I was just thinking about sex being this dangerous and frightening thing rather than what it’s supposed to be, which is just the opposite. “Obviously, the direct AIDS metaphor is there - there have always been sexual diseases floating around, but now there’s a killer.

And how the body can manifest a psychological state.” With his teen-plague stories, which culminate in Black Hole, Charles Burns deals with sexual anxiety. it’s this fascination I have with the separation of the mind and the body.

A common theme in his work is physical transformation and invasion, “. As a result my brain rotted…” Underneath his distinctive ice-cold, hard-edged, black and white art work are dark and disturbing stories that deal with childhood traumas, loss and alienation. So I was able to read comics without being told they were going to rot my mind. “My father’s a scientist who once wanted to be a cartoonist. “The work of Charles Burns is a vision that’s both horrifying and hilariously funny, and which he executes with cold, ruthless clarity… it’s almost as if the artist… as if he weren’t quite… human!”Ĭharles Burns (1955- ) portrays a disturbed world of dark horror and kinky science in his comic strips, the product, he admits, of over-exposure to American pop culture in his youth.

Charles burns graphic novels