Sweet Dreams — Charles Burns
Between the 1950s and 1970s, American romance comics were produced in vast quantities for teenage girls, though the work behind them was almost entirely anonymous and almost entirely male. Charles Burns has long been attentive to this contradiction. In Sweet Dreams, published by Éditions Cornélius in November 2024, he returns to one of its most persistent images: a young woman lying in bed, overwhelmed by the emotional wreckage of love.
The fifty previously unpublished illustrations gathered here do not simply reproduce that motif — they dismantle it. Burns absorbs the visual grammar of mid-century romance comics and redirects it through his own sensibility. The softness curdles. The dreaming figure becomes something stranger and more unsettled. What was once coded as innocent longing tips into surrealist unease, the imagery drifting from sentiment toward something closer to dread. The male gaze embedded in these source materials is not erased but made visible and strange.
The book contains no text. The work operates entirely through image, rendered in Burns's characteristic black-and-white line work — dense, controlled, and psychologically loaded. At 30 × 20 cm in hardcover with a cloth spine, the format gives the illustrations room to press against the page.
Sweet Dreams sits alongside Burns's other work published by Cornélius — including Love Nest, Caprice, and Big Baby — as part of a sustained engagement with American popular imagery, its repressions, and its afterlives. See the full Artbooks & Artist Publications catalogue for related titles.
About Charles Burns
Charles Burns (b. 1955) is an American cartoonist and illustrator best known for Black Hole, X'ed Out, and Big Baby. His ink-heavy, psychologically charged works explore themes of identity, sexuality, transformation, and suburban horror.
