Initiating 'X'

Reading the headily beautiful X’ed Out, the first of three planned installments of Charles Burns’ new comic, is a trippy experience, the result of unexpectedly intersecting influences, which, like the strangely converging worlds of this graphic novel, are simultaneously head-scratching and weirdly sensical.

Dispensing with the black-and-white palate of Black Hole, the massive compendium of his earlier work that established him as a celebrated author, Burns here turns to vivid Technicolor, all pinks and purples and pastels, subtly menacing shades that hint at bruising, at palpable but amorphous danger, and, in the course of an unfortunately slim 56 pages, revitalizes the PTSD-nightmare-apocalypse-love story.

A brief (but unavoidably tangled) summary: We begin with a sleeping figure who bears an uncanny resemblance to Tintin, wistful nostalgia immediately undercut by the figure’s apparent head injury—he wears bandages in the shape of an “X” on the side of his head, right beneath the familiar tuft of black hair—as well as the sudden descent into a realm that evokes nothing so much as Burroughs’ “Interzone,” all monstrous creatures, crude enforcers and ominous marketplaces. Threatened by a lizard-ish security-type straight out of Naked Lunch, the hapless hero is eventually rescued by a backpack-bearing, diaper-wearing man of no determinate age or nationality, who offers to serve as his guide.

We turn away to focus on another sleeping figure, a young man, his red T-shirt bearing the printed likeness of a punk-rock Tintin. He too has a head injury, a bandage beneath his tuft of black hair. He counts out his pills, looks through a photo album. “It’s only a matter of time…,” a black panel warns silent-movie style. And then we are plunged into memory: a party, an abandoned warehouse, the anticipation of a concert. The young man—“Doug” is his name—prepares to perform, putting on a Tintin mask, a recorder around his neck. “Hi, I’m Nitnit,” he announces, blasting his tape as he begins to read “a few of my cut-ups.”

Booed off stage, Doug seeks solace in the arms of Sarah, “Sarah from my photo class,” whose selfportraits, in bondage and with knives, belie her shyness. He rescues her from an apparently abusive boyfriend, about whose incarceration she seems ambivalent, and the two embark on the sort of sweet courtship that hints at imminent disaster. But before disaster can strike we are once again in that odious marketplace, following a procession to coronate a new queen, a woman with a Tintin mask and a resemblance to Sarah… If all of that sounds confusing, the actual work is both less and more so.

Burns is methodical in his use of details, which echo across worlds and storylines, anchoring dream and reality, nightmare and personal history alike. In X’ed Out, he suggests that the perfection of Black Hole (deemed his “masterpiece” by many a reviewer) can be perfected further still. Everything is here amplified—the atmospheric dread, the deft comedy (all the more effective for being unexpected), the deeply resonant emotion and the noless-resonant fear that is the flipside of feeling acutely, the price of a certain kind of sensibility. Even as we do not, cannot, quite know what is happening, we are prepared to follow Burns wherever the twists and turns of his imagination—equal parts Euro-childhood and Americanparanoia—lead.

Just about the only discordant note here is the cliffhanger ending, which could, were you so inclined, be perceived as a cheap attempt to ensure you spend another $20 on the next installment. But then—cynical ploy or not—this too is testament to Burns’ achievement, which makes the thought of waiting any longer than it takes Burns to craft the story’s next part absolutely unthinkable.