Last Look

A true graphic milestone: the epic trilogy that began with X'ed Out, continued in The Hive, and concluded in Sugar Skull – now in one volume. 
 
‘A sleazy, slow-burning, page-turning exploration of a midlife crisis…. He’s not a million miles off [a Noble Prize].’ 
Thomas W. Hodgkinson, a Spectator Book of the Year

Now I’ve read Sugar Skull, named after the macabre sweets we saw our hero, Doug, buying in the last frame of The Hive, it’s clear to me that the only thing to do is to go right back to the beginning of the saga and start again, the better to be sure I haven’t missed some essential symbol or sign, some deeply buried meaning. My strong feeling is that this series is one of the most vividly drawn and painfully honest expositions of male guilt I’ve ever read. But I can’t be definitive about this. Burns isn’t in the business of neat endings.

Burns brings it all together in Sugar Skull. I don’t know which impressed me more – the slow build-up, over three books, to the revelation and knowledge that the final volume delivers, changing entirely how we see Doug, or the way in which Burns pulls his pieces together into such a coherent whole.

Charles Burns's comics are fluid, smooth and as solidly built as a vintage TV set, but they shudder with the chill of the uncanny.

[Last Look] bring[s] together one of the most intricate and seamlessly told stories in the history of graphic novels.

As much grotesque fun as it was reading these books instalment by instalment, Last Look is absolutely the way it should be read. And re-read. And then read again.

A complex, multi-layered narrative with a classic unreliable protagonist… Burns’ art is sensational. The images from Johnny’s story are genuinely disturbing on every level. As always, his characters tap into various archetypes of American youth and family life, but with a sinister edge showing darkness behind the American dream. Burns’ work is seductive, disquieting and original and if you don’t already have the separate volumes, this is a great chance to read the story for the first time.

A sleazy, slow-burning, page-turning exploration of a midlife crisis…. He’s not a million miles off [a Noble Prize].

It rewards the times and attention you can justifiably spend on it, with Burns layering artistic and literary magic beneath the already rich veneer… [A] brilliant book.

I think it may be a masterpiece… [Last Look] manages things faster and more masterfully in graphic form than I can easily imagine in a literary equivalent.

An intricate, secretive book with a hard truth at its center.

‘A sleazy, slow-burning, page-turning exploration of a midlife crisis…. He’s not a million miles off [a Noble Prize].’ 
Thomas W. Hodgkinson, a Spectator Book of the Year 
 
Charles Burns’ graphic trilogy has been hailed as one of the masterpieces of the form. Now readers can find the long strange trip of Doug in all its mind-bending, heartbreaking totality. The fragments of the past collide with the reality of the present, nightmarish dreams evolve into an even more dreadful reality, and when you finally find out where all of this has been going, and what it means ... it will make you go right back to the first page and read it all again with new eyes. Just like Doug.

X'ed Out

From the creator of the cult classic Black Hole, a graphic narrative that will delight and surpass the expectations of his fans.

From the creator of the cult classic Black Hole, a graphic narrative that will delight and surpass the expectations of his fans. 
 
X'ed Out is most easily described as 'Hergé meets William S. Burroughs.' We are back in that spectral, surreal terrain that Burns has made his own - only now the seamless weaves of the erotic and horrifying is played out in parallel worlds of adolescent longing and dreamscape set in China.

Meet Doug, aspiring young artist. He's having a strange night. A weird buzzing noise on the other side of the wall has woken him up, and there across the room, next to a huge hole torn out of the bricks, sits his beloved cat Inky. Who died years ago. But that's no longer the case, as he slinks through the hole, beckoning Doug to follow. So he does. Now there's no turning back. What the heck is going on? To say much more would spoil the creepy, Burnsian fun, especially since - unlike Black Hole - X'ed Out has not been previously serialised anywhere and will have readers guessing at every unnervingly meticulous panel. 
 
Drawing inspiration from such diverse influences as Herge and William Burroughs, X'ed Out is an engrossing new comic book fever-dream, from a true master of the form at the height of his powers

Black Hole

It's here: Charles Burns' epic story of existential horror, over ten years in the making.

Many regard Black Hole as one of the greatest graphic novels, and it's not hard to see why. Burns's black-and-white strips are so cool, and his story - sex, drugs and teenage mutants - grips like a vice.

Drawn in [Burns’] signature woodblock style, and [is] visually memorising

A bleak but brilliant tale of suburban alienation

Black Hole just might be the most perfect book going, if not the sexiest... As startling and evocative a work as the medium has ever produced.

Make no mistake: this is a bleak book that tries desperately in its final frames to introduce a note of optimism in resignation. It's also brilliant.

And you thought your adolescence was scary. 
 
Suburban Seattle, the mid-1970s. We learn from the outset that a strange plague has descended upon the area's teenagers, transmitted by sexual contact. The disease is manifested any number of ways - from the hideously grotesque to the subtle (and concealable) - but once you've got it, that's it. There's no turning back. 
 
As we inhabit the heads of several key characters - some kids who have it, some who don't, some who are about to get it - what unfolds isn't the expected battle to fight the plague, or bring heightened awareness of it, or even to treat it. What we become witness to instead is a fascinating and eerie portrait of the nature of high-school alienation itself - the savagery, the cruelty, the relentless anxiety and ennui, the longing for escape. 
 
And then the murders start. 
 
As hypnotically beautiful as it is horrifying (and, believe it or not, autobiographical), Black Hole transcends its genre by deftly exploring a specific American cultural moment in flux and the kids who are caught in it - back when it wasn't exactly cool to be a hippie any more, but Bowie was still just a little too weird. 
 
To say nothing of sprouting horns and moulting your skin . . .

Charles Burns

‘An instant classic from a master of the form’ 
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY 
 
The beloved and award-winning author of Black Hole returns with an arresting story of an artist's obsessions 
 
As a child, Brian and his friend Jimmy would make home movies in their yards, coaxing their friends into starring as victims of grisly murders and smearing lipstick on them to simulate blood. Now an aspiring filmmaker, he, Jimmy and new girl in town Laurie – his reluctant muse – set off to a remote cabin in the woods. 
 
Armed with an old 16-millimetre camera, they film a true sci-fi horror movie where humans are born of disembodied alien wombs, a homage to Brian's favourite movie The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. But as Brian's affections for Laurie go seemingly unreciprocated, Brian writes and draws himself into a fantasy where she is the girl of his dreams – both his damsel in distress and his saviour. 
 
Final Cut blurs the line between dreams and reality, imagination and perception in this astonishing look at what it truly means to express oneself through art.

Charles Burns

Final Cut

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