X'ED OUT

Charles Burns is famous. If he wasn't, I doubt that this book would have ever seen the light of day. X'ed Out is writer/artist Burns' newest graphic novel, albeit only part one of a supposed longer tale. You might know Burns from his awesome 2005 graphic novel, Black Hole, but you've definitely seen his art somewhere. His images are iconic and look like nothing else out there. This newest book makes no sense though, and feels more like a jumbled mess of random ideas than a cohesive narrative. The main character is a typical Burns outsider/artist that lives with his mom, falls in love with a girl that takes photographs of herself in bondage, and enjoys blueberry Pop Tarts. He has a bandage on his head and at night he dreams that he enters a strange world with lizard people in suits and pig-faced dudes without shirts that eat omelets. In this odd, dream world the creatures take a new queen and send her to The Hive. Did the main character have an accident? Brain surgery? Is this dream world real or just his imagination? What's up with his cigarette-smoking father? How does his new girlfriend fit into all of this? What happened to her? The book is gorgeous but short. I read it in about twenty minutes. It ends abruptly and there are too many questions left unanswered. If this is simply part one then why only release this aspect of it and not wait until it's completed? It's weird, yes, but almost weird just to be weird. It's dark and depressing, almost suffocatingly so. This is too bad, as Burns is a great artist. If he wasn't famous this would probably be stuffed in an attic box somewhere collecting dust. *1/2