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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