There’s a certain irony in the way a collection of imaginary comics covers can evoke such evocative feelings of nostalgia considering that, obviously, they never existed in the first place. In Kommix Charles Burns gives us 80 covers that will remind many readers of those childhood days when they were first discovering periodical comics, poring through long boxes, and piecing together decades of history, serialised narrative and continuity together for themselves. It’s a weirdly enticing collection and one that speaks to us as much for what it doesn’t show as for what it does.
Some of the featured covers herein mimic familiar genre comics of yesteryear but with the starkest of twists. 1950s-style romance comics, for example, but now with titles like Unwholesome Love and Hey! Eat Me! alongside the more conventional Teen-Age Romance and Teen Diary; the schmaltzy and the melodramatic now replaced by the dark, the provocative and the transgressive, with giant phallic maggots and creepy voyeurism adorning the covers.
Others give us series that look like they’ve leaked into our reality via an otherworldly void. A run of issues of a comic that uses indecipherable lingual characters in its title shows us the continuing adventures of a bandes dessinées/Tintin-like protagonist as he journeys through a bizarre landscape encountering half-house/half-person entities, discovering incomprehensible shrines, and sailing down polluted, post-apocalyptic waterways in his bed.
Burns asks us to jump in and out of narratives, picking up key moments and not just reading between panels but reading between the gaps between issues or even entire story arcs. Essentially to build our own story around the fragmentary glimpses we see here. There’s a constant juxtaposition of the everyday and the pedestrian with the eerie and the explicit here that makes Kommix such a hypnotic book. The pedestrian normalcy of awkward suburban teen romance sitting side by side with the most grotesque body horror; banal domesticity and interdimensional incursion becoming casual bedfellows.
For all its bleakness Kommix remains a wistful celebration of a bygone publishing era and a flashback to that awestruck sense of discovery when we first immersed ourselves in the enticing and all-consuming passion of our newfound hobby. Gorgeously designed with an obvious sense of love for the genre fiction standards it is re-imagining Kommix is a book that will invite constant revisitation.
Charles Burns (W/A) Fantagraphics Books, $24.99
Review by Andy Oliver
