Challenging and unique…an engaging, engrossing start by one of the most talented comic artists working today.”—October Country blog On the flipside the women in this book are mostly written badly. But this is likely deliberate because the protagonist doesn't really understand women, and the whole thing is filtered entirely through his perception. It allows those things to grow, and those ideas to grow, as I was working. And there was less — my first idea was: okay, this takes place in the end of the seventies, in around San Francisco or you know, in California, and he’s in Art School. All my friends were artists or photographers or musicians, and it’s going to be in that setting. Even if he does performance pieces and there’s a lot to do with photography and the idea of capturing moments in time with photographs, it doesn’t have much to do with punk music that much, or kind of historic — you know, examining a specific time period. It’s more about the characters and what they are struggling through. But I mean, I think that — again, it’s like that kind of fascination for that kind of other world that I delved into as a child, because he’s always going to exotic places, you know — something that looks middle-eastern, or… wherever he goes, there’s something kind of exotic and foreign about it, even then. That sort of thing plays into the story, but — but it may be some visual references, but it really has nothing to do with the Adventures of Tintin, it has nothing to do with the series at all, other than some kind of visual characteristics of his face and that sort of thing. Images, scenes, phrases noticeably begin repeating immediately. The Japanese romance comic that opens the book re-tells the story of how Doug met Sarah in the first book, and then later we discover Sarah loved to read old romance comics that Doug bought her at a flea market. 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. The comics seem to be the key to Doug’s story AND comics are how we’ll find out Doug’s full story. Layer upon layer of meta detail!

And, with the beginning of the story where a Tintin-lookalike character (the cover’s homage to The Shooting Star is an indicator of one of this book’s key references) with a bandage on his head, waking up in bed, it’s clear Burns is aiming to place the reader on the same uncertain footing as Doug with his deliberately choppy narrative style. Is this a dream? A hallucination? What's real and what isn't? Xavier Guilbert: There are a few times. What is interesting is that it’s often used as a way of putting side-by-side two aspects of the same person. I think the first time that happens is when Doug is out at a party, and he wants to suddenly relax. He’s done his stuff, it wasn’t well received, and you juxtapose the “normal” Doug with his “crazed” self, which is very reminiscent of the Iggy Pop disc cover you did in the past. Xavier Guilbert: So far, what is your experience with PFC? I guess that’s the first time you’re doing something like that… I enjoyed working with them in the past. They have a great collection of authors that are doing comics. It was just a matter of enjoying working with them and thinking that I was going to give this book its best chance to get out in bookstores.

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Laughs] I'm moving slowly. There's always a guilt factor. I'm a little over halfway through the next book, so I'm chugging along at a snail's pace, but I am working and moving ahead. There's other connotations as well. There's the whole punk culture where you're "X'ing" yourself out of "mainstream society." That was a theme than ran through that whole entire period. though of course they have different coloured hair, and Tintin does happen to have a lot more than does Doug (at least at this point in the album). this book is good. it is titillating. i have a good sense of what is going on, despite all the ambiguities, but i want to see what all he does with it—where he will take his kooky charles burns self. after he goes to the bank with my money, that is...

I confess that I don't have a catholic taste in graphic novels. My list of 5-star favorites would include It's a Good Life, If You Don't Weaken by Seth; Jar of Fools by Jason Lutes; most definitely Alison Bechdel's Fun Home; and anything by Loustal & Paringaux. (None of which I've reviewed on GoodReads, for some reason.) But it's a short list. Charles Burns: Yeah, it’s trying to — find something that works. It’s almost — I think that one of the things that I brought up in a conversation with someone is that the reason — there’s a lot of things that artists do to move forward. I think I was stumbling a little bit, because I was — so I have to pencil this thing, and then I normally pencil and ink, and at one point I was like: okay, pencil’s sufficient to give you a clear idea of what that is. So yeah, just finding things that work. Like: oh, this is not working at all, because I’m trying to struggle with the wrong end of whatever that is. But yeah, it’s a learning process, and in that regard, it’s just saying: okay, I’ve never done this before, and I’m a little intimidated, but I’m going to dive in, and, you know… it works. It’s fun. Burns leaves plenty for the reader to figure out in X-ed Out. I read this with others as part of a monthly book club, and there were many theories expressed.

