Final Cut
from the Eisner award-winning author of Black Hole
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- 179,00 kr
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- 179,00 kr
Publisher Description
‘An instant classic from a master of the form’
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
'Unsettling and beautifully executed'
GUARDIAN
An arresting story of an artist's obsessions, from the beloved and award-winning author of Black Hole.
As a child, Brian and his friend Jimmy would make home movies in their yards, coaxing their friends into starring as victims of grisly murders and smearing lipstick on them to simulate blood. Now an aspiring filmmaker, he, Jimmy and new girl in town Laurie – his reluctant muse – set off to a remote cabin in the woods.
Armed with an old camera, they film a true sci-fi horror movie where humans are born of disembodied alien wombs, in homage to The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. But as Brian's affections for Laurie go seemingly unreciprocated, Brian writes and draws himself into a fantasy where she is the girl of his dreams – both his damsel in distress and his saviour.
Final Cut blurs the line between dreams and reality, imagination and perception in this astonishing look at what it truly means to express oneself through art.
**A GUARDIAN, OBSERVER, THE NEW YORKER AND THE WASHINGTON POST BOOK OF THE YEAR**
Charles Burns, Eisner Award-Winner, 2006
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The manias of art-making and adolescent lust are brilliantly rendered by Burns in his first standalone graphic novel since Black Hole. Fans will recognize Burns's lovingly etched backdrops and pulp sensibility as he returns to the subject of confused hormonal youths lost in a netherworld caught between reality and nightmare. The narrative is told mostly from the perspective of Brian, who is so busy drawing his eerie waking dreams (alien brains, his naked floating self) that he's barely conscious of the world around him. Then he meets Laurie, an awkward beauty whose interest in Brian's sketches sparks an obsessive frisson in him. As Brian and his friend Jimmy pursue their yearslong hobby of making B-grade horror flicks, Laurie agrees to be Brian's cinematic muse. It becomes clear her interest in Brian is not only platonic but tempered by concern over his manic fugue states, much like Jimmy takes the filmmaking as more of a lark than Brian will allow. The romantic misunderstandings play out in an atmosphere of lightly thrumming dread. When the trio—along with another young couple and a blonde with an unpredictable streak—march into the woods to stage Brian's homage to Invasion of the Body Snatchers, bloodletting seems sure to follow. But despite Burns's nods to body horror and creature features, his themes are more wistful than terrifying. Rarely has the pursuit of art been more potently characterized as a substitute for love and acceptance. With perfectly attuned emotional and aesthetic details, it's an instant classic from a master of the form.
