CHARLES BURNS grew up in Seattle in the 1970s. His work rose to prominence in Art Spiegelman's Raw magazine in the mid-1980s and took off from there, in an extraordinary range of comics and projects, from Iggy Pop album covers to the latest ad campaign for Altoids. In 1992 he designed the sets for Mark Morris's restaging of The Nutcracker (renamed The Hard Nut) at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. He illustrated covers for Time, The New Yorker, and The New York Times Magazine. He was also tapped as the official cover artist for The Believer magazine at its inception in 2003. Black Hole received Eisner, Harvey, and Ignatz awards in 2005. Burns lives in Philadelphia with his wife and two daughters.
“Burns’s oeuvre is frequently cited as ‘strange,’ but that’s
perhaps oversimplifying a world more thought-provokingly described
as recognizably like our own, except for when it’s not—and it’s the
difference between the two where Burns’s power to shine a light on
the darker side of human nature lies…the result will stick with
readers long after being absorbed.” —Publishers Weekly, starred
review
“The Hive is a tour-de-force of psychedelic storytelling, an
astonishing piece of graphic literature that combines strange
characters, even stranger situations and locales, and multi-leveled
narratives in a way you have never seen before on the page. Burns’
work is utterly unique, and he has no fear about experimenting and
trying to engage the reader in new ways. Perhaps his greatest gift
is finding a way to make you find empathy for people and things
that you would normally find off-putting or disgusting. Burns is
one of the few talents who stands above the medium, and deservedly
so. Easily one of the finest works you’ll see this year.” —Comics
Waiting Room
“As if the introduction to this series wasn’t hallucinatory enough,
this second installment will leave initiates feeling significantly
disoriented. And perhaps that’s part of the point, as Burns
blurs the distinctions within this anti-narrative among comic
books, reality, drugs, masks, nightmare and identity…A very
creative artist lets his imagination loose in the middle of
somewhere, where only the most adventurous lovers of graphic
narrative might dare to tread.” —Kirkus
“Burns’ clean, highly refined style contributes to an unnerving
reading experience when reconciled with the slippery, seething and
roiling quality of a story as it’s taking place—on multiple levels
of consciousness, timeframes and planes of existence…Burns is
making us slow down and savor this morsel of brilliance in a
timeframe that starts to even out the ratio of writing time to
reading time. If that’s vindication for an author—one whose visual
style incorporates thousands of beautiful hash marks, each tapered
perfectly with a tiny brush—then I’m all for it.” —The Comics
Journal
“If you want to play against type and give a completely nonholiday
gift for the holidays, wrap up a copy of Charles Burns’s The Hive.
It’s a creepy tour de force, weaving together layers of paranoid
nightmares, and a sequel to Burns’s X’ed Out. It’s as though the
tenants of Ware’s townhouse all dropped bad acid at the same time,
and Burns’s drawing delivers the horror in full-color,
palm-sweating detail, complete with armies of maggots, sadistic
lovers, and desolate underground factories patrolled by
foul-mouthed alien overlords. Not a stocking stuffer for the little
ones.” —Boston Globe gift guide
“Intelligent, carefully crafted and emphatically not for everyone.”
—Paste Magazine
“The beautifully disturbing, non-linear tale leaps effortlessly
between the real and unreal. Though in this installment, the lines
further blur as elements from the bizarrely apocalyptic reality and
the ‘normal’ collide. Inspired equally by the works of Hergé and
William Burroughs, Burns once again provides one of the best
graphic novels of the year.” —Nexus Graphica Top Ten
Praise for X'ed Out:
"Terrifically creepy . . . I loved every second of this book."
—Boing Boing
"Burns's comics are fluid, smooth and as solidly built as a vintage
TV set, but they shudder with the chill of the uncanny." —The New
York Times Book Review
"A surrealistic, often horrifying book . . . a Tintin homage for
grown-ups." —The Stranger
"A fantastic meta-reality where Burns' spastic yet tightly reined
imagination is allowed to feed on itself deliciously." —AV Club,
"A" review
"Taps into the archive of gothic and grotesque imagery . . . What's
dormant inside of Tintin—the abject fear that Hergé rarely
acknowledges—X'ed Out brings to life." —The Comics Journal
"Cause for celebration . . . a visual feast as much as a literary
one, and it dwells in the mind long after the final pages have
turned." —Culture Mob
"Tantalizing...a gorgeous head trip." —New York Magazine
"Bizarre, haunting, horrific, funny . . . Burns is skilled at
paralyzing readers, and leading us into worlds we never knew
existed." —USA Today
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