X'ed Out: Charles Burns

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Sarah is a bit of a self-harmer and a photograph of a wrist cut harks back to that vaginal picture we saw on the wall way back on the frontis piece. It ends with Doug retreating back to his fantasy as Johnny 23 and reverting back to the same imagery of the opening pages of the first book. Currently, New Zealand’s Karl Wills uses the look in his punk “Jessica of the Schoolyard” series, and filmmaker Steven Spielberg’s Tintin adaptation is supposed to appear as a 2011 Christmas release. From the creator of Black Hole, the second part of a new epic masterpiece of graphic horror in brilliant, vivid color. Given that we’re only in the first third of “X’ed Out,” drawing conclusions about where it’s all going just isn’t possible.

Charles Burns delivers brilliantly on all the mysterious secrets and horrific clues he set up in the first two volumes. A weird buzzing noise on the other side of the wall has woken him up, and there, across the room, next to a huge hole torn out of the bricks, sits his beloved cat, Inky, who died years ago. The main reason that I picked this comic up was because there appeared to be some similarities with the Tintin albums that I loved as a child. 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).I was expecting Burns to show us something shocking and horrific that explains why Doug’s life has been shattered and why he’s created this elaborate fantasy world to cope. Sarah’s counterpart in Doug’s dream is named Suzy and she makes her first appearance at the end of the first volume. In the end neither Doug nor Sam is able to save the women they love, and both men meet very different ends.

Very little is ever revealed about her apart from her job which is a truck driver and that she lives above the Buttles. I had some vague idea that I’d spend four years in college and then when I got out I’d be an artist and make a living.I look forward to reading the second episode, The Hive, to see where this strange-adventure-down-the-rabbit-hole leads me. Even with the innocuous panels, just looking at the characters' mouths slightly agape, the bulbous pimples on their faces. As for this story, it seems to be bracketed, meaning that at the beginning and the end we have this strange dream world that Doug is exploring, and then we move from the dream world to the world where he is stuck in bed with only four pills left, and then from there to that world where he had come into contact with the photographer (though he seems to jump back and forth a bit). He spends his days living in the basement, taking painkillers, sleeping, and looking at old photographs of himself and Sarah.