The Hive

Last Look Trilogy #2

by Charles Burns

Much has happened since we last saw Doug, the Tintin-like hero from X'ed Out. Confessing his past to an unidentified woman, Doug struggles to recall the mysterious incident that left his life shattered, an incident that may have involved his disturbed and now-absent girlfriend, Sarah, and her menacing ex-boyfriend.

Doug warily seeks answers in a nightmarish alternate world that is a distorted mirror of our own, where he is a lowly employee that carts supplies around the Hive. The second part of Charles Burns's riveting trilogy, this graphic narrative will delight and surpass the expectations of his fans.

Genres: Comics, Graphic Novels, Fiction, Horror, Fantasy, Graphic Novels Comics, Comix

56 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2012

About the author

Charles Burns is an American cartoonist and illustrator.
Burns grew up in Seattle in the 1970s. His comic book work rose to prominence in Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly magazine 'RAW' in the mid-1980s. Nowadays, Burns is best known for the horror/coming of age graphic novel Black Hole, originally serialised in twelve issues between 1995 and 2004. The story was eventually collected in one volume by Pantheon Books and received Eisner, Harvey, and Ignatz awards in 2005. His following works X'ed Out (2010), The Hive (2012), Sugar Skull (2014), Last Look (2016) and Last Cut (2024) have also been published by Pantheon Books, although the latter was first released in France as a series of three French comic albums.
As an illustrator, Charles Burns has been involved in a wide range of projects, from Iggy Pop album covers to an ad campaign for Altoids. In 1992 he designed the sets for Mark Morris's restaging of The Nutcracker (renamed The Hard Nut) at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. He illustrated covers for Time, The New Yorker, and The New York Times Magazine. He was also tapped as the official cover artist for The Believer magazine at its inception in 2003.
Burns lives in Philadelphia with his wife and daughters.

Reviews

[Dave Schaafsma · Rating 4 out of 5]

Initially I was confused and put off by the tacking back and forth between the dream/nightmare and reality of Doug and Sarah in volume one of this story, X'Ed Out, felt a little put off by its outdoing Blackhole in strangeness. But in rereading the whole series in essentially one sitting I came to understand and like it a lot more. It's really innovative storytelling of an essentially straightforward story of ordinary people. Oh, and there's these alien creatures and nightmare images, too just to undercut the "normality".

But in rereading, it wasn't all a smooth ride. Just when I thought I might be getting the hang of it, I was confused again by The Hive. We see more of the love relationship between Doug and Sarah, though there seems to be scary moments, dark times, foreboding that all things might not be well. Doug works with aliens in a hive, which is. . . alienating as many jobs can be. In this hive, there are non-human female creatures who seem to be there to make babies (kind of like breeder bees?). Doug gives romance comics (yes, that's what I said!) to these females, comics about a man and a woman who are in love, though the girlfriend is still being pursued by the macho ex.

Too bizarre for ya? Well, in case you were wondering Doug and Sarah are pretty much like the boy and girl in this comic story! Did Doug draw it? Is Doug Charles Burns? Why am I asking questions like this if I am writing this review? Is it because I am still not sure what is going on? Right! But I think in the right altered state I can just about get it. Almost. Ah, let's try this again. But over time, chronology becomes harder to discern in places in this story, and the line between reality and dream/nightmare breaks down from time to time. Whoa, what's going on here? But slow down, take a deep breath, it's just a relationship story told with horror elements!

Now, most readers will just hate this kind of storytelling--too much work, too bizarre--but as a kind of reflection on narrative as a way of making sense of the every day, it's interesting: Herge's Tintin becomes NitNit and meets Jim Woodring's Frank. It's Burrough's Naked Lunch meets Margaret Atwood's Handmaid's Tale! It's experimental, sure, but in a rich tradition extending back 60 years and more! It's H. G. Wells and The Time Machine's quasi-erotic elloi meets Hunter Thompson! And it's a love story, don't you forget it! But stop using exclamation marks!

[Sam Quixote · Rating 5 out of 5]

Re-reading series books in an actual series rather than as they come out over the years is worth it - at least for the good ones, which happily includes this title. I never noticed before but the cover shows Doug older and fatter, looking like he’s got some kind of office job, in contrast to the Doug that we left in the last book where he was wandering about as a younger man in his dad’s dressing gown in a haze with a bandaged head.

Well, shall we? Deeper and deeper into the rabbit hole we go…

Doug is still deeply troubled that the love of his life Sarah is no longer with him, though we still don’t know what happened to her. Time has moved on and his life has changed but he’s been unable to move on. He talks to a new woman - a therapist, a friend? - about Sarah and his dying father, and it looks like he’s become dependent upon booze and pills to cope. Elsewhere in the fantasy world, he’s still the young Tintin lookalike Nitnit but he’s now working in the Hive alongside the lizardmen to supply the breeders with romance comics.

