Common themes, of course, can be recognized across the backcatalog of any established artist. In some ways, however, such signposts feel all the more prominent in Charles Burns’ work. The artist has maintained a powerful sense of stylistic consistency across his output—both in terms of his approach to aesthetics and storytelling—that lesser artist find difficult to maintain over the course of a single story.

In this third and final part of our interview with Burns, we discuss the influences—both conscious and otherwise—on his singular artistic vision and how they influenced both his most famous book, Black Hole, and his more recent venture into the world of film, Peur(s) du Noir—a dark and haunting work that fits in perfectly alongside his better-known work.

[Part One][Part Two]

Black Hole had a lot of single panel images that worked on their own.

Yeah.

Do you work from the images?

You know, it goes both ways. Primarily I’d say that my storytelling comes from writing, but sometimes there’s this really strong, iconic image, and the ideas are based around that. If you think about Black Hole, if you don’t have the woods, the story has a very different feeling to it. This environment, the way that it’s drawn, is very important to the storytelling.

But you’re not experiencing any Jim Woodring-like visions?

I try to pay attention to my subconscious mind and my dreams, but I’ve never really suffered from hallucinations.

I know your father was a scientist—was that part of the genesis of the story that inspired the short film?

Someone asked me that before, and I didn’t have an answer. I thought about it before, and now I do have one. You were talking about the bed that has insects in it. When I was a kid, we moved around a lot, and at some point, I had this bed. It wasn’t like a regular bed—it was more like a couch.

Like a futon?

Yeah, maybe something like that, and the material inside when you sat down made kind of crackling sound. I had a strong imagination, and on evenings when I was trying to fall asleep, I would hear this crackling sound. I’m not moving, but I’m hearing this crackling sound, so of course I’m thinking there’s something in there, like insects.

Is there something specific to that story that lends itself well to doing an animated film, versus a comic?

The guideline was that it had to be in black and white, and that is was about fears of the dark. It’s a horror story and there was a certain length to it—between 15 and 20 minutes. This seemed like it fit. It was also just a matter that I wanted to go back to this story.

The fear of the dark is an incredibly central theme to the story.

Yeah, of course, and in every horror story, really. It was interesting too, working on it, that there were a lot of visual links between the stories. We didn’t know exactly what the entire story would be, but it was interesting to see all of the similarities.

Beyond the darkness, what other themes hold the pieces together?

There’s the whole fear of the physical body, which I always come back to [laughs]. There are just funny little things, like the specimen in jars.

That has to be one of the most terrifying concepts for a horror story—this idea of losing control of yourself. That played a huge role in Black Hole. It also plays a big role in the animated piece.

Yeah, absolutely. The guy wakes up and he’s tied up and has a little cut on his hand.

Yeah, and Black Hole, which has the people slowly turning into monsters.

Oh yeah, right, right. With Black Hole, there are so many things I like about that idea of transformation where someone can wear their clothes and hide their affliction, whereas, if someone has it manifest itself on their face, they can’t possible hide it.

And in those terms, Black Hole has its roots in very real diseases.

Sure, sure.

Did those play a role in the writing of the story?

Well, there are some things that are much more—you’ve got the idea of the girl that slips out of her skin. At that age, you’ve got the idea of wanting to transform yourself and becoming a new person. I like that idea. The extra idea—there’s Burroughs again. The whole idea of the talking asshole.

From Naked Lunch.

Those sort of things played a role.

Would you work on another one of these projects, if the opportunity presented itself?

I’d be interested in working on other projects, but again, this piece was so unusual, in terms of the freedom we were allowed. And also, a major motivation was working with the other artists I admired.

–Brian Heater

At its best, Peur(s) du noir is arguably one of the scariest films you’ll have the opportunity to see in theaters this year. The film, a collection of black and white animated shorts brought together by French producers Valérie Schermann and Christophe Jankovic, doesn’t embrace the ultra-violence and gore of the vast majority of movies than come through your local Cineplex. Rather, like the most compelling horror films, the animated segments confront the psychological, revolving, in some form or another, around the titular fear.

The film is a perfect vehicle for Charles Burns’s art. It’s quietly creepy, exploring themes or youth and fear of the body, all while retaining the artist’s iconic aesthetic in a manner that likely would have proven nearly impossible with more traditional animation, all of which no doubt owes a good deal to the fact that Burns played the role of both writer and director of his piece.

Burns’s segment, however, while successful, gives rise to some familiar questions about film adaptations of graphic novels, specifically the upcoming film version of the artist’s magnum opus, Black Hole. In this second part of our interview with the artist, we discuss the project for which Burns has largely opted to remain hands-off.

