Love Nest

Love Nest by Charles Burns

Love Nest is an illustrated book by Charles Burns, published under the Collection Lucette imprint by Éditions Cornélius. The work draws on the visual language of 1950s romance comics — their saturated sentimentality, their stock gestures — and strips them of colour entirely. What remains is over a hundred black-and-white illustrations that recast familiar romantic imagery through Burns's distinctly unsettling sensibility.

The shift to stark black and white is not merely aesthetic. Burns's command of chiaroscuro transforms the source material: deep shadows, precise line work, and compressed square compositions produce a mood of unease that sits at odds with the genre's original warmth. A fragmented, non-linear narrative accumulates across the pages — built from ellipses, visual echoes, and images that drift between the domestic and the disquieting. It is less a story told than one inferred, assembled by the reader from what is withheld as much as what is shown.

Love Nest was created exclusively for Cornélius and released as a worldwide exclusive. This is the second edition, published in 2016. Also available: Sweet Dreams, another illustrated book by Burns in the same vein, as well as Caprice and Big Baby. Browse the full Surreal & Experimental Comics collection for related titles, or explore all Artbooks & Artist Publications in the shop.