Big Baby

Big Baby by Charles Burns — Third Edition (Éditions Cornélius, April 2026)

Big Baby returns to print in April 2026 in a new hardcover edition from Éditions Cornélius, part of the Collection Solange. Out of availability for more than two years, this third edition is the first to include a 16-page color section containing previously unpublished illustrations by Charles Burns.

About the Book

Set against the backdrop of 1950s America, Big Baby channels the paranoid atmosphere of that era — a culture saturated by mass media, rediscovering Edgar Allan Poe's world of shadows, underground passages, monsters, and fear. Burns works within and against the visual codes of EC Comics, turning their familiar horror conventions toward something more interior and more corrosive.

The book's gothic register is sustained by Burns's cold, precise black-and-white line work. What emerges is not straightforward horror but a portrait of alienation: an inner rot spreading through ordinary domestic life, where violence and madness are never far beneath the surface of the everyday. The comic books that Big Baby reads in secret function like Dorian Gray's hidden portrait — each one marking the progress of a deeper sickness, pressing its stigmata onto the faces and bodies of Burns's characters.

Fear and frustration are the atmosphere here, not the exception. Parents forbid bad dreams while reality itself is a nightmare. There is no switch to turn it off. Burns's surreal and experimental comics work finds one of its most sustained expressions in this material — formally controlled, tonally bleak, and darkly comic in the manner of someone who takes horror seriously as a mode of social observation.

Exclusive Bookplate

Each copy purchased includes an exclusive Big Baby bookplate (ex-libris), printed offset at 18 × 24 cm. This is a factual offer tied to this edition, not a promotional device.

Also Available

Another Charles Burns title currently in the catalogue: Sweet Dreams. Further titles can be found in our artbooks and artist publications selection.