reviewed
by Luke C. Jackson
Charles Burns. Final Cut. Pantheon Books,
2024. 224 pp. US $34.00 (Hardcover). ISBN:
978-0-593-70170-6. https://penguinrandomhouselibrary.com/book/?isbn=9780593701706
I first read Charles Burns’ graphic novel Black Hole in
my early twenties. Since then, I – like many people – have considered it to be
required reading for those who seek to understand the storytelling potential of
the comics medium. First published as a series of twelve comics, Black Hole was
collected and published in hardback by Pantheon Books in 2005.
Set in Seattle in the 1970s, Black Hole tells the
story of a group of teenagers who contract a sexually transmitted disease,
referred to as “the bug” and often read as a metaphor for AIDS. This disease
causes sufferers to see hallucinatory, psychedelic visions, before transforming
them into nightmarish versions of themselves. As a result, sufferers are ostracised
and forced to live in the hills outside town. The haunting images of these
grotesque doppelgängers are captured in the book’s end papers, which act as a
dark mirror to those in the front papers. In stark black and white, both depict
yearbook-style images, their subjects staring at the camera – and the reader –
their pre-evolutionary smiles replaced by tumor-like growths and gaping wounds.
And yet, the book asks, is it these funhouse mirror-like images that are the
true horror, or the plastic smiles of the teenagers within whom these monsters
had once lain dormant?
Burns is an eclectic creator. Before the creative and
commercial success of Black Hole, he came come to the attention of the
comics community as an artist for Françoise Mouly and Art Spiegelman’s RAW
Magazine. His cover for Raw #4 is dystopian, disquieting and yet strangely
beautiful, the perfect visual encapsulation of that issue’s promise to be ‘The
graphix magazine for your bomb shelter’s coffee table.’ Since finding
mainstream success with Black Hole, Burns has created covers for Time,
The New York Times Sunday Magazine and The New Yorker, while he is
both co-founder and cover designer for Believer Magazine. He has also
continued to explore the narrative potential of comics through his work on X’ed
Out (2010), The Hive (2012), and Sugar Skull (2014), a
trilogy of short books that use a disarmingly Tintin-like visual style to
convey a characteristically disturbing worldview.
Like Black Hole, Burns’s latest graphic novel, Final
Cut, is a teen drama in which supernatural occurrences are an allegory for
social and psychological torment. With their parents either absent or
neglectful, budding filmmakers Brian and Jimmy have recruited some of their
classmates, including the beautiful and alluring Laurie, to help bring their
latest cinematic vision to life. Inspired by the 1960s version of Invasion
of the Body Snatchers, directed by Don Siegel, the boys' film – which
is never titled – tells the story of a group of campers who stumble across an
alien invasion and are subsequently replaced with simulacra. In this way, the
central conceit is reminiscent, also, of Burns’ previous graphic novel.
However, unlike Black Hole, the focus here is on the construction of
narrative itself, through the medium of film, and on how creative choices
necessarily reflect the desires, biases and limitations of their creators.
While shooting the film, for Brian at least, reality gives
way to fantasy, the natural gives way to the supernatural, the terrestrial to
the alien. Burns utilizes the medium of comics to reflect this fluidity,
switching between different page constructions, artistic styles and colors
without warning. A single page begins in a traditional ‘waffle iron’-style,
with panels separated by thick black frames and characters presented in muted
colors with little shading. Only moments later, this construction breaks down,
as a panel – depicting a greyscale still from the 1960s classic film The
Last Picture Show - stretches the width of the page. The still itself
depicts an almost barren landscape, devoid of people, capturing Brian’s sense
of isolation, as well as his spatial and temporal dislocation.
The more attuned we become to Brian’s perspective, the more
the book comes to mimic the frames of a movie, which, unlike the panels of a
comic, are uniform in size, shape and rhythm. This allows Brian to construct a
world that is more predictable, one in which his wishes can be fulfilled.
However, the events of the graphic novel are not told exclusively from Brian’s
perspective. The reader is also invited, at crucial moments, to see things from
Lauren’s point of view. Whereas, for Brian, the events depicted in Final
Cut function as an elegy for lost innocence, for Lauren they represent
a time of self-discovery – a new beginning. Ultimately, it is up to the reader
to decide which of these perspectives they accept as true. In this way, Burns
suggests, the ‘final cut’ is not Brian’s, or Lauren’s, but ours.
Author Bio:
Dr. Luke C. Jackson is an author, teacher and researcher
based in Melbourne, Australia. He has written novels, films, games, and graphic
novels, including Two-Week Wait: An IVF
Story (Scribe, 2021). His
current research focuses on the spatialities of texts, including comics.
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