Monday, February 16, 2015

Sugar Skull by Charles Burns


A boy in a sloppy school uniform enters a port-a-potty and climbs down to an underground cavern. From there, he trespasses into a world of deformed people, one of whom is a girl he’s in love with, in bed about to give birth….I mean lay eggs. Now he’s on the run from green-faced people who don’t want him there, in their world of deformed freaks.

All this is a metaphor of the protagonist’s life; his girlfriend’s mysterious past, her creepy ex-boyfriend, a world inhabited by crazy people on the fringes of society. Her ex doesn’t look tough, but creepy, kind of like a teenage Jeffrey Dahmer. In typical Charles Burns style, he enters a strange world that he can’t escape, only he doesn’t seem to realize how strange it is. Only the reader will say “darn, this place is weird.”

Given the number of marginal freaks in Burns’ work, I always believe that he and Neil Jordan should collaborate. Jordan’s movies are a lot like Burns’ stories, where the protagonist enters a strange world inhabited by outcasts. Take The Crying Game for example; in the Charles Burns version, the terrorist would be a college student, whose professor dies of mysterious causes, and he goes looking for the professor’s widow (for reasons you can guess) and finds that she’s this monstrous creature living in a filthy house inhabited by half human-animal hybrids.

The Charles Burns freak show has done is again, and with a vengeance.

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