And I don't mean Charles Montgomery Burns. Oh lord, I can't believe I did that. Shameless dork humor, ladies and gentleman! Charles Burns has a new book out, X'ed Out. Look, I have no idea what it's about other than some guy wanders a bizarre, vaguely ominous dreamscape while looking like a vertically-scaled version of Herge's TinTin. If you've ever wanted to see a guy whose nose has rotted off eat a maggot with a human face, this is the book for you!
And me!
Oh yeah, the Onion A/V Club interview. It has a bizarre digression into how Roger McGuinn couldn't figure out George Harrison's guitar sound until he watched A Hard Day's Night (not that I'm complaining; I'm an arch-digresser and pop culture addict full of esoteric, useless trivia of a similar sort), but the interview also touches on Patti Smith and William S. Burroughs, plus it includes some shop-talk about Burns's former coloring technique (one of my graphic design professors colored his jobs the same way) and the performance anxiety of possibly ruining a finished page by dripping gouache onto it. Hell, you can read! Why am I telling you all this?
X'ed Out is going on my Christmas list, by the way. It's exactly the kind of thing I like. Getting something inappropriate makes the holiday a little surreal, which is just how I like it. Like last year when my sister-in-law gave me Dark Horse's Eerie Achives Volume 1 and my mom gave me... er... Dark Horse's Bernie Wrightson's Frankenstein (which weighs as much as one of the bodies Dr. Frankenstein experimented on, I might add) and I spent Christmas night wandering the gaily-lit, gorgeously decorated Harajuku and Shibuya wards of Tokyo, holiday music in the air and lovely young couples walking along window-shopping and basking in the glow of love. Christmas night is probably the most romantic night of the year in Japan, much more so than either Valentine's Day or White Day.
Monsters, romance and Tokyo. Definitely my most memorable Christmas. This year will be noseless maggot eaters, I guess.
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