![]() ![]() ![]() The first installment of a projected series, “X’ed Out” ends on a sort of cliffhanger that also serves as a thematic conclusion: an image (the largest in the book) that mashes its narrative threads together and hints at the nature of the disaster that has transformed Doug’s life and fantasies.Īs fragmented as its chronology is, “X’ed Out” has a story at its heart. Still, a handful of images bubble up in varying guises: eggs, tunnels of blood, curled-up homunculi, holes in walls that lead to a sadder place. ![]() Burns exploits that effect: Doug keeps trying to look away, to think of something else, and the story leaps from ghastly intimations to blank or black panels, then to a different point in time or a different reality. You have to fill in the gaps between panels yourself, and whatever’s lurking there can be as terrible as you imagine. The most insidious kinds of horror are all about what you don’t see, especially in comics. He also becomes a more Tintin-ish, stylized version of himself, wandering through a nightmarish post-catastrophe landscape where cyclopean monsters trade omelets for cigarettes. The tufty-haired protagonist, Doug, is a frustrated young punk whose life’s tiny orbit encompasses pills, Pop-Tarts and the transgressive art that he and his girlfriend are awkwardly starting to imitate. As with Burns’s 2005 graphic novel “Black Hole,” the central source of unease here is the world-warping chaos of youth and sex. ![]()
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