Charles Burns books

Anthologies

Charles Burns Illustration Reading Order

Graphic Novels

Last Look Trilogy Reading Order

Charles Burns is an American cartoonist whose work is defined by its precise, high-contrast black-and-white art and unsettling subject matter. He first gained attention in the 1980s through contributions to Art Spiegelman’s RAW anthology and has since built a body of work that sits at the intersection of horror, surrealism, and underground comics.

Burns’s most celebrated work is Black Hole, which he serialized over ten years before collecting it as a single graphic novel in 2005. The story follows a group of Seattle teenagers in the mid-1970s who contract a mysterious sexually transmitted disease that causes grotesque mutations. It won the Harvey Award, the Eisner Award, and the Ignatz Award.

His later major project, the Last Look Trilogy, continued his exploration of dreams, memory, and identity through a fragmented narrative that draws on the visual language of Hergé’s Tintin. Burns has also produced several art and illustration books and served as guest editor for The Best American Comics anthology.