Images, scenes, phrases noticeably begin repeating immediately. The Japanese romance comic that opens the book re-tells the story of how Doug met Sarah in the first book, and then later we discover Sarah loved to read old romance comics that Doug bought her at a flea market. In each version of the stories Doug is telling, romance comics play a part, and, mirroring this series and his own life, there are issues missing in between the comics Sarah is reading so she’s not getting the whole story. The comics seem to be the key to Doug’s story AND comics are how we’ll find out Doug’s full story. Layer upon layer of meta detail!

The pig foetus reappears though this time it’s coming out of Sarah’s stomach in a self-inflicted C-section, and the Tintin-esque eggs make another appearance. Small clues like the disembodied voice of Sarah’s psychotic ex threatening to murder them both and the buzzer through which he’s speaking gushing blood hints that perhaps Sarah was killed by him. Or maybe he killed Doug and all of this is purgatory where Doug’s soul is trying to come to peace with his strange life before moving on - is that what this fantasy world is? Charles Burns refuses to give us solid answers and keeps us guessing.

For the most part this book is a bit more straightforward than the first though an uneasy sense of despair continues to hang over proceedings. We see the highs of Doug and Sarah’s relationship and his performance art as his stage persona Nitnit is becoming well-received. Burns spends more time with Doug and his dying father, exploring his father’s past and how he became such a beaten man. It’s odd how we haven’t seen Doug’s mother yet and that Burns seems to be moulding Doug into his father’s image ever so slowly.

The Hive itself has biological-looking walls, fleshy sides that produce eggs, so maybe this is Doug’s subconscious hinting still further at the mystery at the centre of this all: Sarah and a baby they were going to have? There’s a scene earlier when Sarah took some photos of Doug that he hated because he wasn’t wearing his Nitnit mask (his protection or real self?) - will we finally understand what’s happening to Doug when he discards the Nitnit persona that “he created” in order to hide from reality?

This really is a very rewarding comic to revisit now that it’s complete. With the way so much of the story repeats on itself throughout The Hive, it feels like it’s building up momentum and the truth is about to come out. It’s an entrancing mystery told expertly by Burns and drawn in an utterly beautiful way - a masterclass in experimental fiction, challenging comics, and imaginative storytelling. Will Doug find the missing issues he needs to make sense of it all - and what part does the Sugar Skull play? Enough questions - onto the final book and (hopefully) the answers!

[Jon Nakapalau · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow! With the logic of a nightmare you want to wake from Charles Burns takes us into a place of 'claustrophobic alienation' that seems to seep into everyday life...this book is just in time for Halloween! So get ready and add this book to the 'passing out candy' stack of books as you wait for treats or tricks!

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 4 out of 5]

The second instalment in the Burns trilogy contains more expletive-spitting bald green alien workers, worrying 23rd-floor breeding wards populated with pretty waifs, sexy sickly teeny relationship plots with cleverly crowbarred nudity and Patti Smith references, worrying fever-dream-flashback things with various alien squid-like creatures bursting through chests, extremely veiny moribund death-bed dads, something about romantic novels and kinky photographs, the return of the cash-strapped mini-sumo-wrestler squashed-testicle-mutant, and evil sushi with toothy wormy beings sprouting from its nutritious insides. Diverting but far too brief to get all hysterical about, esp. with an absent conclusion. Charles Burns discusses on Bookworm.

[Nicolo · Rating 3 out of 5]

Usually when I’m on a trip out of town I buy a graphic novel or two to commemorate the event. This time was no different since I bought Charles Burns’ The Hive on my latest business trip to Cebu.

I bought it because I’ve heard interesting about it and it is second book of his current trilogy of work. I figured if it was dark mirror of the Tintin books then each volume would be a standalone story. I should have taken note of what the first book in the trilogy was.

I’ve read it and it has what one would expect out of an independently produced graphic novel: the quirky art and character design, the nudity, the sex and strong language. What I was not prepared for was how integral the first chapter was in the total flow of the story. I came into it reading this book unprepared so I was caught off guard and a bit confused. I thought I would have been able to get into the story by reading on but I was never able to get into that groove.

From what I was able to figure out, the book is about Doug, talking about his past hurts and losses to a stranger he’s bumming a couch to sleep in. Doug tries to recall the incident that may have ruined his past relationship with his absent girlfriend which may involve an unplanned pregnancy and a regrettable abortion. Also, Doug has an alter ego who is a Tintin pastiche that lives in an alternate reality populated with humanoid lizards and freakishly distorted humans.

I would probably read and review this again if I could find the first volume, but given the sequence of events that led me to this book in the first place, it’ll take quite a while unless I’m lucky.

Originally reviewed on The Raving Asgardian, my personal blog on comics and its myriad forms.

[Drew Canole · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm looking forward to the final part of this trilogy that started with X'ed Out. Apparently the third is named Sugar Skull and is coming out this fall.

This continued the story and was more of the same plus more craziness. I'm not quite sure what's going on in the story. Its an entertaining read, nonetheless, and one that I'll be revisiting soon.

