Kommix

Master cartoonist Charles Burns has never hidden his passion for comic books and pop culture from the 1950 and 1960s. Inspired by the romance, horror, and sci-fi comics of his youth, as well as the 1960s American underground, the author of Black Hole has created a collection of 80 original comic book covers that, through his own inimitable aesthetic, present an alternate universe of stories that never were, but that you will wish existed.

The covers – some with otherworldly titles in alien letterforms, and others that riff on classic genres (Throbbing Hearts, Unwholesome Love) and eras (Drug Buddy, Huss) – each inspire a multitude of interpretations, build entire worlds, and suggest entire narratives that lie within their non-existent guts. This is Burns at his most playful, imaginative, and suggestive, using the format of the comic book to continue to explore many of the themes that run through all his longer-form work – adolescence, metamorphosis, nightmares, and sexuality – and provide a pretext for the creation of some of the most mysterious and bewitching imagery of Burns’s incredible career. Kommix is like discovering an entire box of comic books you never knew existed.

The stand-alone cover is an ideal medium for Burns: a big, bold image to serve as an armature for his oblique obsessions.– \”The Baffler\”

Gorgeously designed, with an obvious sense of love for the genre fiction standards it is re-imagining, Kommix is a book that will invite constant revisitation.– \”Broken Frontier\”

A psychedelic maze of sci-fi, horror, and romance, plunging into themes of adolescence, transformation, and sex.– \”Cinema Sentries\”

Kommix presents a gorgeous, fictional collection of the absurd.– \”AIPT Comics\”

In Kommix, [Burns] compiles dreamlike scenes, stylized to look like the covers of love comics from the nineteen-fifties and sixties, cheap pulp and porno zines, or exoticized foreign-looking publications. A punk Tintin, together with his black cat, discovers a large and fleshy appendage in the woods; a couple’s intimate moment is disrupted by a perky intruder; and romantic teen-age scenes of passion and jealousy play out with a cast of all-male youngsters.– \”The New Yorker\”

Burns’s stark chiaroscuro and thick, wood-block-esque line work [are] staples of the alternative-comics scene.–Abraham Riesman \”Vulture\”

Charles Burns’s comics are fluid, smooth and as solidly built as a vintage TV set, but they shudder with the chill of the uncanny.–Douglas Wolk \”The New York Times\”

One of the books that first made me fall in love with comics was Burns’s 2005 dystopian creep-fest Black Hole and I have been devoted to his high-contrast weirdness ever since.–Rachel Cooke \”The Guardian\”

Format: Hardback
Pages: 80
Imprint: Fantagraphics US
Publication date: 05/11/2024