call that a graphic novel. And if you were interested in looking for more interesting books, you'd be faced with something like that, rather than finding other good, interesting books.

TBS: Is having graphic novels reviewed in the same way books are and by the same reviewers something that's interesting to you? They are a different form.

CB: Well, there was one review of Black Hole that was just refreshing, because it didn't have that preface that a lot of articles have saying "what are these new things?" It was just treated the same way you describe a painting or a book?it talked about what the content is. Again, I think it will take a while before it kind of sinks in, but I think it's moving in that direction. They are different things from regular prose, though. On the other hand, nobody explains to you what movies are. "This is a moving picture, a motion picture that people enjoy watching. And it's got sound!"

TBS: So what are you working on right now?

CB: Right now I'm taking notes on a new story, slowly but surely. And I'm also putting together a book of illustrations and sketches and miscellaneous pieces that haven't been collected anywhere else. So I'm putting out a giant art book with some of my illustrations and other pieces.