Through the metatextual motif of reading-comic-books-as-detective-works, Burns explores themes of trauma, abjection, and distance. Doug’s drug-dreams dramatize the missing pieces of these narratives, and the Interzone set-pieces propel the mystery aspects of the narrative forward, as Doug’s alter-ego plumbs the detritus of his psychic fallout. In The Hive, we learn more about Doug’s troubled relationship with Sarah, who has problems out the proverbial yingyang (not the least of which is a violent psychopathic ex-boyfriend).īurns weaves the story of Sarah and Doug’s relationship into the fallout of Doug’s father’s death-a death Doug was completely shuttered to, we realize. Throughout the narrative, Burns plays his characters against the extreme, often hysterical dramas of 1950s and ’60s romance comics his strong lines and heavy inks readily recall the early works of Simon and Kirby, but more precise and careful-something closer to Roy Lichtenstein, only more sincere, more emotional. In the “real world” - which is to say the world of Doug’s memory - we learn that he buys a stack of old romance comics for Sarah on their first date. These missing issues stand in for the information Doug (and Burns) withholds from the reader, the missing fragments that have been x’ed out.īurns uses romance comics as a framing or organizing device, a motif linking the disparate worlds of his narrative. One breeder seems to be a version of Doug’s ex-girlfriend the other is a double of Sarah, who asks Doug/Nitnit to bring her romance comics-which he does-only he skips a few issues. His primary role though is secret librarian, catering to the reading needs of the breeders of The Hive. Doug (or Nitnit) has found employment in The Hive as a kind of mail clerk or janitor.

The title refers to a location in Interzone. The Hive (part two of the proposed trilogy) deepens the richness and complexity of the world Burns has imagined. What made X’ed Out so compelling (apart from Burns’s thick, precise illustration, of course), was the sense that this Interzone was a reality equal to Doug’s own “real world” - that it was somehow more real than Doug’s dreams.

In this alien world, Doug takes on the features of Nitnit (an inversion of Tintin), the alter-ego he adopts when performing spoken word cut-ups as the opening act for local punk rock bands. In his parents’ suburban basement, Doug parcels out the last of his late father’s painkillers, slipping from haunted memories of his relationship with Sarah into fevered nightmares of abject horror and then into a wholly other world, a realm that recalls William Burroughs’s Interzone.

In X’ed Out, Charles Burns created a rich and strangely layered world focusing on Doug, a confused and injured young man.

Black hole book charles burns