Charles Burns has spent more than half of his career pointing out adolescence as a crossroads where human beings are susceptible to becoming what we are: full-length men and women, full-fledged beings alienated from themselves and hardly any carnal residue. after the shedding of skin that supposes the passage to adult life.
The taboo side of desire appears in ‘Dulce de leche’
Further
In mazes (of which the first two volumes have been published in Spain by Reservoir Books), Brian Milner, a young horror movie fan with a gift for drawing, is in the throes of puberty. His relationship with the world is shaky, partly because of puberty and partly because of the world. When he receives the attention of Laurie, a redhead who is interested in his doodles, he will respond with a mixture of mistrust and fascination in which a lazy and mysterious comic will be tempered, abundant in graphic allegories and very given to decanting in the unconscious like someone who he rummages through his pockets to find a faded receipt.
Described in the press release as a “portrait of the adolescent artist,” mazes is a trilogy of albums in progress that follows one another like a loom of identities where each character is finding out their psychic construction. In the cases with the best prognosis, quarantining the inherited teachings and instructions, but in general all of them, as always in the work of Burns, carried away by a growing amnesia that leaves behind the childhood paradise, giving it up in that calm and annoying previous sacrifice. to complete oblivion.
meat mysteries
Before the graphic novel turned the comic into a fodder for adolescent traumas, tears, and sentimental vicissitudes of 300 pages, Charles Burns (Washington DC, 1955) hardened himself in the format of the short comic on the pages of RAW, the avant-garde magazine founded by Françoise Mouly and Art Spiegelman, with the adventures of El Borbah, an expeditious private detective weighing over a hundred kilos who already summarized his interests as an author: frying small genres, sly allusions to pop imaginary, a drawing drawn from the shadows and a technical neatness similar to fear. That happened in the 80s, when pastiche and vindicating demolition references was not yet an ironic routine but authentic audacity and, beware, the exclusive jurisdiction of comics and cartoons.
Burns kept up that chutzpah let’s go his in classic comics such as Dog Days, Burn Again o A hellish marriageecho chambers of the paranoia of the 50s, series B and the pamema of the American dream, before delivering his most thoughtful work, an extensive work where he would recount the irruption and consequences of an epidemic that came with the age of turkey. black hole it made room and gave acoustics to strangeness, certifying its author as the first sword of the independent –and nihilist– comic of the 90s and proclaiming him master mason of adolescent mutation, whose first symptoms, according to the teachings of the new flesh, would be restlessness inconvenient, a pruritus or itching prowling the lower abdomen and an arrow shot up to the brain to set up camp there.
alien life
Years later, mazes It happens in a similar place. A subjective environment where the natural determination of each individual is affected by a kind of laboratory romanticism, an emotional bilge whose omissions beat those love comics for girls –and not so girls– that were fashionable in the fifties, authentic thrillers psychological where the disturbances of the flesh were diluted in the torments of the heart.
For Burns, as for William Burroughs, femininity has always been an alien or perhaps telluric manifestation of strange intent, a force represented here by the character of Laurie, who shares the responsibility of the narrative with Brian while being intrigued by the fact. that he would rather spend more time in his artistic fish tank than out.
Entrusted to the higher truths of fiction (an unconditional and eloquent love for horror movies is the backbone of comics), mazes it synthesizes the romance and delivers it like a gallstone, almost a stupefied residue that someone will have to deal with. And just like in Invasion of the body snatchers, a film that is explicitly and recurrently quoted in the pages of the comic, the moral merit is here in suspense. Because in Burns’ comics there is no individual guilt but there is original sin, raison d’être, and this is how we are told in this tragic existentialist report with autobiographical overtones whose symbolic content emerges as a buoy to signal life in progress.
mazes it is again that already somewhat weakened alloy between the anguish of being young and the misfortune of never being young again that Charles Burns has always haunted. And, also as usual, it is fundamentally sustained in that drawing so governed and of glacial beauty that we know, here the characteristic tension of its inks is somewhat attenuated by the presence of color, and although the interrupted reading in three albums lacks atmosphere and seems Responding only to reasons of sustainability (sustainability of the artist), the aftertaste, at the appearance these days of the second volume, is once again that of metal on humid earth, unmistakable for its readers.