[Part One]

I don’t know how you can speak about it, at this point, but there is a Black Hole film in production.

It’s out there and I think it’s announced that David Fincher is the director. There’s a new script that’s being written, as we speak, or maybe it’s done now, but my last contact was talking to the script writer who was going to Seattle.

To run around the forests?

Yeah. “You’ll want to take a left on (whatever the street was), and you’ll want to take a right on…” I did a little bit of that. There are a few references in Black Hole that talk about specific places that do exist in Seattle. He was going to do his own detective work. In the end, I gave him a few clues.

Was it ever suggested that you play a larger role in the script writing?

Not really. I guess I could have insisted and said that I wanted to write a script. They would have been open to that, I suppose. On the other hand, I really wanted to move on and work on different projects. For myself, it would have been just looking back and struggling to get something of my own up there. Even working on the animated film, being offered as much complete control as possible, even then it’s always going to be a collaboration. It’s close to my heart, but someone else is animating, someone else is writing those musical notes.

So, in a way, it’s almost easier for you not to play as large a role?

Yeah. I made that decision. I just wanted to put blinders on, move ahead, and work on different things, instead of trying to involve myself that much.

It took you a decade to get Black Hole out into the world. Is that part of the reason you so badly wanted to move on?

Yeah, that’s part of it. That was part of my motivation for working on Fear(s) of the Dark, as well. I was working on a single piece of obsessive work for so long, that I wanted to get out of my little studio and work with other people. I wanted to do something that was different for me. I succeeded at that, which is nice.

Why does it end up being such a lengthy process? Do you go back and edit yourself a lot? Does it just take a long time to do every page?

All of those things. One of the reasons is that I work really slowly—I edit myself a lot. I also start and stop a lot, because I have other projects. I have paying projects, illustrations and such.

And Black Hole was coming out as single issues.

Yeah. It was an issue a year for while there, it seemed like. But yeah, it was always conceived as as a complete book. It was written that way. It was like inching forward.

I assume the Black Hole will be live-action?

Again, I don’t know. The option says it can be whatever they want, so yeah, it can be puppets, for all I know.

Assuming for argument’s sake that it’s real people—reading Black Hole, the visual style is so important—do you think that it will lose something?

I don’t know. There’s some talk about trying to do some sort of movie magic to replicate that, but that’s just conversation. I don’t know if that will be done—if anything will be done. It’s Hollywood, so…

You have one of the most instantly recognizable styles in the medium. I can pick up an issue of, say, The Believer, and instantly recognize one of your pieces. How important was it to develop a clear style?

Well, it was just something that I gradually built on. It was not something I did intentionally. It was more just a matter of a certain look that I admired and was trying to figure out, going back to high school and junior high. I looked at certain things and wondered how they made those lines. I finally figured out that they used brushes to make those lines. I started trying to use a brush and went from there.

Do you ever have the desire to try out something radically different?

A little. What I’m working on now is a new comic, which is in color. That brings up a lot of really interesting ways of telling a story. You don’t have to describe the fact that someone has a pink shirt on. There are just elements that you can use as storytelling devices. And I’m also trying something new in the sense that I’m interchanging a couple of different visual styles in the story.

Are you doing the coloring yourself?

Yeah.

Does the fact that you’ve done black and white so long stem from early printing issues, or—

Early on there were a few things that had to do with printing limitations. In the case Black Hole, I just knew that the story had to be in black and white. There was just no question, with the mood and feeling. I love black and white. It’s hard to explain the work I’m doing now, but it’s based in part on Herge’s Tin Tin, which is a book that I grew up with. Color is a very important part of what that book is. So I’ve got a little bit of that Belgian bright, flat colors.

Both Black Hole and the animated shorts are black and white—they’re also horror stories, in some sense. Is the new story a different direction?

It’s not Black Hole, and again, it’s going to be hard to describe. It’s a little bit Tin Tin and William Burroughs [laughs]. How’s that?

So, an adventure story, with centipedes.

With opiates and hallucinations. There’s also a big dose of punk in there, too.

A lot of Burrough’s sci-fi stuff is sort of horror-based.

Yeah.

Is that still a big influence on what you’re continuing to do?

I guess so. There certainly some very horrific imagery in there. I just drew this green fetus creature that’s floating in dirty water. That’s what I just finished. That’s on my drawing table. So, yeah, there’s strong imagery like that. Not the entire story is like that, though.

