Book Review: Final Cut by Charles Burns

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.