This is a world in which boys discover that girls have tails, and girls discover that boys are unfathomable. Yesterday’s girl next door falls under the glam-rocking spell of David Bowie’s Diamond Dogs, while Neil Young’s equally popular Harvest seems to serenade a parallel sphere. Identity is up for grabs, as experience and circumstance wreak transformations that leave some of these kids strangers to themselves, as well as to their friends. Within the world delineated through the nightmare caricatures of Burns, intercourse can leave an indelible impression on the skin, like a strange stigmata, while indulging in drugs can blur the already thin line between reality and illusion. It details the sexual and psychedelic misadventures of a group of teenagers, from their initiation into the grisly mysteries of Biology 101 through a summer in which some of their lives seem like science experiments gone awry. Though originally issued as a series of 12 comic books, this anthology by the Seattle-based Burns ( Big Baby, 1985) has the thematic coherence of a graphic novel. There’s nothing funny about high school in this black-and-white comics collection, which should strike a particularly sharp chord among those who endured and survived their adolescent rites of passage in the early 1970s.
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