Charles Burns

In 1981 Gilles Deleuze read in Francis Bacon's paintings a 'zone of the indiscernible' between man and animal. Bacon's figures spasm through their wounded architectures, screams erupting as destabilised bodies attempt to escape their figurations. This paper develops this zone of the indiscernible to explore how human flesh has become a medium for representations of the end. In David Cronenberg's Videodrome [1983], a dark psychological conspiracy places the flesh under suspicion of suggestible media-corruption, as Max Renn transcends to abstracted data by orgiastically abandoning the old flesh.

Against the knowing futurism of Videodrome, this paper compares Charles Burns' Black Hole comic-book series [1995-2005], which uses the grotesque contagious corruption of teenage flesh as a dark analogy for growing up and loss of innocence in the haunted spaces of late 20th century  Americana. Overtly Freudian, the rich contrasts of Burns' work introduces the becoming-monstrous and the eruption of contagion which racks modern American anxieties about the ending of the human, most familiar in recent zombie narratives. Taking a parallel track, in both accounts beastly becomings are played out on the flesh to mark internal turmoil whilst offering two directions for a contemporary bestiary of our culture. Whilst Burns offers a pessimistic Quietism and submission to the mysterious disease, Cronenberg's narrative alternatively calls to end the old flesh and embrace the possibilities of cybertechnology. Baudrillardian pessimism is spliced with 'biopunk' subcultures alongside Eugene Thacker's theoretical forays into life as the 'unthinkable' (2010, 2011) to finally ascertain why anxieties over life, technology and the end continue to play on a corrupted flesh. Does power embody itself through a zombified life, or will the skin continue to subvert and revolt against human (and posthuman) machinations?

Sejam raças fabulosas que vivem nos confins da terra, sejam seres individuais na fronteira entre o animal e o divino, o monstro é o Outro. Porém, pela obra do quadrinista Charles Burns, sobretudo a trilogia Last look, e o rastro que nele advém, a experiência pelos quadrinhos do pós-guerra inscrevem na contemporaneidade uma outridade não exterior, não objetal, um monstro íntimo. Busca-se , então, a partir de autores como Julia Kristeva e Peter Sloterdijk, com os conceitos de abjeto e nobjeto, respectivamente, pensar o espaço íntimo de transmissão do sujeito, do vir-a-ser-sujeito monstruoso. Uma questão estética que, da psicanálise à esferologia, apontará ao interior ocupado pelo monstro no contemporâneo.

At the beginning of the 21st century, comics are a medium ‘on the rise’ in scholarship and in schools. This collection of essays, which emerged from a graduate student conference at TU Dortmund University, demonstrates their immense medial, artistic, and cultural potential. Authors from different academic perspectives - Applied Linguistics, Comparative Literature, Cultural Studies, Gender Studies, Narratology, and Postcolonial Studies - take readers on an engaging trip through the world of contemporary comic books ranging from widely popular series to exclusive avant-garde auteur works.

This essay focuses on Charles Burns’s Black Hole, a graphic novel, published in 2005 and
set in the Seattle suburbs, which undermines the cultural myths that, durong the time between
the late 1960s and the 1990s, have been related (often uncritically) to the Pacific Northwest.
Black Hole positions itself among the texts that reshaped Northwestern culture in the 1990s,
and addresses the social and urban changes that, over two decades, have affected the whole
area in which its story is set. In so doing, it debunks both the myth of the Pacific Northwest as
the American “Ecotopia,” and, by featuring adolescents as protagonists, common stereotypes
associated to youth.