Last Look

"Charles Burns, in my view, is a real master of the creepy. He is a lovely person, one of the nicest people I’ve ever met in my life, but, in his comics, it’s hard to be as creepy as Charles is. Part of what is interesting about Last Look and really attracts me to it are the cultural references. You mentioned the really strong French comics tradition which is also referred to as the Franco-Belgian comics tradition, with works like Astérix and Tintin being globally famous. Charles Burns created this trilogy specifically to the physical dimensions of the Franco-Belgian album format. He did that on purpose to pay homage to the Franco-Belgian tradition that produced Tintin . This book is a kind of skewed take on the Tintin adventure story. A cat named Inky is like the dog named Snowy. So punk subculture is also a big thread of the book. He has this Tintin -like mask that he wants to wear when he performs his avant-garde performances inspired by William Burroughs. This book is just an incredible mashup of different cultural references. There are tons of Tintin references, to specific panels from Tintin . There are references to Burroughs, and Burroughs as a figurehead for punk culture and to cut-up culture in general. Romance comics are also a big theme of this book, as is art school. I love how these characters name-drop. They are talking about people like Louise Bourgeois, they’re creating art projects in the style of their favourite artists. So we get a density of references here, distilled in a really fascinating, very personal way. Yes, maybe the Oscar of the comics world. I actually went to the Eisner Awards this past summer. It was so much fun. It takes place in San Diego, the Friday night of the Comic-Con weekend. It’s worth noting that there are very few people in comics who have the virtuosity of line that Charles does. His execution and this very particular style that he has, with the thickness in black line, really sets his work apart from most other cartoonists. He is technically an incredible master of the form. You can see this in the way he uses shading, all the heavy black lines that go into it. What is interesting about this work as opposed to Black Hole —which was his other big graphic novel project—is that this is in colour. He’s working in colour for the first time in a long time, in addition to his amazing black, heavily inked pages. It is very hard to describe Charles’s style. There’s something that codes ‘retro’ about it, but it’s like retro plus, because if you go back and look at the fifties comics, then that’s what Charles does, but to excess. He combines genres like the horror comics and the romance comics with the contemporary novel. There is a story in Last Look in which one cares about characters in a way that one doesn’t really care about the pulp characters in fifties comic books. In terms of how it looks, he amplifies the style that we see in genre comics and makes it his own. It is slightly icier in his work than it is even in the 1950s comics. It looks even more artificial. It is like he’s ratcheted it up a notch. He is not so much borrowing from it, he’s recreated it."