Charles Burns

For the last fifteen minutes I have been trying to write an appropriate introduction to my feelings regarding Charles Burns and his incredible work. And, I'm just stupified. We've met a couple times before, in those fleeting "how do you do" moments, and it's always the same-- I fall into a mute silence.

Charles was working on pre-press and technical issues with our mate John Kuramoto, and I sat across the room thinking about how I am a certifiable nerd for his stuff: my FACETASM posters are over fifteen years old, I owned and wore his "Devil" t-shirt through my teen years, I stared in wonder at his Time Magazine covers, I videotaped Dog Boy episodes from Liquid Television!

Not mentioning any of these stalker-type things, the office got into a cheerful discussion about Tintin and Hergé's influences, Charles' current work-in-progress graphic novel, managing the mental ups and downs of freelance gigs, and having a family while being an artist.

His style of conversation reminds me of his art-- thoughtful, mysterious, and purposeful. I felt terrifically at ease and nearly forgot that I was sitting and chatting with a living legend/master inker! At one point, he remarked upon our joint, "You guys have a real comics vibe in your studio."

Thank you, Charles.

"There was a certain line quality that I was always really attracted to—this very thick-to-thin line that is a result of using a brush. There was just some kind of solidity to it, or a kind of richness…. I don’t know, just a feeling to it that I really liked.

So I started out trying to emulate the look of that kind of line, and took it to an extreme, I guess. Because if you compare the work that I do with the work that inspired it—more traditional comic-book stuff—mine looks much tighter and much more precise in a certain way. Not more mechanical, but more extreme. It’s also something that I arrived at slowly. In my earlier work I relied on shade patterns and cross-hatching to create a gray middle ground, but I gradually stripped it down to pure black and white.

I try to achieve something that’s almost like a visceral effect. The quality of the lines and the density of the black take on a character of their own—it’s something that has an effect on your subconscious. Those lines make you feel a certain way. That kind of surface makes you feel a certain way. That’s the best way I can describe it. If you’re looking at the texture of the woods in Black Hole, that starts to be a real element of the story, part of the character of the story. Or when Keith is in the kitchen, and he’s looking into a cup that has cigarette butts floating in it… Hopefully I’ve drawn it in a way that you’ll feel his disgust, or it reflects a sense of his despair. I don’t have to write “I looked down into the cup and saw…” or “The room was all trashed and it made me feel crummy.” I don’t need to tell the story that way—that’s what the artwork achieves if it’s successful. Hopefully it makes you have some kind of gut reaction."

-- Charles Burns
interviewed in The Believer