Charles Burns

Comics, Graphic Novels, and Illustration

Charles Burns (born 1955) is an American cartoonist and illustrator whose work sits at the intersection of underground comics, avant-garde publishing, and commercial illustration. His draftsmanship — precise, high-contrast, and anatomically distorted in controlled ways — is immediately recognizable, and his career spans five decades of sustained output across serialized comics, collected editions, and image-making for print and advertising.

Burns came to wider attention through early issues of RAW, the avant-garde comics magazine founded in 1980 by Françoise Mouly and Art Spiegelman. He contributed a die-cut cover for RAW #4 in 1982, and Raw Books published two of his works as RAW One-Shots. His short comics from this period and the years following were later gathered in the three-volume Charles Burns Library — El Borbah (1999), Big Baby (2000), and Skin Deep (2001) — published as hardcovers by Fantagraphics Books. These volumes collect the bulk of his pre-Black Hole work. A fourth volume, Bad Vibes, was announced but not completed.

From 1993 to 2004, Burns serialized Black Hole across 12 issues, published by Kitchen Sink Press and Fantagraphics Books. The series was collected into a single volume in 2005. It won the Harvey Award and remains the work most closely associated with his name in Charles Burns graphic novels. In 2010, Burns began the Last Look trilogy with X'ed Out, followed by The Hive (2012) and Sugar Skull (2014). Pantheon published the complete trilogy as a single volume, Last Look, in 2016.

In 2025, Burns won the Eisner Award for Best Writer/Artist for Kommix, Final Cut, and Unwholesome Love. He was awarded a Pew Fellowship in 1994.

Outside comics, Burns has produced illustration work across a range of contexts: the album cover for Iggy Pop's Brick by Brick, advertising material for OK Soda and Altoids, and portrait illustrations for The Believer.

This collection brings together Charles Burns books and publications available at Lokator100, dispatched from Germany with careful packing. Titles span his major Surreal & Experimental Comics output as well as works that cross into the territory of Artbooks & Artist Publications. French-language editions published by Éditions Cornélius may also appear in this collection where available.