Graphic Novel: Just as what Nabokov called "the first little throb of Lolita" was conceived in his short story The Enchantress, long-term fans of Charles Burns will recognise in Teen Plague (Raw Magazine, 1989) the first stirrings of this, his magnum opus, Black Hole.
In an article in the New York Times last year Chip McGrath, examining the phenomenon of the graphic novel, wrote: "Charles Burns's Black Hole is still unfinished, but some graphic artists talk about it the way people talked about Ulysses back when it was appearing in instalments."
Let's take that for a test drive. Joyce finished faster and managed a better prose style. On the other hand, Burns draws much more nicely than Joyce. If this sort of grandiose comparison must be made, the shoes Burns is stepping into are not Joyce's but Kafka's - specifically the Kafka of Metamorphosis.
For this account of a ghastly plague that decimates teenage Seattle suburbia in the mid-1970s is as much about soul sickness as decomposing flesh. The mysterious sexually transmitted disease results in mutations ranging from the development of a mouth in the chest to the acquisition of a disposable tail, the latter rendered not unattractive by the indefatigable Burns.
Narrated by a succession of teens, some victims, some monsters, the tale unfolds into a nightmare of adolescent angst and existential alienation reminiscent at its best of Twin Peaks or Blue Velvet. Burns's beautifully rendered brush drawings make even the daytime ominous. A pall of decay hangs over everything. How much is real, we wonder, as these strangely changed children squatting in the house of holidaymaking parents or by the campfires in the forest of Burns's night drop their windowpane acid and suck their roaches dry.
There is a love story here too, but with a difference. Strange dolls, like voodoo fetishes, appear hanging in the trees. And then someone starts murdering the mutants.
For Burns fans who didn't manage to collect all 12 instalments of the saga when it was issued serially by Fantagraphics, this will be a welcome reissue, and a splendid stocking filler for the older teenager (always bearing in mind that there's a certain amount of what the late Paddy Crosbie referred to as "in bed scenes"). Those too who grew up, or attempted to, listening to David Bowie's Diamond Dogs should find it right up their arcane little alley.
Tom Mathews is a freelance cartoonist and writer. A collection of his drawings, The Best of Tom Mathews, was recently published by New Island
Black Hole By Charles Burns Jonathan Cape, £16.99