Charles Burns's sweet dreams

We didn’t need convincing. What Charles Burns started in 2010 with X’ed Out is easily as good as his jet-black comic strip classic Black Hole. Its sequel, The Hive is another diamond hewn from some subterranean cave, in which Burns pairs an almost classical form rooted in Hergé’s Tintin with a dizzying visual and narrative labyrinth.

COMIC BOOK | The Hive ●●●●
Charles Burns Pantheon Books, 60 p., €21,99

“What didn’t I tell her? What parts of the story did I leave out?” The Hive, part two of what American comic strip author Charles Burns promises to turn into a trilogy, neatly starts from where X’ed Out left its readers. The protagonist Doug, now somewhat older and rounder, still suffers from – either intentional or accidentally self-induced by an array of narcotics – amnesia, and his alter ego Nitnit, formed from Doug’s raw, terrifying sleep dust, has managed to gain access to the Hive, a building that looks like a cross between a cooling tower and a pyramid, where his love interest Suzy performs her utterly unenviable procreative tasks as queen and breeder. In this “bee hive” in the Burroughs-esque Interzone, Nitnit (like a Tintin of the underworld) joins a gang of industrious, foul-mouthed, lizard-like creatures that are supposed to facilitate the breeders’ work. And that is where the cheesy 1960s romance comics – which Burns evokes so magnificently – come in. They weave a leitmotif through both the upper and lower world. Nitnit gives the bedridden Suzy issues of Throbbing Heart, a series that might be interpreted as a parallel universe of what Doug and Sarah experience. Not that the reader becomes any the wiser about the parts of their story that Doug doesn’t reveal. Episodes 39 and 40 are missing, and unsurprisingly, they are the parts in which the breakup occurs: “It’s pretty obvious that something really, really awful happened, but what? It’s driving me nuts!” Suzy sighs.

Nuts? No, the darkness in which Charles Burns has veiled Doug and Nitnit’s adventures is a blessing. It is easier to move between the dream state and painful reality in the twilight, and it also better highlights the similarities between those two levels of consciousness, between X’ed Out and The Hive (and between these two books and Burns’s homemade bootleg Johnny 23, which is written in the same alien alphabet as the romance comics Suzy reads). Just like X’ed Out, The Hive is bursting with photography: a reference to Lucas Samaras is exchanged in the second instalment for a tribute to Louise Bourgeois, whose Femme maison inspires Doug to take a series of polaroids focused on a seductive and by turns sexually aggressive or submissive Sarah “wearing” a cardboard house (a series Burns himself made in his youth). “That’s all I want. A room with a door I can close... a door that locks,” is how Doug expresses his desire for a sense of security. But besides a safe home, Femme maison also hints at imprisonment. Like the Nitnit mask Doug hides behind during his performances with cut-ups inspired by William Burroughs: playing it safe does not mean that that safety might not be an abysmal illusion.

The only piece of the puzzle about which Charles Burns gives us any closure is Doug’s father. After his marriage, the man pined away in the cellar of his house and did nothing to resist his impending death. Doug scattered his ashes in the river that rushes through a ruin-filled landscape in his subconscious. Birth and death loom ever larger in Burns’s story: the breeders in the Hive, Doug’s dead father, Sarah’s (alleged?) pregnancy, the abortions of the troubled female central character of Throbbing Heart, etc. The penetrating reflections and connections Burns mounts between (the various identities of) his characters and the various dimensions of his comic strip universe (and himself!) reveal a wondrous complexity. “I was you,” it says on the sugar skull that Nitnit buys from a zombie-like street vendor. Burns-speak for “sweet dreams”!