Charles Burns – X’ed Out
I’ve been anxiously waiting for Charles Burns’ X’ed Out since an issue of “The Believer” reproduced a single page of this first installment of an ongoing hallucinatory epic that smashes The Adventures of Tintin into Naked Lunch to produce a savage nightmare that draws upon the commonplace, mundane fears in life and amalgamates them, as The Metamorphosis, Gilliam’s Brazil, and most of Kobo Abe’s novels do, with the most fabulously bleak and hellish terrors that all of existence might at the penultimate moment be revealed certainly as a grimy, insectile, perversely monotonous shuffling of papers on a clerk’s desk in a sub-basement rather than a romantic endeavor of the beleaguered human spirit endeavoring eternal bliss. The book is beautifully distressing, narcotic, and stupefied to better restrain a smoldering outrage at the promise made, and simultaneously broken, at the moment of birth.
That being said, I was exposed to my first page of X’ed Out whilst I sat on the toilet, so my l’il interpretation might be just a smidgen informed by its being germinated in the windowless, moldy cell at the heart of my apartment where I conduct my periodical befouling (mere inches, what’s more, from the place I eat); because I was so knocked-out by that single page of Burns’ accomplishment, I remained seated for an extra ten minutes scrutinizing every crystal-clear panel.
“This is so up my alley it kind of hurts!” I said to myself.
Twisted psycho-sexual images are wheat-pasted to the walls of a sparsely-populated and gutterless desert city in which some seedy enterprise is being perpetrated by lizard-men and cycloptic omeletteers. Meanwhile a life is played out before us in fits and starts in which nothing is explained and nothing holds any more significance than it does – just like a life! And that’s just one page of this hulking creature raised out of the dismembered limbs robber from the graves of Herge and Burroughs.
If I’ve made X’ed Out seem like a terminal bum-out, don’t get me wrong: for all its filth, its moral ambiguity, its perversion, it is also undeniably beautiful, both in it’s execution and, well, for those very reasons I mentioned above. This is not the deafening wail of false certainty that life-affirming self-help books quite profitably sell to confused and frightened people who need a reason to not examine too closely their own reflection or call the devil by his name.
I am not trying to say that this is some utter cultural apex, either. What it is, is scouring, scrutinizing, searing, prying, dark art from a truly great artist. It is an example of why respect for comics as a medium has skyrocketed in the past quarter-century. Like Tintin, each panel has been executed with care, and each is worth the deep look I gave them that day on the pot those months ago.
