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Boots!

Where would we be without boasts?

Where would we be without good?

No, Timberg.

It's a rhetorical question, sir.

But where would we need without books?

From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblatt.

This is Bookworm, and today my guest, I'm excited to say, is Charles Burns.

He's published two-thirds of a trilogy, which began with his book X'd Out. Now we've got his new

graphic novel, The Hive. It's almost unbearable not to have the third book, but while we wait,

perhaps there'll be some questions that you'll have had answered here. Now, you seem to be the genius of unpleasant textures.

How does that happen to be?

God, I mean, I don't know. I'm not trying, I mean, it comes naturally to me. I don't know

to me. I don't know why I was drawn to darker things when I was growing up. I grew up in

the 60s and my feeling is that there was, you know, the world I was around me was fairly bland and

fairly, you know, safe. I grew up in Bethesda, Maryland, outside of Washington, D.C. But right

around that time, there was this, like on television and in the media,

there was this fad about monsters.

And for some reason, that just clicked with me.

There was something kind of dark and mysterious and very rich about that whole world. I mean, going to, going to school. I didn't have access to those things. You know, I was in a neighborhood that was, you know, not around stores, but some kid at school would have a monster magazine. And I'd have to figure out what I could trade with them to get, you know, get my hands on that. And again, I don't know, I don't know what was so

fascinating, but there was something, like I said, something very rich and exciting that I was

...