The Comforts of Horror

Daniel Lukes reviews Charles Burns’s “Final Cut” and “Kommix.”

By Daniel LukesNovember 17, 2024

• SF

• Comics

HORROR IS EXPERIENCING a new golden age at the moment, and for good reason. We live in horrific times. We’ve suffered a global pandemic that has killed over 7,000,000 people, and which we have not properly reckoned with as a society or culture. We face a climate crisis that we refuse to seriously engage with as a global community. Costs of living are soaring and economic inequalities are widening. The specter of fascism is rising again as we watch, and we refuse to budge from the capitalist paradigm that exacerbates all of these looming dangers. Finally, over the last year, we have been forced to watch genocide, the massacre of children and adults, every day on social media, with social penalties for anyone who raises their voice against this atrocity.

We are, as they say on X (formerly Twitter), living in hell. With our future curtailed and thus the science fiction imagination in deep trouble (apart from postapocalyptic and dystopian scenarios, which still thrive), it’s no surprise that people are turning to horror to understand our present moment. Body horror in particular speaks to our times, whether helping us make sense of the expendability of human bodies in the capitalist machine, as explored by Sayak Valencia in Gore Capitalism (2018) and Jon Greenaway in Capitalism: A Horror Story (2024); offering a reckoning with Black history and Black lives, such as in the works of Jordan Peele and Little Marvin; or illuminating the struggle for bodily autonomy in the new wave of queer, trans, and feminist horror fiction and film, from Gretchen Felker-Martin’s Manhunt (2022) to Julie Ducournau’s Titane (2021).

Charles Burns, as his two new books—Final Cut and Kommix—remind us, provides a key voice in modern body horror: a master at identifying the horror of what it means to have a body, to be a body, and to be apart from that body. Burns made his mark in the 1990s with the darkly brilliant Black Hole (1995–2005), a coming-of-age story in comic book form centered on a sexually transmitted disease that transforms its carriers into monstrous outcasts, rendered in a stark black-and-white style conveying the effect of woodcut. Despite being set in 1970s Seattle, where Burns grew up, Black Hole was very much legible as a parable for the HIV/AIDS epidemic, an issue at the forefront of the mind of any young person discovering their sexuality in the 1990s.

What made Black Hole such a career-defining tour de force was Burns’s ability to perfectly capture the destabilizing sense of uncertainty that comes over you as a teenager, when your body begins to transform into something else, something alien to you, and the world around you suddenly shifts and settles into something harsh and ugly. Burns evokes brilliantly that idea, which M. Belanger describes in the introduction to the brilliantly titled Your Body Is Not Your Body: A New Weird Horror Anthology to Benefit Trans Youth in Texas (2022):

At puberty, flesh reshapes itself into something neither comfortable nor entirely recognizable. Every mirror’s a traitor and you feel alien in your own skin. And that’s not the end of it: family, doctors, perfect strangers may seek to control and define your body with or without your capitulation. You may be objectified, fetishized, medicalized, and politicized. Your Body is not Your Body.

Burns’s visions of teenage bodily transformation and tentatively queer desire in Black Hole are as relevant today as in the 1990s and 2000s. Even prior to Black Hole, Burns’s peculiar style—grimy but playful—was central in crafting the very aesthetic of the ’90s: gloomy, apathetic, ironic, distanced. His art adorns the seminal Sub Pop 200 compilation album (1988) and cans of failed soft drink OK Soda alike. Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly served as Burns’s early champions, publishing his work in RAW.

And then what? For any artist whose work defines an era, the question of relevance and where to go next risks becoming a major career roadblock, and despite his role as the house cover artist for The Believer, it feels as though Burns has been drifting a bit since then. This is especially true when compared with the output of contemporaries like Daniel Clowes or Gilbert Hernández, who have put out incredible work over the last two decades, leaning heavily into genre fiction. Clowes’s time-traveling Patience (2016) in particular is undoubtedly a career high.

Burns’s Last Look trilogy (2016), his first major work since Black Hole, was a bit of a head-scratcher. While Burns can’t be faulted for trying something different, Last Look missed the mark, at least for me. With its overt nods to William S. Burroughs via insect/humanoid characters, Orientalist street markets, weird factories, and grotesque food, plus a warped version of Tintin, no less, Last Look weaved a dreamlike body horror story that turned out overly Burroughsian. The excessive homage permeated not just Last Look’s imagery but also its cut-up method, and this postmodern referentiality somewhat drowned out the storytelling. Visually also, despite the successful switch from black-and-white to color, Last Look felt like a throwback to Burns’s early work like El Borbah (1983–99), with its more cluttered style, before he had fully learned to let his images breathe, and to wield the simple power of the void—the expressive force of empty space on a page.

