Charles Burns (1) (1955–)

This is an intense one. I didn't realize it was set right in my neighborhood. Sort of. Geographically, it's in the neighborhood where I live now. ( I ride my bike across Ravenna Park every day to and from work.) Psychologically, my experience of those mid-70s years was painfully similar to what these characters experience. Still, I know those people and those places. Harrowingly surrealistic. Though we didn't have the same bug virus out on the Prairie, we had all the other behavioral eccentricities and afflictions described here.
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I picked this up on a whim from the library from the graphic novels display. I'd heard the name Charles Burns, but aside from perhaps a collection of authors, had not read any of his work.

His non-linear storytelling, graphics style, and typography are all appealing to me. What was not appealing was that this is not a stand-alone volume. In fact, after reading it, I knew very little of the storyline at all-- and not enough to ensure that I will pick up the next volume.

Bound in hardcover, I was expecting a standalone or at least a complete story in a collection of others. However, in fact, the scene shown on the cover of the book does not even happen in this volume.

Burns's style is much more intriguing in color than in black and white (I picked up a collection in which he appeared as a featured author, but in black and white, to compare) and I think he's heading somewhere interesting with _X'ed Out_: a story which plays with the malleability of memory, family patterns, memory loss, mental illness, identity...with a nice dose of a possible parallel universe thrown in. Maybe.

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