When Doug goes to the fantasy realm he becomes Johnny 23 (though he previously called himself Nitnit), a Tintin lookalike who’s escaping from reality by pretending he lives in a crazy landscape filled with monsters and aliens and whatnot. That’s really what the performance art was all about - the mask. Putting up a barrier between himself and the outside world and pretending he was someone else. It’s pretty pathetic.

Doug is still deeply troubled that the love of his life Sarah is no longer with him, though we still don’t know what happened to her. Time has moved on and his life has changed but he’s been unable to move on. He talks to a new woman - a therapist, a friend? - about Sarah and his dying father, and it looks like he’s become dependent upon booze and pills to cope. 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. Burns’s comics are fluid, smooth and as solidly built as a vintage TV set, but they shudder with the chill of the uncanny.”— New York Times Book Review

Sugar Skull was an immensely disappointing let-down to what has otherwise been a fascinating series. Charles Burns explains everything in this final volume of his X’ed Out Trilogy, which is something you’ll either appreciate, because you hate any ambiguity at the end of a story, or dislike because that’s not consistent with the way this has been written thus far. Sometimes there are books that I just never want to end, though I feel sure I would be disappointed if they kept going. This latest trilogy from dark-comics master Charles Burns (preceding this volume were X'ed Out and The Hive) is a classic example of this. Though none of the worlds he's created herein are particularly pleasant ones, he has crafted them so perfectly and filled them with such involving (if usually repellent) characters that it was painful to see the end coming. Fortunately, the end -- when it comes -- encourages rereading the entire set. Xavier Guilbert: Would you say it’s because he’s a child, and therefore his personality still some kind of work in progress? Or would it be overanalyzing it? The Burroughs influence is just as strong -- the Moroccan Interzone-world where Doug has layered his memories in 'Naked Lunch'-nightmares -- and it signals Doug's state of mind as a morphine addict, as well as the horrors of withdrawal. We also learn that there is nothing in Doug's life so horrible that it justifies his fear. He's a coward, which is no doubt a terrifying revelation itself. He really is Nitnit, the reverse of Tintin. If Tintin represents bravery, curiosity, and a love of life, Doug has become the anti-Tintin.

a b El Borbah / Hard-Boiled Defective Stories at Don Markstein's Toonopedia. Archived from the original on December 2, 2015. Through each work in this trilogy— X’ed Out, The Hive, and Sugar Skull— Burns keeps us visually unnerved with surreal dreams meeting warped realities. The epic benefits from being collected here as a single set of inspired weirdness.” —The Washington Post So, he's (maybe) not just screwing with our heads, fellow readers (including me) who may have wanted to give up after the first book! This is a bizarre tale, but there also may be a fairly straightforward core to the story, wrapped in layers of fear and wonder and purple haze. I am coming to better understand horror as a genre. This is, as others have noted, work that is both horror and also somewhat surprisingly influenced by the deep warmth and charm of TinTin, seemingly simple kid comic stories (that seem less simple in some ways the more you look at them), the comics Burns loved as a kid, now twisted by alienation, rage, yet retaining some humor. There's an innocence and sharply drawn, boldly colored starkness about it all that is technically impressive, of course. Everything that's been set up in the previous two books comes to a head in this final one, and most of our questions are answered. In typical Burns fashion, though, every one answered brings up at least one question more. We see what happened to Johnny 23, his true identity Doug, and even the hapless Hive worker Nitnit, but none of them gets a happy ending. Charles Burns: Sure. I wouldn’t say nostalgia, but autobiography, absolutely. The scene where there’s the direct reference to Radio Ethiopia, that was based on — it had to be later than that. It had to be 1977 — but you looked it up, so I trust you.Nightmarish but oddly innocent… some of his most visually mesmerizing and handsomely presented work to date.”— Santa Cruz Metro I think, too, this trilogy is in some ways formally a tribute to William Burroughs and the kind of storytelling surrealism Burroughs did. Burns shows us a single, clearly and (maybe) lovingly rendered portrait of William Burroughs in this volume as a clue to the considered madness of his method. What's the feeling of it? Dream, but often nightmare, that really infuses his work, or seems to. A resolution to Doug's relationship with Sarah takes place, we get to learn what all the recurring fetus/egg images may mean (or not). Time expands, we move into the future, other men, other women, work their ways into the narrative.