Review by Graham Johnstone
Charles Burns made his name in the 1980s with intense short comics, but subsequent output has been slower in coming, and has more recently been in the form of art books and ephemera. Foreign language releases, meanwhile teased and frustrated readers awaiting a new graphic novel.
Final Cut gathers a trilogy serialised across Europe as Dédalus or similar, its delayed appearance in English explained by American publishers Pantheon opting to publish it as single volume. So is it worth the wait?
Final Cut is a coming of age story, with a camping trip, and backdrop of mid-century movies – familiar Burns material, prompting his quip about ‘Black Hole 2’. It opens with fragile introvert, Brian at a party, drawing in the kitchen. When Laurie introduces herself, Brian is smitten. She’s there with Jimmy, Brian’s amateur film-making partner, and is the aspiring star of their next film. Cast and crew head to their wilderness location, and romance blossoms, though not as expected.
The art is beautiful, and unmistakably Burns. Reflecting Final Cut’s cinematic allusions, he is at his most visually realistic – if only reality was as meticulously composed. Burns sensitively builds on his flat but subtle palette, with sepia tint and ‘airbrushed’ tones (pictured, left) to evoke vintage celluloid, and slightly muted hues for projected images. He retains his razor-sharp inking, but sometimes fades it to suggest images that are drawn, projected, or otherwise ‘unreal’. In contrast, ‘real life’ scenes are in over-saturated Technicolour, notably Laurie’s cover-featured hair. Occasionally, he unleashes colour from outlines, especially for some striking skies (pictured, right). Such simple devices aid both clarity and visual appeal, so adding freshness to a familiar style.
Over 224 album-sized pages carry a minimal plot, but enable a rich interweaving of stories and imagery. Screenings of Brian and Jimmy’s amateur films gently mock genre and plot-heavy stories, asserting Burns’ difference. He also recreates and riffs on real world films his characters watch. Invasion of the Body-Snatchers, a 1956 sci-fi noir, seems pure Burns, here chiming with Brian’s outside status, and inspiring alien imagery for their next production. The Last Picture Show is a coming-of-age film (released in 1971, as Burns turned sixteen), and triggers artistic maturing for Brian. However, Burns’ backwater youth haven’t reached the sexy Seventies, instead seeming, like both films, frozen in the fumbling Fifties. Brian reimagines the monochrome aliens into fleshy pink pudenda – a knowing nod to Brian’s unfulfilled sexuality. This is acknowledged in Laurie’s response to concept art of her emerging from a cocoon: “an excuse to draw me naked?” Despite celluloid inspirations, Final Cut is assertively un-cinematic – visually (foregrounding it’s drawnness), and narratively, (with interior narration, and shifting perspectives). So Burns creates from his cinematic sources, something fresh, poetic, and personal.
Burns foregrounds the imagining of stories, and blurs boundaries with reality. The sequences from Laurie’s point of view might be written by Brian, her nervous liking of him too conveniently mirroring Brian himself. The title, Final Cut, alludes to the powerful cinematic artifice of editing, that can change emphasis, even meaning, as Brian does in the end of the book, perhaps as he unknowingly has himself.
A sense that Burns is exploring personally resonant experiences, is reinforced by a dedication to Burns’ wife: “died 2022”. Of course the book must have been underway then, but it nevertheless exudes a feeling of a special aloneness, and the challenge of facing lost love.
Is this a fresh departure for Burns? No, but it’s a rich and resonant remix of enduring themes. After Final Cut, most readers will be hoping for more.
