Burns Bright

Philly artist/animator Charles Burns

by Shaun Brady

Sometimes there are aspects of an artist's bio that seem too perfect. Take NoLibs-based graphic artist Charles Burns, whose father's career as a scientist seems echoed in the boyhood bedroom laboratory of the main character in his segment of Fear(s) of the Dark, a compilation of short, animated films.

But life doesn't work out quite so linearly. Burns' father was an oceanographer who did not bring work home. Strike one for amateur psychoanalysis, but Burns does not think too deeply about the root of his work anyway.

"If I really did analyze all of my work I think I would freeze," Burns says. "I'd never work again if I dug that deep ... For me, the pleasure is in the discovery of working through ideas, not necessarily coming up with a concrete answer. It's the mystery part I'm interested in."

Burns' Fear(s) segment, though, seems ripe for such dissection. He adapted the idea from an early piece originally published in 1979 — though where, he won't say, "because I don't need to unearth that." The story, about a young boy obsessed with science whose discovery of an unusual insect leads to biological horrors later in life, is full of sexual anxiety and the horror of intimate relationships.

"It reverses the male-female role, where a woman is basically impregnating her male lover," Burns says. "I like exploring those sorts of stereotypes created about men and women and what they actually reveal about us."

The film's producers insisted that the artists be involved in every aspect of their segment's production — an ideal situation. One that will not be replicated in the adaptation of his decade-in-the-making graphic novel Black Hole, currently slated to be directed by David Fincher. "I don't want a crummy movie," he says, "but I also know that the book is the book and I can stand by that for the rest of my life."

Burns is currently working on his first color comic, inspired by the classic Tintin comics and tentatively titled Johnny 23, a reference to a William S. Burroughs story. And for now, whatever deep-seated neuroses he was unearthing in Fear(s) of the Dark appear to be put to rest.

"I don't think I'm going to do any more teenagers with diseases but you never know."

(s_brady@citypaper.net)