Sugar Skull by Charles Burns

Rating: WARTY!

Sugar Skull (not to be confused, believe it or not, with a score of other novels of the same name) is the last of a trilogy of graphic novels, which I unfortunately read first, not realizing this was part of a series (X'ed Out, The Hive, and this volume)). It made no sense to me and the ending was a complete bust, essentially telling the reader they had wasted their time because this trilogy went literally nowhere. The library didn't have the middle volume, and when I picked up volumes one and three, I thought they were separate stories in the same world! Graphic novel creators, I've noticed, are extraordinarily bad about indicating that a novel is part of a series and they're even worse at indicating which step in the series the one you're holding in your hand actually is. Even having read the first in the series, however, it still didn't make this one any more sensible or became any more accessible.

The initial problem with this for me was, not having read the previous two volumes, that I had no idea that the main character had a cartoon fantasy running in his head. Even knowing that retrospectively and reconsidering this novel, it still made no sense, but at least that knowledge explained some of the weird switching between ostensibly unconnected (and ultimately nonsensical) story lines.

The basic story is of a man, Doug, who's really a kid who won't grow up, pursuing adolescent fantasies of being a rock-star or an artist, instead of getting his act together. Maybe he could actually have been a rock-star or an artist, but he simply doesn't have the wherewithal to pursue any career, so he wastes time in his fantasy world, lolling around, doing no work, unable to make any effort, and going nowhere. To his credit, he got off the booze, but he's really not good at staying off it, and he appears to have no idea what's wrong with his life.

He's a father who fled when he learned his girlfriend, Sarah, was pregnant. Despite her extensive and repeated efforts to contact him, he meanly stonewalled her consistently. She's done fine without him, as he learns later, and she has no desire whatsoever to have him back in her, and especially not her kid's, life.

Doug himself has been married, but is a serial cheater, so no sign of maturity there either. In a further insult, the band he was with actually took off after he left (no word on whether there was a connection between these two events!), and while one of the guys in the band still has affection for Doug, the girl outright and uncompromisingly rejects him as bad news. She evidently knows something we're just learning!

In his fantasy life, Doug goes by the name of Tintin backwards, and looks like the veteran cartoon star. The fantasies are unremarkable though weird, and they convey little, and they really achieve nothing for the reader or for Doug himself, but he cannot let go of them or grow out of them. He gets beaten up at one point by Sarah's psychotic ex-boyfriend, and even this doesn't make an ounce of difference to his life. In short, why would anyone care about this guy or what happens to him? I didn't, and I cannot recommend this.

X'ed Out by Charles Burns

Rating: WARTY!

X'ed Out (not to be confused with X'Ed Out Part II by Kevin Lofton, or with The X'ed-out X-ray by Ron Roy and John Steven Gurney) is book one of a trilogy (X'ed Out, The Hive, and Sugar Skull. As usual for me, I came into this ass-backwards and read the last one first, couldn't get the middle one at the library, and read the first one last, so my take on it is a bit skewed (but when isn't it?!). The problem with graphic novels (and also with some non-graphic series) is that they offer no help whatsoever in determining which volume goes where. There was no indication on either of the two volumes that I did read to offer guidance that it was even a part of a trilogy, much less where each appeared in the order. I had actually thought these were two different stories based int eh same world. Wrong.

Doug is delusional. Seriously so. he has a fantasy world running in his head that is very nearly as real to him as is the real world. He wakes up one night to find a hole in his wall and his dead black cat leading him off to a fantasy worlds inhabited by his alter ego, a Tintin rip-off named Nitnit. It gets worse from there, with Doug reliving his past, meeting hostile lizard men who are conducting a breeding program using human females (how that works is a complete mystery).

Doug is quite evidently misogynistic, and also a spineless loser who is so self-obsessed and indolent that no one could possibly love him. he blows one chance after another to do something with his life. I didn't like this story (so-called) at all. It made a vague kind of sense, but overall, for all practical purposes was too overblown to make an real sense, and there's too much going on to ever get resolved even in three volumes. The artwork was colorful and, well, it was colorful. It was also flat, inanimate, and unappealing. I can't recommend this, and had no interest in going on to read the middle volume.

Black Hole by Charles Burns

Rating: WARTY!

This month's nominee for worst cover ever was originally published by Fantagraphics as twelve comic books starting in 1995. Now it's combined into one hardback published in 2005. Despite the publication dates, it's set in the 1970's and I suspect it's a lot more meaningful to the author than ever it is to any of his readers. I found it revealing that wikipedia refers to Burns as a cartoonist in its page title!

The book blurb claims that it's "...deftly exploring a specific American cultural moment in flux and the kids who are caught in it- back when it wasn’t exactly cool to be a hippie anymore, but Bowie was still just a little too weird." This was nonsensical to me. There was no such "moment" - except maybe in the author's own personal life!

