A young man sits in a kitchen with a blue felt-tip pen. He can see his reflection in a chrome toaster: tousled black hair, Oxford shirt. He sketches out a grotesque figure, a human body with a contortion of tentacles where the neck should be, then a giant cauliflower-like red growth in place of a head. “It takes me a while,” he says, “but at some point I realise I’m drawing a self-portrait.”
This is the opening scene of Final Cut, Charles Burns’s first new English-language graphic novel in a decade (it brings together three serialised comics previously published in French). A body-horror toaster self-portrait is quintessentially Burnsian, his work being inked in the blurred space between humdrum American adolescent life and a monstrous, otherworldly unconscious. But it’s also about a real thing that happened to Burns, half a century earlier. “I was in this kitchen,” he says. “It was 1974 and I was very high, at a party, drawing my self-portrait in a toaster. Actually, I think I’ve got a copy. Let me grab it real quick.”
