Burns' beefy El Borbah batters badness

COURTESY FANTAGRAPHIC BOOKS

As fictional detectives go, Charles Burns' El Borbah suffers most of the indignities common to characters of his genre. Respected by no one, he gets sapped in the head, tied up, shot, and sees his brand new car gradually destroyed over the course of a case. His vices are also P.I. standard-issue: drinking, smoking and a habit of wisecracking at the wrong moment. He might be mistaken for a grumpy, latter-day Philip Marlowe if he didn't dress like a Mexican wrestler and pound the crap out of everybody he meets.

El Borbah collects five stories from the early '80s starring Burns' musclebound, incongruous shamus. With their violent plots and freakish characters, the stories suggest a Dick Tracy in which every character has become a grotesque. That comic strip's fantasy universe, which posed Chester Gould's square-jawed hero against a stream of warped evildoers, has collapsed in El Borbah's world. Burns' protagonist holds equal contempt for the innocent and the guilty, and though he realizes the horrific implications of the cases he takes, he cares more about getting his next paycheck.

As for El Borbah's assignments, the guy never seems to encounter a small crime. He investigates a woman's suicide only to discover a vast hamburger conspiracy. An assignment to guard a child reveals a sperm bank employee who attempts to remake the world in his image. In "Bone Voyage," the longest story, he investigates the activities of a shadowy cult of wishbone worshipers who run sex clubs. In every instance, El Borbah can't stop the plots he encounters. He does his minuscule job and steps out for a smoke, leaving the world to continue decaying.

What Burns is concerned with in these early stories, however, is the interplay of bizarre plot devices and archetypes, not with whether he can tie everything together in a satisfying manner at the end. To read these stories is to watch a young artist at play, telling what he claims is a detective story so he can dress it up in wrestlers' clothes and throw in a gang of old men who've had their heads attached to babies' bodies. Burns notes in the back how he used to watch wrestling on Saturday mornings, and how "the sight of all those twisting sweaty bodies going at it had a brutal intensity you didn't see on other, more sanitized television shows." The way Burns slams his outlandish plots and characters together partly explains why his endings are so inconclusive. The more he can keep his stories in flux, the more heat he can build in his pressure-cooker universe.

Burns' beautiful black-and-white art adds to this effect immeasurably. It's incredibly slick and exact, but there's a flat, deadpan aspect to the characters that makes them look vaguely like action figures. They look like toys for Burns to play with, and when El Borbah nearly runs over an old man in his new muscle car, bellowing "Ha ha ha!" the comic holds ridiculous, exhilarating energy.

El Borbah is also a little shallow. Burns' early work is a series of extremely engaging trifles; as he's progressed, he's gradually added more human elements to his characters, such as Big Baby's paranoia or the lovelorn desperation of Dog-Boy. His current comic series, Black Hole, gives all of its characters recognizably human personalities, and seems genuinely concerned about wrapping up its plotlines. When Burns finally finishes Black Hole, it may turn out to be his masterpiece. Until then, there's the guiltless, freakish fun of El Borbah—it's some of the best pulp out there.

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