X'ed Out [Hardcover]

Charles Burns (Author)

Book Description

Release date: October 19, 2010 | Series: X'Ed Out

From the creator of Black Hole: the first volume of an epic masterpiece of graphic fiction in brilliant color.
 
Doug is having a strange night. A weird buzzing noise on the other side of the wall has woken him up, and there, across the room, next to a huge hole torn out of the bricks, sits his beloved cat, Inky. Who died years ago. But who’s nonetheless slinking out through the hole, beckoning Doug to follow.
 
What’s going on?
 
To say any more would spoil the freaky, Burnsian fun, especially because X’ed Out, unlike Black Hole, has not been previously serialized, and every unnervingly meticulous panel will be more tantalizing than the last . . .
 
Drawing inspiration from such diverse influences as Hergé and William Burroughs, Charles Burns has given us a dazzling spectral fever-dream—and a comic-book masterpiece.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Fusing the unsettling kitsch of EC horror comics, the storytelling sensibility of Euro-classics like Tintin, and the astute observations about young adults that made Black Hole so engrossing, Burns has turned out a haunting first chapter in what promises to be a spellbinder. The opening pages flip among the various realities of Doug, a young man recovering from a head injury of some kind with only a box of pills and some strawberry Pop-Tarts to speed his recovery. Flashbacks and dreams switch among various scenes: Doug and his hypocrite father; a wild party gone awry when Doug's crush object's crazy (but unseen) boyfriend goes on a rampage; and, most mysteriously, another world--found behind a hole in a brick wall--where dead cats live, worms weep, and a giant hive rules a grim city of deformed creatures. Burns's control of the story is masterful--the recurring imagery make it unclear just which is the reality and which is the dream. His sharply delineated art captures a grotesque yet sympathetic view of kids thrust far beyond a world that they can control or even understand. The only disappointment about X'ed Out is its brevity--the first of several installments, it will leave you begging for the rest of the story.
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From Booklist

The latest work from Burns, who is known for his weirdly cryptic yet strangely comedic graphic novels, may be his most enigmatic effort yet. It opens with Doug, a young student with an unspecified head injury, recalling a dream—or is it?—in which he follows his dead cat, Inky, into a bizarre, devastated environment populated by lizard-faced men and other grotesque creatures. Doug’s waking life is nearly as disturbing: his mother is mostly absent, his father is zoned out, and the object of his affections, a girl from his photography class, has a violent but mysteriously unseen boyfriend. Burns’ neurotically precise, high-contrast artwork evokes a surface normalcy that makes the underlying creepiness all the more disconcerting. This too-brief volume—the first in a series—is tantalizing but frustrating, raising questions that readers can only hope will be answered in future installments: What is the nature of the injury that’s left Doug largely bedridden and dependent on pills? Where will the ominous relationship with his classmate lead? And what’s with all the Tintin references that permeate the tale? --Gordon Flagg

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 56 pages
• Publisher: Pantheon; First Edition edition (October 19, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0307379132
• ISBN-13: 978-0307379139
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 0.5 x 11.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (25 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #44,397 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 18 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Super cool October 22, 2010

By Mitch Jones

Format:Hardcover

Sensitive stoner poets should enjoy this a lot. Complaints about length seem irrelevant given the amount of time Burns must have spent on this. I'd pay up to $30 for the amazing artwork here. Sure the story's a bit out there, but it has heart where it counts. Burns might throw a gruesome image of a human-faced worm at you, but he'll make sure the worm is crying so you feel weird about it. I don't doubt that we have a masterpiece in the making here.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Surreal and compelling November 5, 2011

By Madwoes

Format:Hardcover

This was my first real introduction to Burns's work and I was quite impressed. Very good art. "Art" in the truest sense of the word. There were two panels in particular that were so stunningly visceral (due to the character's expressions) that they stayed with me for a long time. The slowly evolving story lines range from the dreamlike to the stunningly familiar, and they don't clearly connect at first, but come together towards the end. This is a weird book and beautifully so. However, it definitely ends leaving you wanting more. It ended right as I was starting to become fully immersed. Looking forward to more!

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Tintin Meets Hieronymus Bosch April 15, 2012

By paedagogue

Format:Hardcover

and not in a trivial way. As an art historian, I can assure potential readers that this is the real thing, art that engages a long, weird, beautiful tradition of imaginative art. Ancient sacred images (Mesopotamian, Chinese, Precolumbian, African), medieval drolleries, Bosch, Bruegel, Leonardo, Duchamp, Magritte, Dali, the great masters of the early comic strip and the great Pop artists of our own mid-20th century--it's all there, filtered through the weird scrim of mid-20th-century horror comics and brought back to life in a narrative of youthful heartbreak, illness and partial amnesia. To those who complain about the price--oh PLEASE! You'd probably fork out $25 or more for one seriously crummy undersized reproduction of your favorite Surrealist picture, where here you are offered a whole book's-worth of beautiful ORIGINAL art that takes you on a journey into several strange worlds and a single human heart. I buy books about art all the time, and I do look at the cost-per-page ratio, but this book IS a work of art: the large page-size, the clean, stylish design in-page and page-to-page, the radiant color, the unhurried pacing of the poetically concise "script," all add up to a one-of-a-kind experience. It's a total bargain. I look forward to the sequel, but if it remains unfinished, I'll still feel I've made a fantastic purchase.