This is a tale of self discovery destruction and selfishness. This is the story of a damaged mind dealing with truth, this is about running away from your problems. It’s about not knowing who you are. It’s about thinking you’re the hero, when in reality you aren’t really doing anything then stroking your own ego. It feels like a story of mid twenties self-crisis.
As Black Hole was about teen dread, this feels like it’s about twenties self-crisis and not knowing your way in the world or knowing how you fit in the adult world, possibly fear of responsibility.

This trilogy is about birth, life, death(just look at the covers). Doug wakes knowing he’ll never remember what was about to happen… A juxtaposition of strange dreamscapes & mundane reality. This is symbolism galore, but not in a bad way. Just in a heavy handed way, much like Black Hole.  The “dream world” oddly feels more real, and the “real world” feels like an anxiety dream. It’s a good story, I do feel like there is something missing storywise, but I can’t tell you what it is. It all makes glad I am no longer in my twenties and dealing with self-obsessed art art school types. The folk in the “real world” remind me of the parts of me I despise from my youth and the people I avoid in my older years, plus the head injury parts hits a little too close to home.

I really enjoy Charles Burns’ illustration style, it always reminds me of Shin-hanaga(新版画) woodcuts and photos of the Pacific Northwest in the late 70s-early eighties. The color and type in this series are great, and really do a great job of informing the tone and assisting the narrative of the story. If you like this type of comic book, you’ll like this comic book. If you have to hunt down a good bookstore to find a comic book you like, this is a comic for you. If you listen to my recommendations, then I recommend this.

I give it 4.5 K  large spotted eggs out of 5K large spotted eggs. I really enjoyed it, but I  feel it was lacking enough weirdness for me. I highly recommend it.

X’ed Out, The Hive & Sugar Skull will be bundled as a trilogy, I guess will be available Oct 04, 2016 as a paperback. Check out their publisher’s website.