Charles Burns (born September 27, 1955) is an American cartoonist and illustrator.
Career
Comics
Charles Burns' earliest works include illustrations for the Sub Pop fanzine, and Another Room Magazine of Oakland, California, but he came to prominence when his comics were published for the first time in early issues of RAW, the avant-garde comics magazine founded in 1980 by Françoise Mouly and Art Spiegelman. In 1982, Burns did a die-cut cover for RAW #4. Raw Books also published two books of Burns as 'RAW One-Shot': Big Baby and Hard-Boiled Defective Stories. In 1994, he was awarded a Pew Fellowships in the Arts. In 1999, he showed at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.
Most of Burns' short stories, published in various supports over the decades, were later collected in the three volumes of the "Charles Burns' Library" (hardcovers from Fantagraphics Books): El Borbah (1999), Big Baby (2000), and Skin Deep (2001). (A fourth and last volume, Bad Vibes, has yet to be published, which would have the Library collecting the entirety of his pre-Black Hole comics work. It was later stated that Burns did not feel there was enough material for a complete fourth volume.)
From 1993 to 2004, he serialized the 12 chapters of his Harvey Award-winning graphic novel Black Hole (12 issues from Kitchen Sink Press and Fantagraphics Books). The series was collected into a single volume in 2005. Black Hole was featured prominently in the film Dawn of the Planet of the Apes.
In 2007 Burns contributed material for the French made animated horror anthology Fear(s) of the Dark.
In October 2010, Burns released the first part of a new series, X'ed Out. Part two of the new trilogy, The Hive, was released in October 2012. Sugar Skull, the final installment in the trilogy, was released Fall of 2014.
Illustration
Burns' high-profile illustrations include work for the Iggy Pop album Brick by Brick. His art was also licensed by The Coca-Cola Company to illustrate product and advertising material for their failed OK Soda product. More recently, he has worked on advertising campaigns for Altoids and portrait illustrations for The Believer. In the early 1990s, his Dogboy stories were adapted by MTV as a live-action serial for Liquid Television. In 1991, choreographer Mark Morris commissioned him to create illustrations that were then used as a basis for his version of Tchaikovsky's The Nutcracker, calling it The Hard Nut. Burns's style was a source of inspiration for Martin Ander's artwork for Fever Ray, Karin Dreijer Andersson's solo project.
References
External links
- Charles Burns page at Fantagraphics - Books in print from this publisher.
- Brian Heater, "Interview: Charles Burns Pt. 1", The Daily Cross Hatch, (November 10, 2008).
- "I'm Slowly Learning to Draw Every Human Being in the United States," Interview with Hillary Chute, The Believer, January 2008
