Burns, Charles – Big Baby

Website

Big Baby

Guess when the first of the stories collected in this book came out. Give up? It was 1983. 18 years ago, and I’m just now getting around to reading them. Most of the blame for that can be placed squarely on the shoulders of Fantagraphics, because this is a pretty thin book and it costs $25 (no softcover editions available). I usually don’t have that kind of money lying around for something that I’ve just heard great things about, but lately I’ve been buying a lot more stuff for the sake of this website (right, it’s all a sacred duty and I don’t get any enjoyment at all out of reading comics that I’ve been looking at for years). Well, if you have $25 laying around, this book is absolutely gorgeous. It’s a thing of beauty and intense craftsmanship and would look great on the bookshelf of anybody who enjoys comics. I’m going to have hunt down his other stuff now, which is another reason that I avoid stuff like this that I’ve heard about for years: having to catch up on all the stuff that I’ve missed.

What’s the book like? Well, picture all the old EC stuff like Tales From The Crypt (the 50’s comic, not the show, for the illiterates out there), except done really well. Sure, that old stuff had some charm, but you’d have a hard time convincing anybody that it was literature. This stuff is genuinely creepy and disturbing without being campy. This is all about the main character, who is called Big Baby, having little adventures. The adults never believe him and he has an overactive imagination, so he’s always on his own. That floating boy and his story was creepy as hell and is worth the price of admission. A main bone of contention is that there are only 4 stories in this book and one of them is only a couple of pages long. I realize that this packaging looks great, but this would have made a much bigger impact if it was affordable even to the average comic fan who wants to read it. One of those things that Fantagraphics doesn’t seem to get, or maybe they know a lot more than I do because they seem to be doing OK. Anyway, there’s another story called “Teen Plague” about Big Baby’s confusion between reading an old comic about aliens trying to take over the planet and his babysitter having a hickey in the shape of the wound that the aliens were making. Great stuff, especially when it turns out that something might be wrong with her and her boyfriend after all. The first story, Curse of the Molemen, deals with Big Baby seeing a man being dragged into a hole in his neighbor’s backyard and his trying to convince anybody that something is going on when all the adults think that the scary movie he watched is scaring him into seeing things. I wish he had done more of these, but now I have to pick up his series Black Hole, so maybe he got even better. I guess the bottom line here is that this is good stuff, but pricey.