At the juncture of fiction and memory, of cheap thrills and horror, lies the dark world of Charles Burns. His stories take comic book cliches - wiseacre kids, sinister scientists, tough-as-nails detectives, teenage lust and stylized horror - and rearrange them into disturbing yet funny patterns. Beneath this interplay of familiar iconography lurks the real traumas of childhood, traumas of loss and alienation. Burns latest series, Black Hole, has won multiple Harvey Awards and was listed by The Comics Journal as one of the top 100 comics of the 20th century.