Search results for ""author charles burns""

And you thought your adolescence was scary. Suburban Seattle, the mid-1970s. We learn from the outset that a strange plague has descended upon the area's teenagers, transmitted by sexual contact. The disease is manifested any number of ways - from the hideously grotesque to the subtle (and concealable) - but once you've got it, that's it. There's no turning back. As we inhabit the heads of several key characters - some kids who have it, some who don't, some who are about to get it - what unfolds isn't the expected battle to fight the plague, or bring heightened awareness of it, or even to treat it. What we become witness to instead is a fascinating and eerie portrait of the nature of high-school alienation itself - the savagery, the cruelty, the relentless anxiety and ennui, the longing for escape. And then the murders start. As hypnotically beautiful as it is horrifying (and, believe it or not, autobiographical), Black Hole transcends its genre by deftly exploring a specific American cultural moment in flux and the kids who are caught in it - back when it wasn't exactly cool to be a hippie any more, but Bowie was still just a little too weird. To say nothing of sprouting horns and moulting your skin . . .

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An instant classic from a master of the form'PUBLISHERS WEEKLYAn arresting story of an artist''s obsessions, from the beloved and award-winning author of Black Hole.As a child, Brian and his friend Jimmy would make home movies in their yards, coaxing their friends into starring as victims of grisly murders and smearing lipstick on them to simulate blood. Now an aspiring filmmaker, he, Jimmy and new girl in town Laurie his reluctant muse set off to a remote cabin in the woods.Armed with an old camera, they film a true sci-fi horror movie where humans are born of disembodied alien wombs, in homage to The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. But as Brian''s affections for Laurie go seemingly unreciprocated, Brian writes and draws himself into a fantasy where she is the girl of his dreams both his damsel in distress and his saviour.Final Cut blurs the line between dreams and reality, imagination and perception in this

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Meet Doug, aspiring young artist. He's having a strange night. A weird buzzing noise on the other side of the wall has woken him up, and there across the room, next to a huge hole torn out of the bricks, sits his beloved cat Inky. Who died years ago. But that's no longer the case, as he slinks through the hole, beckoning Doug to follow. So he does. Now there's no turning back. What the heck is going on? To say much more would spoil the creepy, Burnsian fun, especially since - unlike Black Hole - X'ed Out has not been previously serialised anywhere and will have readers guessing at every unnervingly meticulous panel.Drawing inspiration from such diverse influences as Herge and William Burroughs, X'ed Out is an engrossing new comic book fever-dream, from a true master of the form at the height of his powers

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