Back in 2014, Charles Burns found himself at an unlikely career crossroads. The author, cartoonist, and illustrator had finished his graphic novel trilogy Last Look and had reason to be satisfied. Critics and readers hailed Burns as one of the world’s greatest comics artists, right alongside Art Spiegelman, who published his work in Raw. Burns has won awards, including an Ignatz, multiple Harveys, and an Eisner. His résumé includes everything from series like Big Baby and El Borbah, which defined the 1980s and ’90s alt-weekly comics aesthetic, to album covers for Iggy Pop, to commercial work for Altoids and OK Soda.
But whenever he tried to start a new project, it fizzled out. “I went for months and years,” Burns, 68, says via phone from Philadelphia. “This is shit,” he remembers saying to himself. “I should know how to do this.” Facing what he calls the worst creative frustration of his career, he found himself thinking, “Maybe this is it. Maybe I don’t have anything at all.”
So, to prove he still had something in the tank, Burns set himself a small goal: finishing a seven-page story. If he couldn’t do that, he told himself, he’d have to start doing something else.
He began with a memory of sitting (“very stoned”) in his friend’s kitchen and drawing himself as an alien in the reflection of a chrome toaster. To his surprise, that scene became the opening to Final Cut (Pantheon, Sept.) and proved to him that he still had something to say.
Fans of his work and new readers will be glad Burns finally found his story. Final Cut is an eerie and powerful graphic novel about Brian, a shy young artist whose creative and romantic obsessions intertwine, taking him to the brink of madness. Set, like much of Burns’s work, in the forested mountains of the Pacific Northwest during the 1970s, Final Cut starts at a party, where Brian meets Laurie, a red-haired beauty who isn’t put off by his social awkwardness.
After this meet-cute, the book splits to reveal Brian’s and Laurie’s points of view. Collaborating with childhood friend Jimmy on an amateur science fiction film heavily influenced by Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Brian begins working Laurie into his story as a kind of muse. At the same time, Laurie attempts to parse whether Brian’s intentions are romantic or platonic. When the two, along with Jimmy and some friends, hike into the wilderness to make their movie, the gulf between Brian’s artistic and romantic fantasies and reality threatens to derail him completely.
Burns imbues the story with a potent sense of disquiet and illustrates the similarities between romantic and creative obsession. The backdrop is simultaneously beautiful and threatening. Burns’s typically heavy shading and dark colors create a noirish claustrophobia at times, but the book is interspersed with roomier and more expansive scenes—often large representations of Brian’s screenplay fantasies in which tentacled alien pods drift over primeval wilderness.
As fantastical as some parts of the book seem, it draws heavily from Burns’s life. Born in Washington, D.C., in 1955, he moved around a lot with his family before settling in Seattle in 1965. As adolescents, “my friends and I would go hiking, take trips up to the mountains.” And like Brian, he grew up with a friend who had a projector and a trove of 8 mm monster flicks, which inspired the DIY films they shot together.
Burns’s 8 mm habit was not sustained. What did stick in his youth was drawing. “I was interested in art,” he says. “I was the kid who drew in school.” He liked comics, from Mad magazine to Tintin, but had broader interests as well. “It wasn’t one of those things where I had blinders on and was only enjoying comics,” he says, adding that he had a “vague idea” of going to college and then “being an artist.” He studied at three different schools in Washington state before attending UC-Davis, where he earned a master’s degree in art.
Teachers and friends thought Burns was talented and encouraged him. But his early career wasn’t without its challenges. “When I was starting out there really wasn’t a place for me,” he says. “Most of the underground comics had slipped away.”
Burns had read superhero comics as kid but says he “didn’t have the skills or the interest” to pursue the genre. Hoping to possibly produce art comics, he moved to New York City. He first published with Raw in 1981 and then in Heavy Metal. In 1982, he married the painter Susan Moore, with whom he raised two daughters in Philadelphia.
During those early years, Burns says he tried anything and everything. If he heard about a space opening up in the back of the Village Voice that could fit a one-panel comic, he pursued it. But, realizing that he wasn’t a “gag cartoonist,” he transitioned to serializing linked stories. His early work—Big Baby and El Borbah, with their punk humor, mutant characters, noir styling, thicket of references, and disdain for mainstream conventionality—found readers as indie comics and in alternative weeklies. But Black Hole, a 12-issue series he started publishing in 1995 through Kitchen Sink Press (later Fantagraphics), was his breakthrough.
Though Final Cut is reminiscent of his earlier work, it also represents something of a shift, in part because it is inspired by cinema rather than comics. In addition to Invasion of the Body Snatchers—several frames of which Burns reproduces beautifully in the book during a pivotal scene in which Brian takes Laurie to see the film—Final Cut references The Last Picture Show. That detail was also drawn from Burns’s youth. He says he vividly recalls being devastated after seeing the movie in 1971 in the theater with his best friend and sister: “We walked 20 minutes without saying a word to each other.”
Memories from his youth and the Pacific Northwest as a setting form a strong through line in Burns’s work. Still, there have been times, he says, when “I was thinking I needed to find some other time period or location. But I always somehow pull myself back there.”
Though some aspects of his work may not change, Burns isn’t interested in repeating himself. “If I’d been smart,” he says, “my marketing strategy would have been Black Hole 2.”
To this day, people ask him about writing more stories about El Borbah, the Mexican wrestler and private detective character whose absurdist exploits he hasn’t revisited for decades. “I wouldn’t have a clue how to do that,” he says. When he’s done with a story he moves on. And ultimately, he wants to follow his instincts rather than plan out his next steps.
“The reward of spending so much time on a project,” he says, “is discovering something you did not anticipate. That’s why I keep trying to create new work.”
Chris Barsanti’s writing has appeared in the Hollywood Reporter and other publications. He is the author of several books, including, most recently, Six Seasons and a Movie.
