Big Baby is one of those oversized graphic novels you see in the shelf at the library and despair of ever getting home. It’s too large to fit standing up, and so rests at an awkward angle or is forced into prostration. No matter, the book itself is weird enough to warrant a good review. Charles Burns suffers from too much talent at depicting surreal situations imbued with a creeping sense of horror. Baby is a child with an overactive imagination that excels in infusing his everyday surroundings, especially nocturnal ones, with a sizable dose of horror.
We have the Molemen, who live sub terra and take men to their underground cages to ravish them repeatedly, to “act as their wives”. The story is resolved when Baby escapes, catalytically ending a lifetime of domestic abuse next door. Teen Plague is a little story about a horrific plague sweeping high school kids who make out and have premarital sex. Sounds like Burns is reliving a decade of nauseating 80s movies with extremely puritanical overtones. Blood Club has a similar theme, about boys at summer camp who form a secret club, until Baby finds a skin mag and is reviled as a pervert. The ghost is only too real to Baby, however, and he succeeds in freeing it from its agony. Requiescat in pace!
Overtones of guilt about teenage hormonal episodes aside, this graphic novel holds your attention. The monochromatic format uses its high contrast to draw your eye to the stark emotions on the characters’ faces. The heads are large, often oversized and the usual emotions of angst, betrayal, anger, humiliation, terror, shame, guilt and apathy that make up the pre-pubescent psyche are portrayed realistically here. This is no Fuuuuu comic.
ISBN: 978-1-56097-800-8