Charles Burns (born 1955) is an American cartoonist, illustrator and film director.
”At the juncture of fiction and memory, of cheap thrills and horror,
lies the dark world of Charles Burns. His stories, which first attracted notice in the pages of RAW during the early 1980s, take comic
book clichés – wiseacre kids, sinister scientists, tough-as-nails
detectives, teenage lust and EC-style horror – and rearrange them into
disturbing yet funny patterns. Beneath this interplay of familiar
iconography lurk the real traumas of childhood, traumas of loss and
alienation.
Similarly, Burns' ice-cold artwork polishes a 'conventional' comic look to the nth degree, underlying the artificiality of what we take for normal. At
times, Burns's work suggests that our worst fears about mainstream
comics are true: that they are stamped out by machines programmed by
someone who is going slightly insane.”
