Last Look

Last Look

Summary

‘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.

Reviews

  • 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.
    Rachel Cooke, Observer

About the author

Charles Burns

Charles Burns grew up in Seattle in the 1970s. His work rose to prominence in Art Spiegelman's Raw magazine in the mid-1980s and took off from there, for an extraordinary range of comics and projects, from Iggy Pop album covers to the latest ad campaign for Altoids. In 1992 he designed the sets for Mark Morris's delightful restaging of The Nutcracker. He's illustrated covers for Time, the New Yorker and the New York Times Sunday Magazine. He is the official cover artist for The Believer magazine. Black Hole received Eisner, Harvey and Ignatz awards in 2005. Burns lives in Philadelphia with his wife and two daughters.
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