Skin deep comic7/31/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() The story's narrative, which began its twelfth arc in January 2015, presents the point of view of Michelle, a college-aged Sphinx who has only recently learned that she is not a human, and the various points of view of the citizens of Liverpool's Avalon, an entire magically hidden city. The story follows the lives of various mythical creatures, such as a gryphon, a nixie, a satyr, and a sphinx, as they disguise themselves (using magical medallions) into the world of humans. Very good comics, by any metric.Skin Deep is a fantasy webcomic series written and drawn by Missourian Kory Bing. With its wild twist ending it follows the tradition of EC horror comics, but with its down-to-earth domestic drama it also hints at the direction that Burns would later take in his magna opera, Black Hole and Last Look, which are driven by believable characters and interpersonal relationships.Īlthough first published in 1992, just three years before the first issue of Black Hole, this work is still very different from what would become Burns’s signature style, but it nonetheless shows a hugely talented creator with a highly original artistic voice. The last comic, the 14-page "A Marriage Made in Hell", is slight but is executed perfectly. Overall it's entertaining but not as memorable as most of Burns's work, and its ending is a bit abrupt and anticlimactic. It's the closest in tone to the El Borbah strips, and it's also very reminiscent of Like A Velvet Glove Cast in Iron by Daniel Clowes: it's a meandering and outlandish tale of larger-than-life characters embroiled in bizarre events. The second comic, "Burn Again", is the longest, at 47 pages, but it's also my least favourite. I always find the idea of losing control of one's own mind and personality darkly fascinating, and Burns handles the premise superbly, taking it in a highly original (if somewhat absurd) direction. Following a young man who starts exhibiting strange behaviour after a back-alley surgical procedure, it's an excellent mix of humour and genuinely unsettling psychological horror. The collection's first comic, the 20-page "Dog Days", is my favourite of the three. ![]() The connecting gimmick notwithstanding, there are several commonalities that make the three comics fit together: they all combine horror with romance, they all deconstruct 1950s US society, and they all fall tonally somewhere between the straight-up weirdness of El Borbah and the more grounded horror of Big Baby. Skin Deep is a cycle of three essentially unrelated comics, though they are connected via a device whereby the initial pages of each comic feature an aspect from the one that precedes it (the collection's first comic also being connected to Burns's Big Baby comics in this way). I really love Burns' more recent graphic novel Black Hole and many of these same themes are much more subtly and eerily realistically presented there, so Skin Deep is both more quick, a tad more fun, but considerably less sublime than the full-on graphic novel-it's great for those of short attention spans and who might crave a tad more stylistic flash and fun impact from your summer comic reading. Burns hits adolescence right on with the pop psychology that blames parents/the adult world for its capitalistic/opportunistic abuse and how it drives us to madness and murder, has papa stealing your girl in a reverse Oedipus, makes you the high-school laughingstock with your doggie heart, and mixes marriage with war and dismemberment, the ultimate anxiety, how gender and identity, without adult sex, can be a hidden secret beneath the veneer of clothing and culture and who knows what going to war, working in a library, or taking many, many business trips does to our identity and gender-identity. Mostly in Burns' stuff I find all of the above stylistic elements covering up an actually naive early '60s comic strip innocence with the curiosity and vaguely musty/moldy terror of adolescent sexual desire permeating the stories. These are three stories from his Big Baby strip loosely linked together, a kind of weird, episodic-horror-anthology-film-by-Amicus triptych. I love the monster Kid, Mexican wrestling, Twilight Zone, imaginary early '60s, sick, slightly off, David Cronenbergesque biological mutation, science fiction, psychedelic world that Charles Burns creates in his work. ![]()
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