While his contemporaries were drawing Superman ("I'd never want to do any comic character unless I could make them have Aids or something," he told one interviewer), Burns was crafting his own skewed and stilted version of everyday life, complete with zombies, putrefying skin diseases and weird visions. It's hilarious one moment, chilling the next, clearly the product of a less than settled mind - and yet when you meet him the Philly-based father seems a nice bloke, no more no less. Until he starts to unfold:

"I wish I was 400lbs so I could... at least not have to take as much shit as I do," he says, when talking about his all-wrestling detective, El Borbah. "But I guess men deserve more abuse."

His drawings, like painstaking wood block prints, parody the wooden acting and stage sets of the movies that influenced him - along with wrestling, Mad magazine and European strips like TinTin.

You want to draw conclusions about this clean-cut guy, you assume he must have lead a traumatic life or had terrible crises of confidence with girls, but he cheerfully resists being easily stereotyped. Everyone who interviews Burns feels compelled to probe his formative years and we all come out with distinctly average answers: "I wasn't a total nerd, but I wasn't a big, socially popular kid." "Oh yeah, I dated." At heart, you suspect, he likes doing stories about teenagers because they're great fodder - they do dumb things, they draw hasty conclusions, they're chickenshit when faced with the big unfriendly world, symbolised in his artwork by mad marauding aliens or girls who have snakes instead of tongues.

Burns was born in 1955, slap bang in the middle of the Cold War, when America was looking to a shiny, bubble-car future if they weren't bombed by the Russkies first. This combination of optimism and paranoia is a spread throughout his work, where women are plastic Barbie girls. When the aliens take us over, men turn into tentacled monsters while women stay as beautiful shells with their monsters on the inside. "For everybody, 1950s culture was looking towards the future, this Utopian America, and I guess a lot of my work is dealing with how those kinds of ideas are lies - that beneath the surface of this perfect idea of America lurked something darker."

He's done everything from illustrations for Time magazine and an Iggy Pop album to theatrical design. His sets for Mark Morris's updated version of Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker Suite, called simply The Hard Nut, and his work for the Belgian Dance Company had to be seen to be believed. "I know absolutely nothing about dance," he happily told me eight years ago when he first began to diversify from comics. "All my comics look like stage sets anyway... it's great to see your stuff two storeys high."

For The Hard Nut, Burns set the fairytale in the 1960s suburbs of his childhood, with a heroine disfigured by evil mice and a six-headed rat-king danced by two people. New York, Brussels and Edinburgh were variously impressed.

His confused half-canine hero, Dog Boy, was turned into a live action show back in 1991 for MTV's Liquid Television series, and while not as successful as Beavis and Butthead or Aeon Flux, the series' two big hits, it drew critical acclaim and made his name familiar to the MTV generation, and a whole lot of other people. Because his style is so distinctive, almost eerie in its perfection, he sticks in people's minds and has often had the experience of big-name editors commissioning him out of the blue.

Burns had another crack at becoming a pop icon in mid-1994 when he was one of a handful of cartoonists who designed packaging for Coke cans (well, not quite Coca-Cola: OK-soda, Coke's ill-fated Generation-X pop). Unfortunately the grey-canned drink, slogan "Don't think there has to be a reason for everything", flopped spectacularly. At least Burns got ,000 out of it. But at the same time he still sells his weekly comic strips to a handful American papers for a few dollars.

Fundamentally, Charles Burns does what he wants, which is to refine his themes and obsessions, looking for the kernel of darkness at the heart of modern America. He wanders back and forth, doing an illustration here, a cover there, daring critics to try and dismantle his phobia-laden stories, often copied but never equalled.