Final Cut is Burns's new book, and his first major work of comics since, I think, the odd Tintin-inspired trilogy a decade ago, which started with X'ed Out. And it's very much in the spirit of his older works: the characters are young, maybe college-age though with no obvious school or jobs or other concerns to complicate their schedules. The world they live in is probably the early 1970s - our hero sees The Last Picture Show in a theater; it might not be first-run but it's playing - and they are making a movie.
The point of view alternates between Brian - he's the uneasy young man this time out, possibly manic-depressive and always sketching strange things - and Laurie, the girl he's obsessed with and who is going to be the star of the short horror movie this group is making. Brian and his best friend Jimmy have been making short silent movies with a personal film camera for maybe a decade, starting when they were about twelve: grisly murders, alien invasions, pulpy violence and startling danger. That kind of thing. The things that pop-culture-steeped young Boomer men would gravitate to, derivative versions of '50s monster movies.
They're doing this, I think, somewhere in the Pacific Northwest. One member of the group has a family cabin, out in the woods, they they can use. And the book takes place partially in their home city - whatever that is - but mostly on a few camping trips, to that cabin and elsewhere in the woods, to film this movie. And, along the way, to drink and goof off and fool around - Brian is super-serious about this movie, but no one else is, and all the others are more typical twenty-somethings, mostly happy and looking for a good time.
The publisher's description calls this a book about the creative impulse, but I'm not sure if I agree. Brian, we see as the book goes on, has some level of ambition - like a "real" filmmaker, he has a vision of what he wants this movie to look like already in his head, and we think it might be decent. (It's still a silly derivative horror movie - let me be honest - full of second-hand ideas and random shocks, but perhaps his imagery and artistic eye would have made that something compelling.) Laurie, though, is not part of that impulse at all. She's not a would-be actress: she's just the pretty girl dragged into this by her friends. For her, this is something fun to do, she hopes, or something at least interesting to look back on later. And Laurie is at least half of the story here. Calling this a story about creativity reduces her to a role in Brian's movie, rather than a real person with her own concerns and issues.
Like many other Burns protagonists, both Brian and Laurie are mostly passive here: Laurie is directed to gesture at supposed alien ships in the sky or to struggle out of a pod. She trails along with this group because they're her friends, and they have plans and ideas. Brian is more central, but it still feels like Jimmy is the energetic one, the one who makes things happen, the man with enthusiasms who convinces everyone else to go along. Brian has the ideas, but would end up sitting by himself just drawing them without someone like Jimmy.
Of course Brian is obsessed with Laurie in a complicated artistic and personal way. He wants her to be his girlfriend, but also his muse - or, rather, she already is his muse, for this project at least, and he desperately wants her to live up to his unrealistic constructed vision of the woman-who-looks-like-Laurie in his planned movie.
They don't talk about the personal stuff, just the movie. If Brian were the kind of person who could explain things in words, it would be a very different story: it wouldn't be a Charles Burns story, I think. Brian does not get what he wants, obviously. Laurie...does, as much as she wanted anything specific.
They do make a movie. It is something like Brian's vision. But his vision would be a completely believable, Hollywood-quality production. Anything Brian does with this group, in this amateur way, will inevitably fall short. (There may be a deeply buried, implied "and so the Brians of the world grow up to be Charles Burns" - that they move to a similar artform that does let one person control everything, where budget is not as important as time and craft and focus.)
Final Cut looks gorgeous as well - as we expect from Burns - with inky blacks and his deep shadowing over colors that often are a bit brighter than we remember.
There's one way Final Cut differs from earlier Burns stories: the creepy horror-movie iconography and worries are all confined to the movie-in-the-book. This is not a genre story; it's about making genre stories. So it uses that imagery, but only in the service of creating art: we get some of Brian's dreams and visions, but no sense that they are real, unlike books like Black Hole, which are more centrally unsettling.
So this is a quieter, subtler story than we've seen before from Burns - most of the same elements, but with the realism mixed higher and the supernatural very low, as a background touch. And I'm impressed with the way he treats Laurie, and keeps her central as a character - not just the imaginary version of her Brian has created. In the end, it is her story as much as his: she's not just a viewpoint to illuminate his ideas, but an entirely separate way of seeing, a different way of thinking about this impulse.
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