Caprice

Fictional Comic Book Covers by Charles Burns

Caprice brings together around thirty original illustrations conceived as covers for books that do not exist. Charles Burns draws on his long-standing fascination with 1950s American pulp comics — their lurid colour, their compressed drama, their implicit violence — and runs that aesthetic through the precise, ink-heavy graphic language he has developed across four decades of work.

Each image holds the compressed tension of a first panel: a situation implied but unresolved, a narrative withheld. The recurring preoccupations of Burns's work are present throughout — adolescence, metamorphosis, sexuality, nightmares — rendered here not as sequential story but as a series of charged, self-contained surfaces. The effect is somewhere between an archive and an invention.

The book was published in May 2023 as the inaugural issue of Collection Kim, a new series from Éditions Cornélius, and represents a worldwide exclusive publication. It sits at an intersection that will be familiar to readers of Big Baby or Love Nest — between artist publication and comic object, between image collection and latent fiction.

Burns first came to wider attention through his contributions to RAW, the avant-garde comics magazine co-founded by Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly, and went on to produce Black Hole, X'ed Out, and the subsequent Last Look trilogy. Caprice does not extend any of those narratives directly; it operates instead as a concentrated expression of the visual logic that underlies all of them. Relevant for collectors of surreal and experimental comics, for readers already inside Burns's universe, and for anyone drawn to the artist publication as a form.

Also available: Sweet Dreams.