Why Charles Burns keeps returning to teenage angst in his graphic novels

A flicker of a memory from Charles Burns’ teenage years was enough to pull him out of writers’ block and into a new book, Final Cut.

In this memory, he is stoned at a house party, sitting in the kitchen and drawing, hoping that someone incredible will walk in, discover him there and admire his work. 

In real life, that didn’t happen. But in Final Cut, it does, and the story opens up with this scene of teenage loneliness and the hope for finding a connection with a redhead named Laurie.

In Final Cut, childhood friends Brian and Jimmy set out to create a sci-fi horror movie using an old eight-millimetre camera. With Laurie as Brian’s muse, they trek to a remote cabin in the mountains and Brian struggles with finding the balance between his dreams and reality.

American cartoonist Burns rose to fame with his graphic novels often centring around the teenage experience, including the hit Black Hole. Now in his late 60s, he wanted to try something different.

But after five attempts at crafting a “middle-aged guy that’s doing this and that,” Burns reentered the familiar world of adolescent angst, by challenging himself to write out a seven-page story, which eventually turned into Final Cut.

“I key into those very vivid, strong emotional feelings that I had,” said Burns on Bookends with Mattea Roach. “Not that I haven’t had them as an adult, but somehow those really extreme images and ideas blossomed at that point in my life. And so I find myself continually going back. There’s something there that I find myself drawn to — this kind of rich, emotional life.”

Mattea Roach: What inspired you to give your main characters the specific creative interest of filmmaking?

Charles Burns: That reflected what I was doing at that age. I was living in Seattle, out in the Pacific Northwest, and I had grown up looking at horror magazines, monster magazines. And in the back of those magazines, there were advertisements for eight-millimetre copies of what tended to be very cheap horror movies. 

It was this kind of fantasy of being about to watch those movies any time you wanted because they weren’t accessible at that point. There was occasionally a show on TV that would come up, but they looked really exciting. 

So somewhere around ninth grade, I guess, 14, 15 years old, I met a friend who had all those movies. His parents had a movie camera. They had a projector, a screen. And so we would go over to his house and look at these very cheap, ridiculous eight-millimetre movies, like I Was A Teenage Frankenstein or Varan the Unbelievable.

The story comes out of that part of my life, of the idea of creating something with your friends– Charles Burns

We knew they were cheesy and the quality was really low. But still, we sat and watched them all and enjoyed them. And that kind of led us to this idea that we have a camera and we could actually film our own movies. And that’s what we started doing. The story comes out of that part of my life, of the idea of creating something with your friends. 

In Final Cut, it’s very clear that these two friends, Brian and Jimmy, have been working on those kinds of movies, and they have a whole history together of making those movies. And the sense is like, this is kind of like, this might be like our last go ’round. We’ll do one more movie, but we’re closer to adulthood than we are to being little kids. So they’re kind of clinging to that kind of youthful friendship and that bond.

But there’s also the distractions and the changes of being young adults.

MR: Even though he gets frustrated at times, Brian has this ability to write his own narrative. He’s drawing artistic inspiration from some of these experiences that are difficult — and that gives him a bit of an ability to control his own story and exert some agency, which is something that teenagers often are lacking. I’m wondering if you have any thoughts about what art can offer people that are maybe experiencing these kinds of personal, professional, romantic frustrations. 

CB: For me, it’s always just this kind of odd urge to tell this story. And I can’t explain it in any other way. I’m never thinking of an audience. I mean, obviously you’re working for print and you anticipate that there’s a book that’s going to come out or some kind of publication. But for me, the urge is not therapeutic. It’s some inexplicable thing I can’t quite put into words.

It’s this urge to tell that story. It’s formulating ideas as you’re working. And I’ve never believed in the idea that if you express these things, you’re going to get it out of your system, they’re obviously still in my system.

MR: You have this drive to create — which the character Brian seems to share — which makes you the sort of person who would want to make art, even if there was no one to see it. There was just a need to tell these stories and a need to express. 

CB: Yeah, I would definitely be doing something, whether it was going down to my little local print shop and printing up some Xerox copies of my comics or something.

I feel I’ve been incredibly lucky to find an audience that’s interested in my work. But there’s something that happens when I’m sitting at a table and every once in a while it’s just like, “This is working and there’s something that’s happening there.” I can’t explain it, but something is feeding you something that’s strong.

And that’s what I’m kind of still chasing after, that feeling of discovery. 

This interview was edited for length and clarity. It was produced by Katy Swailes.