Charles Burns

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Charles Burns, 2009

Charles Burns (born September 27, 1955 in Washington, DC ) is an American artist, cartoonist and writer. He currently works and lives in Philadelphia , Pennsylvania .

Career

The early years

After Burns attended the Fine Art Class at the University of Washington until 1977, he studied painting and sculpture at the Graduate School in Davis , California from 1977 to 1979 . His first work included cover designs for the fanzine Sub Pop (from which the record label of the same name emerged).

In 1981 he met Art Spiegelman , who got him excited about the medium of comics . By 1991 Burns contributed to Spiegelman's avant-garde comic magazine RAW , a. a. Dog Boy and Big Baby . In 1983 he started the series El Borbah for Heavy Metal magazine .

Burns spent around two years in Italy in the mid-1980s . During this time he became known in Europe; various magazines, including the German heavy metal , printed his stories.

Black Hole

In 1993 Burns began work on his opus Magnum Black Hole , a partly subtle, partly explicit horror story about a virus that attacks high school students in Seattle in the 1970s and leads to bizarre physical deformations.

In 1995 the first edition was published by the American publisher Kitchen Sink Press , from volume 5 Black Hole was published by Fantagraphic Books . After publication of the twelfth and final volume of the series in 2004, followed a year later with Pantheon Books , a 368-page hardcover - Edition , which includes all twelve volumes in a slightly modified version.

Non-comic work

In addition to his comic book works, Burns designed the cover of the Iggy Pop album "Brick by Brick", advertising subjects for Altoids and Levi's , and designs for the Coca Cola Company in the USA for the mid-1990s Beverage brand launched on the market OK Soda .

He has also had publications and cover illustrations in TIME , Rolling Stone , Esquire and The New Yorker magazines . For The Believer magazine, founded in 2003, he designs the cover of every issue and is the official cover designer.

style

Burns' drawing style contains influences and borrowings from the American horror comics of the early 1950s (before the introduction of the Comics Code in the McCarthy era ), but also a cool aesthetic such as that used in advertising and media design of the 1980s . Burns' drawings are for the most part clearly outlined and straightforward, use a black- and-white drawing style dominated by black and hatching .

For his achievements as an inker, Burns received the Harvey Award seven times from 1998 to 2006 .

Trivia

Charles Burns attended Evergreen State College in Olympia , Washington , in the early 1970s . There he met the Simpsons inventor Matt Groening and the cartoonist Lynda Barry , with whom he worked on the school newspaper there.

Matt Groening, who named numerous characters in the television series he designed, The Simpsons after family members and friends, apparently took inspiration from his former classmate Charles Burns when choosing the name for the character Charles Montgomery Burns .

In the early 1990s, MTV adapted the Dog Boy stories for the television series Liquid Television in the form of a real-life series, for which Burns also wrote the script .

bibliography

Note: Black Hole was published in 12 volumes in the USA, but in 6 volumes in Germany, whereby a German edition has the size of two volumes of the US edition. The German editions of Big Baby and El Borbah appeared earlier than the US editions, as the two works were originally published in the USA as a series in the RAW magazine, respectively. Heavy Metal were released.

Original US editions

German-language publications

Awards

  • 1989 Harvey Award Special award for outstanding achievements in production / presentation, for Hardboiled Defective Stories (RAW / Pantheon)
  • 1998 Harvey Award for Best Tuscher (Inker), for all of his 1997 work, including Black Hole (Kitchen Sink Press)
  • 1999 Harvey Award for Best Tuscher (Inker), for all of his work in 1998, including Black Hole (Kitchen Sink Press)
  • 2001 Harvey Award for the best Tuscher (Inker), for Black Hole (Fantagraphics Books)
  • 2002 Harvey Award for the best Tuscher (Inker), for Black Hole (Fantagraphics Books)
  • 2003 Ignatz Award for Outstanding Story, for Black Hole (Fantagraphics Books)
  • 2004 Harvey Award for the best Tuscher (Inker), for Black Hole (Fantagraphics Books)
  • 2004 Harvey Award for Best Cover Artist, for Black Hole (Fantagraphics Books)
  • 2005 Harvey Award for Best Tuscher (Inker), for Black Hole (Fantagraphics Books)
  • 2006 Harvey Award for Best Tuscher (Inker), for Black Hole # 12 (Fantagraphics Books)

Web links

Commons : Charles Burns  - collection of images, videos and audio files
personal data
SURNAME Burns, Charles
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American artist, comic book artist and writer
DATE OF BIRTH September 27, 1955
PLACE OF BIRTH Washington, DC , USA