Charles Burns vs Tintin

When I was a child I never really read the Tintin books (you were either an Asterix person or a Tintin person, and I was in group one while my brother was in group two), so I missed out on some great stuff when I was the perfect age for it.



As an adult, I am definitely a Charles Burns person (in the sense that I like his work, not in the sense that I'm some strange teenaged mutant freak with a tail like one of his characters). I liked his take on a classic Tintin cover for his most recent book, X'ed Out.

Now I discover that there's some weird France-only remix of X'ed Out called Johnny 23, which rearranges the images from the book, adds new art, and uses only the strange alien alphabet from the first book. It, too, references a classic Tintin cover.

X'ed Out, by the way, is very good, but it's also, annoyingly, only the first part of a story, which I didn't know when I bought it. Nothing on the book tells you how many parts there will be, or when the next one is due. Given Burns doesn't exactly churn out a new issue of his work every month, I wonder whether I'll see the end of this story before I die.

Charles Burns Continued!

Following on from my first Charles Burns post, I coincidentally received and read my copy of Chip Kidd's new novel, The Learners, yesterday. Kidd is the most famous book designer currently working, and certainly one of the most respected. He is also a very good novelist. This sequel to the moving and funny The Cheese Monkeys is a worthy follow-up. It also features a cover by Charles Burns.

At left you can see the front cover with its diagonally cut red half-jacket: the illustration itself is printed onto the cover boards. It's a characteristically alarming Burns image, and one very appropriate to a novel about a man whose life and ideas about himself are pretty much ruined by participating in Stanley Milgram's famous obedience experiment in 1961.

Here is the full cover (front and back), both with and without the jacket, so you can see Burns' artwork in full.

The Murky World of Charles Burns

Comic writer/artist Charles Burns has been slowly gathering fans and art commissions for years now. His breakthrough work was the fascinating, un-nerving adolescence parable Black Hole, collected into graphic novel form a couple of years ago.



An interior spread from the book is shown here, giving you a good idea of his thickly inked, moody style.



Before Black Hole, he produced a number of shorter comics, which have been collected in three volumes by Fantagraphics.


Recently, however, he has started to get commissions for book covers. Two of the more notable ones are shown here. The first is his appropriately grisly cover for Upton Sinclair's muck-raking The Jungle, published as part of Penguin's Graphic Classics series (classic books with cover art done by great comics artists).



Then, late in 2007, he provided the cover for the Zadie Smith-edited story collection, The Book of Other People. The UK and the US versions use slightly different variations of his artwork. I think the UK version succeeds because of the cunning use of a "belly strap" which hides one of the more alarming 'other people'.



Here's the US version, by way of comparison.



And as a final offering, here's the man himself in a self-portrait from the inside flap of the Black Hole hardcover.



Not a man you'd accept a lift from on a dark night, but a great illustrator.