There was nothing "hippie" and nothing "seventies" here. It was just a bunch of high-school losers who were literally being wasted - getting wasted on drugs and booze, and wasting their lives. There was no enlightenment going on here, no rebellion against the establishment - indeed, these kids were firmly entrenched in their own establishment. There was no musical revolution, nothing new. This story felt like it was really was nothing more than personal anecdotes recalling bad trips.

The whole novel reads like a bad drug trip. Maybe that's the intent, but it made no sense and wasn't entertaining for the most part. Maybe the author is trying to make sense of his youth, but the novel really didn't mean a whole heck of a lot to me. Parts of it were well done, other parts meaningless. The comics explore the same time-period or the same events from many perspectives, so there's a lot of overlap, which I suspect is easier to see in the compendium than it was in the separate comics.

The artwork isn't anything special. It's borderline competent, but in no way startling, and this is especially stark given the subject matter. The seventies was an extraordinarily flamboyant era. Why depict it in B&W? Some of the characters are really hard to tell apart. One pair of them - a dating couple - is really only differentiated by the fact that the guy has some peach fuzz on his chin whereas the girl doesn't. I'm not kidding!

It's hardly impressive art. It's all sharply, but thickly drawn black-and-white line and shade, but the story is anything but black and white. It's also drawn for a mature audience: though it's set in and around high school, there's a huge amount of drug use and a lot of explicit sexuality, with some violence and violent themes towards the end.

To me, that was really sad - that these kids evidently had nothing to do with their lives - indeed, no interest whatsoever in life - other than partying and smoking pot. Personally, I don't care if people spend their lives partying and smoking pot - it's no worse (and no better) than smoking tobacco, let's face it - but I don't get why I should be expected to be interested in reading a novel which offers that, and only that.

There was very little in this story to draw me in and and make me want to pursue it. I did finish it because it was short and because I really hoped there would be a pay-off at the end. There wasn't. What was it George Bush senior moment said? The nattering nabobs of negativity? Other than everything Reagan said, and Clinton's preposterous lie that he did not "have sex with that woman", that is the absolute dumbest thing any president ever said (with "mission accomplished" a close second!), but it George Herbert Walker's nonsensical blabber really does apply in the case of this comic.

The characters are two-dimensional, with nothing to recommend them. One was a replica of John Lennon in his pinched nose, granny-glasses period, so I started looking for others who might identify with recording artists, but I didn't see any others that I recognized, so maybe that was just a one-off. The situations were very ordinary for the most part with nothing special about any of it (with few exceptions). It was amusing that everyone seemed to have the same hair style.

The really weird thing is the mutation disease. Running through this youthful crowd is a body-fluid transmitted disease which causes physical mutations. Some reviewers have equated this with AIDS, but I don't think that's what Burns intended. I think the mutations caused by this "plague" were nothing more than a physical manifestation of teen fears.

One guy, for example, has a mouth at the base of his neck - one which speaks and seems to be controlled by a different part of his brain - or even a different brain - than his regular mouth. Which teen hasn't felt like they've said things they didn't mean or didn't intend? The girl who has sex with him contracts the disease, but her manifestation of it is that she periodically sheds her skin like a snake. Which teen hasn't sometimes wondered what it would be like to shed their skin and be someone else? Haven't serious drug abusers felt at times like they were crawling out of their skin? Other victims exhibit bumps or blisters on their face. One guy develops facial features that make him look reminiscent of a rabbit. I don't see that as a comment on the fact that he contracted the disease while humping like a bunny.

Actually, there's no pattern to this "disease" at all, and other than teens shunning other teens who have it, there is no reference to the disease from society at large - no attempt to fight it or contain it. There was no effort to explain where it came from, or why no one was really interested in it. It was like the disease was nothing more than an amateur attempt to graphically portray feelings of disaffection, rejection, incompetence and so on, but given that it all came from acts of love and passion, it made zero sense to me. Indeed, it very effectively countermanded the author's apparent intention.

Some portions of the story featured a cult of kids leaving home and migrating to the woods where they would camp out with others of their "kind". Again, this made more sense as a physical manifestation of feelings of alienation, but presented the way it was just made it seem silly and trivial. This is of course where it was easy for murders to be committed, but those made least sense of all. If the characters were not really physically living in the woods, and this was merely a representation of their isolation, then what were the acts of murder supposed to represent? If the murders were real, then what triggered them? None of this is addressed, much less explained.

One character, Eliza, was well-worth her own story, but she was given rather short shrift (or short shift!) here. She had a tail, but it was never clear if this came from the STD, or if she was naturally born with it. People are born with tails - a relic of evolution for which the creationists have absolutely no explanation whatsoever. Eliza was an artist and was giftedly so, but frankly, she didn't seem to belong to this story at all. I would have loved a story about her. She was the only character with anything to say or with any real story to tell.

Overall I can't recommend this novel. You know what it most reminded me of? Reefer Madness - that asinine movie which purportedly warns children against using drugs that was made in the late 1930s and was so awful, exploitative, over-the-top, and inaccurate that it's become a cult classic. Hopefully this limited tradition novel won't become that famous.