An Artist Searches for Identity and Belonging in “Final Cut” https://ift.tt/GsmcaJx
Internationally acclaimed and award-winning cartoonist and illustrator Charles Burns (author of Ignatz, Harvey, and Eisner Award-winning graphic novel Black Hole, as well as series like X’d Out, Last Look, and El Borbah, among many, many others) returns to comics with a bang in the triumphant graphic novel, Final Cut.
Final Cut is a highly original tale about a young artist who wants to make a sci-fi film with his friends on a trip to the woods. But things get complicated when he loses himself in his imagination, and our protagonist must face challenges both in his story and beyond the lens.
What does it mean to pursue a creative endeavor and what are the risks of letting it overtake our private lives? Is art enough to sustain us? How do our identities separate us from the ordinary world? These are questions Burns seeks to answer in his latest comic. I was lucky enough to receive an arc of Final Cut from Pantheon Books to review and found myself enthralled by his work.
Burns knows a thing or two about being an artist. According to Pantheon, “He has illustrated covers for Time, The New Yorker, and The New York Times Sunday Magazine, and is cover artist for The Believer.” From the get-go, I was immersed in the gorgeously rendered illustrations. Burns’s skills as a cartoonist are evident in every line and detail. Perhaps this is why his opening shot struck an immediate chord of authenticity with me from page one. Our protagonist sits at a party he doesn’t want to be at, drawing an alien instead of getting drunk or talking to friends. He prefers to get lost in his sketchbook rather than socialize, feeling like “a compressed alien, sitting at another table, in another world.” This is Brian, an outsider artist and hopeless romantic. His goals seem simple: make a movie that calls back to his favorite film. Survive a trip to the woods with friends. Win over Laurie. Like Invasions of the Body Snatchers, the horror Burns captures is more intimate than the gore and violence found in slasher films.
Everyone in the friend group experiences their own private separation from one another for different reasons that ironically connect them in the narrative: identity, desire, art. The tension created by their secrets builds suspense, and Burns is great at portraying this trepidation in his art through silences in wordless panels and body language.
When Brian is unable to earn the affections of his friend Laurie, he manifests an illustrated universe in which she returns his affections. His love renders him unable to conceive of a timeline where she does not exist to serve his unattainable fantasies. Laurie, meanwhile, begins to feel alienated from him and her friend group because of her queerness rising to the surface. She experiences a sense of impending doom the more these feelings for her friend become impossible to ignore.
Admittedly from a lesbian cartoonist’s perspective, I kept wanting Laurie to have more autonomy. Though they serve the plot, Brian’s drawings of her naked seemed gratuitous. Laurie even tells Brian at one point, “Well, at least you drew me with all of my clothes on this time.” I felt the same. Brian and Laurie’s imaginary relationship holds more narrative weight than Laurie and Tina’s lived experiences. I thought they could have been explored further from an emotional standpoint in order to heighten their complexity as fully rounded characters.
The heart of this story lies in its dazzling interrogation of art making and the power or disempowerment story can give us. When we watch films or read books, we get to abandon our mundane problems in favor of strange new worlds. In the pages of this comic, Jack Kirby’s quote rings true: “Anything is possible.” Through his detailed artwork and exploration of pop culture, Burns masters what comics do best and invites us into a mysterious universe that’s entirely his own. It’s based in reality, yet isn’t afraid to dip its toes into the supernatural. In the end, Charles Burns’ innovative graphic novel offers a world you’ll gladly slip into.
GRAPHIC NOVEL Final Cut
By Charles Burns
Pantheon
Published September 24, 2024
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