It will thus come as a relief to Black Hole fans that with Final Cut, Burns seems to have gotten his groove back. Originally published in France as Dédales (“Mazes”) from 2019 to 23, Final Cut follows a period of writer’s block and returns somewhat to the coming-of-age awkward teenage unrequited-love world of Black Hole. Final Cut still splices in pop culture references, in the form of classic sci-fi horror B-movies like the 1956 Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but it does so more fluidly. The two protagonists are Brian, an introverted young artist with a tendency to lose himself in reveries, and Laurie, the young woman playing the lead role in Brian’s latest home movie. She introduces herself to him at a party, which kicks off an obsession on his part that will go on for the next 200-odd pages. There, budding sexuality, awkwardness, desire, and paralysis are relayed through images of cocoons, pods, and tentacles, the classic detritus of sci-fi cultures rendered beautiful and strange by Burns’s expert pen strokes and spellbinding art.

Final Cut blends dreams, visions, and movies in function of a timeless story of awkward first love, and the fact that we experience the narrative from both characters’ perspectives restores a welcome sense of balance to what otherwise could have been a typical self-pitying incel narrative—rather than the complicated queer love triangle it ends up being. Everything comes to a head in a moviemaking camping trip, and Burns is at his best revealing what lies at the interstices between nature and human, vision and reality, sobriety and altered state, earth and stars, on the cusp of probing that which defies symbolization: a sense of belonging to something larger than us, whether it be the cosmos or biological life. Burns is deft at exploring how we use narrative and culture to try to make sense of it all, especially during those teenage years when films and comics can be so important to us, carrying the weight of sexual and emotional sublimation.

Burns doesn’t really get political per se, but maybe there is a cautionary tale here about how culture can be abused, and a warning against getting lost in overly sentimental or nostalgic narratives of the past. Brian certainly becomes consumed by his thwarted desire for Laurie, seemingly disappearing into his world of dreams, movies, and art. He wants his horror movie to change the past and give him a happy ending. Final Cut walks the line between nostalgia and caution, creating a breezy yet eerie, dreamlike vibe, satisfyingly recalling the world of Black Hole without fully lapsing into sequel territory. Color acts as the main visual difference between the two, and Burns deploys it as expertly as he previously used black-and-white. For this review, I used digital PDF versions of Burns’s work, but the publishers were also kind enough to send me hard copies, and the colors in print vibrantly pop off the page—especially the red common to both Laurie’s hair and the bodies of the spherical, podlike aliens.

Kommix, meanwhile, envisions in a collection of 80 fake comic covers almost an alternate history of comics, referencing everything from wholesome favorite Archie to Phoebe Gloeckner’s harrowing A Child’s Life and Other Stories (1998), mixing up alternative and mainstream comics alike, as well as invented alphabets that recall Chinese and Korean characters. As you flick through these covers, equally delighted and horrified by images in which aliens intrude on humans, skin is disfigured and mutates, people kiss and embrace in grotesque ways, and half-recognized characters pose for the camera, a theme common to Burns’s work in general emerges: romance. The work evokes the ways that cultural productions, from the lowbrow to the surrealistic and conceptual, function as sublimations of unfulfilled desire, and how body horror carries the burden of helping us through strange bodies and strange times.

When I picked up Kommix, it struck me how the collection repeats characters and visual elements from Last Look. Oh no! I thought, not this again. But actually, those materials resonate more compellingly here. Last Look didn’t really know what it wanted to be, but Kommix wants to be pure comics, fully freed from having to tell a meaningful story. Where Last Look tipped excessively into genre fiction without enough grounding in realism, Kommix is pure world-building, an exploration of the comics genre as a world unto itself—one in which the flotsam and jetsam of visual pop cultures constantly threaten to jump out of the page, barely contained by the frame. With its alien bodies, unfamiliar alphabets, stories that never were, metafictional universes, retrofuturistic world-building, and grotesque distortions of beloved childhood and teen iconography, Kommix takes broad swipes at comics-as-nostalgia, warning off attempts to present the past as innocent or whitewash it: Tintin himself could be extremely racist, after all. In a way, Kommix is the perfect answer to a world in which photographic reality is already indistinguishable from AI deepfakes: the future is not what it used to be, but neither is the past.

Kommix is also a bit like a comics remix/covers album, presenting a warped world in which the past seems not comforting but uncanny and alien to us, with Burns’s love of phallic and Freudian imagery at the forefront. We humans are so invested in denying our animal bodies, as we spend more and more time in disembodied and virtual states at the workplace and at home, with our heads in the cloud. But Burns won’t let us forget that we were worms not too long ago, and maybe will be again soon.

It’s serendipitous that Kommix and Final Cut are coming out around the same time, because with these two books, you get both sides of Charles Burns: the deep storyteller and the playful grotesque—plus the comforting yet uncanny feeling that he’s still relevant and producing fascinating and thought-provoking nightmare fuel.