Sugar Skull

by Charles Burns

Overview

The long, strange trip that began in X'ed Out and continued in The Hive reaches its mind-bending, heartbreaking end.

Doug is forced to deal with the lie he's been telling himself since the beginning. In this concluding volume, nightmarish dreams evolve into an even more dreadful reality...

(With full-color illustrations throughout.)

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780307907905
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	09/16/2014
Series:	Pantheon Graphic Library
Pages:	64
Product dimensions:	8.90(w) x 11.80(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

CHARLES BURNS grew up in Seattle in the 1970s. His work rose to prominence in Art Spiegelman’s Raw magazine in the mid-1980s, and since he has worked on a wide range of projects including album covers, ad campaigns, and set design. He has illustrated covers for Time, The New Yorker, and The New York Times Sunday Magazine, and is cover artist for The Believer. Black Hole received Eisner, Harvey, and Ignatz awards in 2005. Burns lives in Philadelphia with his wife and daughters.

Interviews

Barnes & Noble Review Interview with Charles Burns

The Barnes & Noble Review: When creating a book or character, which comes first: the illustration or the story?

Charles Burns: The story always comes first. I fill up cheap notebooks with endless notes along with a few rough drawings and slowly, slowly build a structure for a story. The way I work has changed a little over the years, but I'll try anything that works: filling out notecards, making rough breakdowns of the comic pages, sitting at a computer and typing out a narrative, making calendars and maps, searching the internet for images — whatever works. I may have a strong visual image that sparks an idea, but everything is in service to the story.

BNR: Where do you work, and what does that workspace look like? Do you have consistent habits, with regard to time of day and rituals (food, music, talismans)?

CB: A talisman? I've got a little plastic eyeball hanging from my drawing table lamp — does that count? I work at home and my studio has a huge drawing table filled with all of the necessary "tools of the trade?. I'm surrounded by floor to ceiling bookshelves. I need all of those books to insulate me and protect me from the hard, cruel outside world. My wife refers to it as my "little room" as in, "Are you going back up to your little room?" There's nothing too exciting about my work schedule — no rituals other than getting up early and working all day. On something. I'm not always as focused and disciplined as I'd like to be, but I put in the hours.

BNR: What did you enjoy drawing as a child?

CB:I guess I started out drawing what most children draw — figures, trees, houses. Once I got a little older, I entertained myself by copying drawings from books and I'll have to admit that I received "positive reinforcement " for some of them and so naturally, I continued focusing in on drawing. I also had a fairly isolated childhood early on and drawing provided a way of entertaining myself. I have a distinct memory of my first day of public school and looking around at what all of the other kids were drawing and thinking, "All they can draw are scribbles."

BNR: You've been the illustrator of The Believer since its first issue in 2003. Of the many portraits you've drawn for the magazine, which have been your favorites?

CB: I know it sounds dumb, but occasionally I'm asked to do "portraits" of animals, and those are always fun. Drawing glasses and facial hair is always a challenge so if I have an option of glasses or no glasses (or beard/no beard), I take the easy way out. And it's always difficult to draw people I actually know because I always want to make them happy, but that doesn't always work — "You made me look so old."

BNR: Who are your favorite fictional characters?

CB: Maybe Tintin? The Tintin books were some of the first books I actually managed to read on my own, and they had a huge impact on me when I was growing up. Even though I didn't have a reference point for historical or cultural aspects of the stories, I was able to find my way in the world of Tintin, and that was a place I wanted to be.

BNR: What is the first book or work of art that you can recall genuinely frightening you?

CB: My father had a book about drawing and illustration, and there were two images in particular that really, really spooked the hell out of me: a beautiful, intense drawing by Boris Artzybasheff that I couldn't begin to describe, and a drawing by Daumier of a group of figures that showed headless corpses, a tiny skeleton child? the walking dead. That image popped into my head on quite a few occasions just as I was drifting off to sleep at night — not very fun.

BNR: You went to Evergreen State College, with classmates like Lynda Barry and Matt Groening. Was there something particularly excellent about that program in turning out accomplished artists, or did talented people simply arrive there at their own accord? Was Olympia a draw to you and others seeking an artful home?

CB: I only attended Evergreen for a year, but it was a pretty incredible school — if you a self-motivated oddball, it was the perfect alternative to the other state colleges in Washington. Matt, Lynda, and I all worked for the school newspaper, so that's how we met — I designed ads and drew comics, Lynda drew comics, and Matt was an editor and wrote reviews of bootleg Mothers of Invention albums.

BNR: Your work is a unique blend of the realistic and the surreal. Are you someone who recalls your dreams, and do you draw artistic inspiration from them?

CB: I'm someone who plays close attention to my dreams and all of the paths my subconscious brain wanders off on. When I'm gathering ideas for my stories, I do my best to not censor myself in any way and on occasions I've come up with images, ideas and associations that are a little dark and disturbing — even for me. I've found myself thinking, "Aw, jeez . . . I don't know if I should draw this,? and that's usually a clear sign that I should go ahead and get it down on paper.

BNR: Where do you find visual models for your characters? Friends and acquaintances, photography, paintings, strangers in public, all of the above?