–Brian Heater

When it was finally collected by Pantheon in 2005, after a decade’s worth of serialization, Black Hole confirmed Charles Burns’s place as the master of indie horror comics. Where many of his fellow graduates of Art Spiegelman’s RAW had long sinced forsaken the teachings of the tattered EC books on which they were weaned, there was something in the youthful psychological terrors which Burns could not abandon—or perhaps more accurately, would not abandon him.

The persistent existentialist horrors of Burns’s work are, if anything, only compounded by the artist’s brush work, which has long since become one of the most familiar styles in all of contemporary sequential art, instantly recognizable, the moment it pops up in some anthology or on the frontcover of McSweeney’s The Believer–its stark, shadow-heavy black and white an ever-present homage to the subtle terror of the earliest of horror movies.

That Burns should attempt one day to make his own horror film should come as a surprise to no one. The artist happily signed on to direct a segment for Peur(s) du Noir—Fear(s) of the Dark. The Guillermo Del Toro-approved collection of dark animated shorts has been making its way around the festival circuit over the past year.  The film is subtly frightening in a manner that most contemporary horror films forgo, too often embracing the shock of overt gore—a method that never seems to translate sufficiently in the world of sequential art.

Burns’s segment is the clear centerpiece of the film, and thanks to the subtle form of computer animation employed, which retains his style in a manner which would like be lost on more traditional animation methods, from the moment a character appears on the screen, there’s no doubt who’s behind the piece.

Burns, who has been traveling a bit to promote the film took time during a recent New York appearance to talk to us about Fear(s) of the Dark.

It’s got to be exciting to finally sit down and see the film in all of its animated glory.

Well, it’s funny, I saw it when it came out in France, last winter. I was over there for the premier in Paris. It’s one of those things I was working on for a while, and it’s finally coming here, which is nice.

I watched it last night, and the second it came on, it was clear which short was yours. We seem to be at a point in animation where the director doesn’t have to compromise his or her visual style at all.

That was the reason I wanted to be involved was the production company and what they wanted to do, which was make sure that there was no point where I was edited or my ideas were edited, other than to say something like, “is this a good idea, to do another zoom shot here?” Other than that, there was nothing as far as the content that was ever compromised. That was great. I think that was the production company’s whole approach, to allow each artist and writer to have their own vision intact.

Was animation something you had been interested in for a while?

Not really. It was something I had done as a kid, stop-motion, claymation, and things like that. But it’s not really something that I’ve kept up with, as an adult. There were plenty times where people would ask me if I had seen certain films. I have two daughters who went through their period of watching all of the animated movies, so I’ve walked past that. It wasn’t really something that I had kept up with, but I was interested in it in the sense of wanting to try something that was new—stepping into this world that I didn’t really know about.

In its most elementary sense, sequential art can almost be seen as a storyboard for animation. It seems like a fairly logical step to make.

Well, it was funny—at this point, I feel secure about writing comics. I’ve been writing comics long enough. It’s not easy, but it’s a domain I understand and feel comfortable with. So, when I started out, I came up with a storyline and wrote that out and broke it down into storyboards. All of that felt comfortable and familiar. But the minute we moved onto the next step, I felt like I was in deep trouble, because there’s an absolutely different sense about how a story is told when it’s moving. This is a very different process, which I quickly found out. That’s what was interesting too, was that there was an understanding that myself and other artists involved hadn’t done animation before. We hadn’t directed before.

Is that true of all of the other artists [involved in the film]?

Not all of them. Richard McGuire, who did the last segment—the other Americant—had worked with the directors before, and he may have even done other animated segments before—I’m not positive. So he knew the whole process. And I’d imagine some of the other artists, as well, but I’m not positive.

So that piece was written specifically to be turned into an animated short?

Yeah. Well, it was based on this real early story that I had done, right when I had started to write comics. It’s an embarrassing comic in that the drawing and the writing is bad, but there’s still part of the content that I really wanted to go back and re-examine.

There’s something inherently creepy about insects and beds and the things that crawl on us, when we sleep.

Right. Some stories come from a very simple image like that—insects inside this bed, crawling. What is the feeling of that?

I’m sure you gotten this before, but there are some visual moments that I couldn’t help but to compare to Black Hole. There’s the moment with the cut in the wrist.

 Sure. There are a lot of themes that come back, again and again. I never know how to explain that part of it. I always leave that to the critics to explain.

Having come from an early story, would you say that, in some ways, it was something of an inspiration for Black Hole?

Not an inspiration, so much as again there are just these little imageries and ideas that I keep coming back to, again and again.

[Continued in Part Two]

–Brian Heater