Charles Burns has been a luminary of the alternative comics world since the early ’80s, when his work was published in the underground comics anthology RAW, edited by Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly. Most famous for Black Hole — published between 1995 and 2005, the series chronicles the misfortunes of a group of Seattle teenagers who contract a horrifying sexually transmitted disease which leads to gruesome disfigurations — Burns is also the in-house illustrator for The Believer and has done advertising work for commercial products such as Altoids and Coca-Cola.
     His latest work, X’ed Out (Pantheon Books, $19.95), will be released on October 19th as the first installment in a new trilogy. Printed in brilliant full color, the book follows a young man named Doug as he drifts in and out of sleep-like states, flashbacks and what seem to be full on, drug-induced hallucinations. PLANET sat down with Charles Burns in his Philadelphia home to talk about X’ed Out, his so-deemed “genius for the grotesque” and why he doesn’t write teenage vampire romances.

That old saying (and secret dictum of science fiction) “the future is now” is rarely as appropriate a descriptor as it is for William Gibson’s latest novel, Zero History (Putnam, $26.95). For the past twenty-five years, Gibson has been churning out, with a machinelike consistency, remarkable works of science fiction — all the while edging their settings backwards, closer and closer to the present.
     Having established himself as one of our finest dealers of far-flung futures, Gibson’s decision to set his first novels of the new century — Pattern Recognition (2003) and Spook Country (2007) — in a future barely distinguishable from the present came as something of a surprise. Gone were the razor girls, neural uplinks and dope-smoking Rastafarian spaceship pilots that had for so long characterized his work; in their stead were viral internet footage, transnational marketing conspiracies and something akin to a 9/11 induced cultural tinnitus, the nascent whine of the old rhythms of the world unfurrowing. All of a sudden, the future felt more like the now than ever before.
     Zero History marks the third, and perhaps final, installment in Gibson’s newest series. The three novels share the same near future world, as well as many of its characters, preoccupations and flaws.