All of the above. Most of my characters are stand-ins for myself in one way or the other . . . including all of the horribly disfigured monsters I like to draw.

BNR: You lived in Italy during the mid-'80s: what drew you to the Italian cartoonists of that time, and how did Italy influence your work?

CB: I was lucky to be able to meet a number of incredibly talented cartoonists when I lived in Rome, including Lorenzo Mattotti, Giorgio Carpinteri, and Igor Tuveri (also known as Igort). What I appreciated most about their work was the fact that they had artistic influences that were very different from the American cartoonists I knew. They all had an appreciation for a wide range of the "classic" comics I was familiar with but they were also interested in things like Italian Futurist painting and Japanese woodblock prints. Although I worked on a few projects with them and had deep respect for their work, I don't think any of it ever really rubbed off on me.

BNR: You got a big break working for Françoise Mouly and Art Spiegelman's Raw magazine. What are your memories of the two of them, and those early days working on a now-legendary zine?

CB: Both Françoise and Art are still close friends of mine after all of these years. I met them while searching for illustration jobs in New York — I spotted the first issue of Raw on a magazine rack and was instantly drawn to the size (it was really, really big) and the quality of the art and design. In the indicia of that first issue was a small blurb that said they were interested in submissions and I had the arrogance — or maybe it was just desperation — to actually walk over to their loft and ring the buzzer. Art Spiegelman answered the door (after walking down six flights) and in not-too-uncertain words told me I should send them photocopies of my comics. I did, and much to my surprise received a friendly response inviting me to come visit and show them my "stuff." Both Art and Françoise were the first people aside from close friends who really "got" my work. My early memories of visiting them always include a lot of cigarettes and coffee and a lot of books — books by amazing artists I'd never heard of — always a growing pile of books as Art would jump up after asking me, "Do you know (fill in the blank)? You don't? Wait, you've gotta see this!" Sometimes I think that's where my real education began.

BNR: Sugar Skull is the conclusion of a trilogy that takes place largely in an alternate reality. Are you someone who believes in the concept of multiverses, and the possibility that our own timeline is but one of several existing in tandem?

CB: Not really — I have trouble enough navigating the reality I find myself in. I guess the only alternate reality I can deal with comes in the form of books and movies.

BNR: What is the best advice you've received as an artist?

CB: I was going to write, "Don't quit your day job,? but that sounds way too negative. The best advice I've received would probably be, "Try using a brush."

—September 30, 2014

Editorial Reviews

★ 09/08/2014
Completing his trilogy that began in 2010 with X’ed Out and continued with The Hive in 2012, Burns brings the story of amnesiac Doug to a devastating conclusion. Only an artist of Burns’ precision and vision could keep all the plates of this dimension and time hopping tale spinning so smoothly. In the first two volumes we met Doug, whose story jumps back and forth in between his relationship with a girl named Sarah and his future as a pill-popping loser. Along the way his avatar, Nit-Nit, has surreal adventures in a bleak parallel world full of disgustingly pitiful creatures. In the final volume, the horrors pile up as the many careful symbols that Burns has set up in the previous 128 pages—a pig fetus, a mask, a Polaroid, a pink blanket—manifest into a nightmarish existence that Doug can’t escape from, whether it’s the real world, in which Doug’s attempts at a relationship are sabotaged by his break-up with Sarah, or his fantasy, in which we learn, in grotesque detail, just where those eggs seen on the cover of The Hive are coming from. Like Black Hole, this trilogy is a masterpiece of dread and wasted opportunity. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

The coloring is vivid and captivating, and Burns has written a deeply rewarding, albeit heart-wrenching conclusion.” —Patrick Lohier, boingboing.net

From the Publisher

★ 2014-10-08
The third volume in a trilogy concludes a renowned graphic artist's hallucinatory descent into comic-book hell—and it doesn't end prettily.The size and format of the traditional comic book perfectly suits the darker vision of Burns, who's reinforced his reputation through work in magazines such as the New Yorker but lets his demons run wild here. Without ever resorting to a linear narrative, he concludes the story of Doug that began in X'ed Out (2010) and continued with The Hive (2012). Sober for more than a year, he suffers a massive relapse when he returns to his former punk-rock haunts and sees some people who would rather not see him. Yet his dream life and waking life aren't clearly delineated, for Doug or for the reader, and whatever state he's in, he fears, "[n]o matter what I do, I'll never get rid of that voice in my head." Framing and interweaving Doug's narrative is the even more nightmarish descent of the bandaged boy Johnny, like Alice down the rabbit hole, through a stack of skulls, a reunion with his cat and a deep sleep that finds him awakening to a nightmare that might be worse than his nightmare. Identities blur as plot points in both narratives involve romance comics, unexpected pregnancies and women as agents of healing for deeply bruised young men. But the art carries the weight here and rewards repeat viewings, as the text resists summary and paraphrase. Like a dream or a very bad acid trip, what often defies linear logic makes connections on a subliminal, surreal plane. A fittingly audacious finale to an artistically ambitious trilogy, one that pays homage to the comic books of old yet takes the art to another, weirder level.

Kirkus Reviews