Where film has David Lynch, comics have Charles Burns. His disturbed and disturbing universe deploys his obsessions with radical abandon: an aesthetics that combines the 1950s with B-movie horror, sex as a disease – or a curse, the dark side of suburban America. Whether his characters are Mexican wrestlers, kid detectives, or teenagers infected with a mysterious virus, the tales by this master of the strange in modern comics can plumb the unconscious of American society, but they can also reinterpret Hergé’s work by hitting Tintin with a dose of LSD. At the heart of his work is always the conflict between purity and moral and physical corruption, which he portrays with a drawing style that ranges from sinister nightmare to pulp fantasy, and which many people will recognize from his brilliant covers of The New Yorker or The Believer, or from Iggy Pop’s album Brick by Brick. 

In this conversation between Charles Burns and the journalist and writer Beatriz García Guirado, author of the novels Los pies fríos [Cold Feet] and La tierra hueca [The Hollow Earth] and co-author of the essay “Ballard Reloaded”, we delve into his disturbing imagination, where the borders between the outside and the inside of the human mind begin to slip away.