Customer Reviews

Skin Deep

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I confess to being a Burns freak, owning everything I can find of his - even if he only has one or two pages in a book, I will buy it. This doesn't disappoint if you are a fan of Burns, or just enjoy comix that are deeply twisted, some sort of hell from the inside of a demented mind. Burns has a distinctive way with the pen and the comix themselves are also enjoyable.

Distinctly creepy with a great deal of reality placed in a blender with some bad speed.Think of the images left in your mind when you wake up from a bad dream right before you get the shades open!!First rate story telling and art.

My wife doesn't like this book. That's all you need to know. Go for it. Well, I'll vouchsafe a bit more. A cartoonist I was talking to once put it very neatly. Speaking of his education by another cartoonist, he said "he taught me the art of knowing where to put the ink." Sounds silly, I know, but think about that next time you look at a B&W comic book. To me, Charles Burns might well be the first book I'd hand to someone, as Exhibit A of knowing where to put the ink. And I haven't even gotten around to discussing his subject matter, yet! You need to know that Burns' work is very emotional, more than a little surreal, peopled by montrous humanoids, a little too familiar for my tastes; most people would say ugly, the rest, beautiful. Themes of doglike love, the rampage of spirituality gone hopelessly awry, the pieces of passion exploded beyond recognition, and stitched together like a calico cat. It's all here. Good luck.

Length:: 6:26 Mins

This comic book is entertaining just to read, but it also makes a good conversation piece for the coffee table. The artwork is not flashy and colorful like most of the modern graphic novels you could buy from more mainstream artists, but it has a very cool retro 50's sort of feel to it.

In my video I read to you five pages of the first story ( the book has three stories), to give you a feel for tone and look of book. The main character and hero of the first story is kind of a cross between Archie Andrews and Jimmy Olsen. A naive fellow who most folks call Dog-Boy, and he looks at the world around him without much depth of thought, the way perhaps adolescents might view the world. But he encounters sinister, creepy people who seem to have boiled over from some underground cauldron in a punk-rock hell and does the best he can to deal with what fate has handed him.

The second story is a very twisted and , well, sick..., exposure of a cult-like scam artist who ends up believing his own propaganda only to realize too late that he , himself , is being used by another shady self-styled cultist.

The third story defies any standard description. An author proceeds to write a tale and takes us into the storyline only to have reality suddenly come crashing back at the end.

The book is well worth buying. I actually have re-read the book several times since buying it, enjoying it immensely each time. It's not a read-and-toss book, it's one that you will keep coming back to because of it's strangeness and strange sense of humor.

- Mike S.

If you have the Penguin Books 1992 version of SKIN DEEP, then you have 95% of the content of this edition. The Stories "Dog Days" and "Burn Again" were published as weekly strips between 1988 and 1991. The story "A Marriage Made in Hell" was published as a whole in RAW back in 1984.

If you were paying attention, you'll recognize "Dog Days" as the source material for the brilliant live action serial "Dog Boy" which ran on MTV's LIQUID TELEVISION.

For this souped up version of SKIN DEEP (volume 3 in The Charles Burns Library), there are new covers, new interior front and back pieces, and an epilogue with a little explanatory verse and some collected bits and pieces including: a Burns cover for BLAST magazine (1991, which also serialized Dog Boy), black and white reproductions of the 1992 edition covers and endpieces, a self portrait which also appeared on the cover of Comics Journal in 1992 and some fabulous Burns "wallpaper" which you are encouraged to photocopy to use as such.

Very satisfying for the Burn enthusiast.

This edition was delayed several times, probably due to the time consuming and painstaking efforts that go into his creations.

It's definitely worth the effort. Thanks Charles!