Big Baby

Charles Burns’s Big Baby is a stark, unsettling series from the 1990s, published by Kunst der Comics / Alpha, that distills his signature style into a single, potent issue. With Burns handling both writing and art, alongside co-writer Gerd Benz, the comic explores the eerie, claustrophobic inner world of a child, rendered in Burns’s precise, black-and-white linework. It matters as a concentrated, early example of Burns’s fascination with the grotesque and the suburban uncanny, a key artifact from a defining era in alternative comics.