El Borbah

By Charles Burns

Book Overview

Meet El Borbah, a 400-pound private eye who wears a Mexican wrestler's tights and eerie mask. Subsisting entirely on junk food and beer, El Borbah conducts his investigations with tough talk and a short temper. He smashes through doors and skulls as he stalks a perfectly realized film-noir city filled with punks, geeks, business-suited creeps and mad scientists.

El Borbah features five science-fiction and true-detective episodes: In "Robot Love," rebellious kids in nightclubs replace their "parts" with mechanical substitutes as part of a new fad, only to find that their parents have been automating themselves all along; in "Love in Vein" a mad visionary sperm donor plans a master race and turns "his" kids against their parents; "Bone Voyage" details the exploits of a cult called the Brotherhood of the Bone, a kind of cross between the Masons and the Mansons. The fantastic plots take up the weird fears of a scientific society, but the action is pure pulp. Charles Burns effortlessly spins yarns with gritty punchlines and pictures so perfect they must have existed in some collective memory of junk drama. And through it all crashes El Borbah, trying to make an honest buck from dishonest people.

Burns is the author of Black Hole, the acknowledged masterpiece of the form that Fantagraphics serialized through the 1990s and will be collected into a massive graphic novel in 2005 by Pantheon Books. El Borbah is Burns' earliest work, created in the early 1980s, though the work remains eerily contemporary. Steeped in a "sci-fi-noir" aesthetic informed by Burns' steadily childhood diet of B-movies and comic books, but with a sophisticated sense of humor that is often as disturbing as it is funny, El Borbah is comics as its most entertaining.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1560976934
• ISBN13: 9781560976936
• Release Date: January 2006
• Publisher: Fantagraphics Books
• Length: 93 Pages
• Weight: 1.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 9.1" x 12.1"

Customer Reviews

Absolutely Fantastic Production!

It's great to see Charles Burns' work get the treatment it deserves, this is one beautifully-made book with hilarious, pulpy stories starring the mad wrestler-detective El Borbah. Well worth the price!

Viva El Borbah!

Burns has always been a consistently excellent artist. No one knows how to put black on paper better than him. This collection contains some great artwork and entertaining writing. I can't wait until the next collection....

Viva El Borbah!

Years before bands such as Southern Culture on the Skids and Los Straightjackets began to pay homage to masked Mexican wrestlers, Burns gave us El Borbah. The mask wearing Private Dick chain smokes, swills beer and gets into fist fights with just about everyone. Bizarre and beautiful. For those who love B-Grade Sci-Fi, Mexican wrestlers and Film Noir, this is a must have.

Sick Thrills from the Master of the Razor Line!

Fans of Burns know him to be one of the two or three (let's include Gary Panter and Chris Ware) geniuses of the form at work today. The El Borbahs are top of the line and deserve this collection between covers. Nobody-- NOBODY!-- draws like Burns, and his writing is obsessively dark and charmingly twisted. Bedtime reading for people who've forgotten why they once liked comics.....

bizzare SFnal detective comic book

Designed to appeal to the peculiar, a nicely-realised world of weirdos torment our hero 'el borbah - man of steel' who appears to be a WWF wrestler with a job as a PI. pre-reminiscent of 'gun with occasional music'