[Andy · Rating 4 out of 5]

"The Hive" is a surreal tale about Doug, an aimless kid who performs as the mascot to a local punk band named Bacon and has a disturbed girlfriend who obsessively reads Romance Comics. The story takes a few turns to his mascot character who delivers romance comics to sick, dying girls. There's a lot of conscious and subconscious role playing going on here and part of the fun of reading "The Hive" is figuring out how many parallels occur between both stories since after all it's basically the two faces of Doug. (By the way the mascot character looks a lot like Doug from Nickelodeon). And of course it's always a blast seeing Charles Burns art in color - finally!

[Dylan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Even weirder than the first one

[Marc · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reading Charles Burns is like walking into somebody else's twisted dreams. This follows up his previous work, X'ed Out, but I picked it up first without realizing it and read through it. And then discovered X'ed Out right next to it on the library shelf and read that, too!
There's a big part of me that wants to give you a synopsis, but what would I say? ... some dude wakes up in a strange world where he brings reading material to women in "The Hive" who are referred to as "breeders" (sort of like the guy who pushes the book/magazine cart around at a prison). Look-a-like green, alien middle managers boss him around and he tries to piece memories together of earlier romances. Was that helpful? Probably not.

[Gavin Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

Burns is crafting a stunning trilogy. This middle volume continues to add layer after subconscious, surreal layer to a narrative that seems to exert a gravitational force--with each turn of the page one is sucked further and further into this world of dark fantasy and desire. It seems impossible to completely sort out or untangle what is real and what's not; nevertheless, my great appreciation for this book stems precisely from its difficulty. It does not yield easy answers. It demands you reread, you juxtapose images and pages, you recollect what you've seen and heard. I anticipate returning to it again and again in an effort to more fully appreciate the complexity of the narrative and the richness of its formal presentation. Can't wait for the last volume...

[Golden Secondary School · Rating 4 out of 5]

Brilliant and disturbing, this nightmarish tale will make you uncomfortable and curious. Garish colours match with intricate yet ominous graphics to draw the reader in.

The story line is complex and mature. Recommended for older students and/or those who are fans of David Lynch.

[Sonic · Rating 5 out of 5]

. I loved it!


What the hell did I just read?



I don't know, ...


but, ...


I loved it!

[Laura · Rating 3 out of 5]

It’s been a little bit since I finished the first one but we got the rest of the trilogy the other day. I was confused as to what;s happening in the first one bc the whole thing is an opiate laden dream sequence so naturally it doesn’t make much sense. In this one we see the first time the protagonist ever takes opiates with Sarah. Still don’t know much about the dream world, other than that there’s breeder women which I think I may have already known because I remember noting that the alien world was organized like an insect colony. I really hate the slackjawed protagonist I cannot get over his mouth and I ruin every page by thinking about it.

[Tina · Rating 4 out of 5]

This second volume pulls you deeper into Doug’s dreams, past, and the shame he’s trying his best to avoid. I found some images in this one genuinely startling. Sarah’s ex’s voice coming from the buzzer added another level of dread. I love the panels of those guys selling sugar skulls.

[D.M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Independent comics stalwart Charles Burns has been steadily ploughing pretty much the same furrow for something like 30 years now: teen plagues, an obsession with 1950s pop-culture and dangerous women/girls who lead clueless men/boys to their dooms. This reached its apex with his magnum opus Black Hole, which seemed to take the whole thing as far as it was likely to go. Reading this latest trilogy from him suggests that's exactly what was intended, as he breaks very new ground here.
The first book of the set, X'ed Out, dropped us right in to what was clearly a world different from Burns' usual: a confused young man wakes in what appears to be a post-apocalyptic nightmare world, teams up unwittingly with a sort of overgrown-baby con-man and gradually learns more about his unfamiliar surroundings. By that book's end, we discover that we're shifting between three worlds: the real past of 'Johnny 23,' a wannabe punk-poet with a mask of Tintin homage 'Nitnit'; the present of Doug, the real identity of Johnny 23 and a young man who's recovering from something tragic and ugly; and Doug's nightmare alter-ego Nitnit, who moves in the grim world that exists in the shadow of The Hive.
As this second volume opens, we are thrown immediately into these blended realities, first with Nitnit, then with Johnny, and finally with a new future-Doug before it starts spinning all over again. Nitnit has gotten himself a worker job in The Hive itself, having something peripheral to do with the human 'breeder' females apparently used by his world's lizard-man overlords. Johnny is in the throes of his passionate if puzzling affair with the mysterious (and possibly dangerous) Sarah. Meanwhile, future-Doug struggles with his nightmares within nightmares and whatever ended up happening with Sarah, with the aid of a new girlfriend.
Though this could all get confusing fast, Burns handles it ably and beautifully, so it's never confounding, always stunning, and constantly nerve-wracking. He may have struck out for new territory here, but his artistic and narrative styles have never been stronger. By the end of this instalment, we are slightly more informed about the worlds Burns has created here, but there are still clearly many knots to unravel in the final third volume.

[Jay Daze · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've always been a sucker for Burns' surrealistic dream-state comics and The Hive is a successful continuation of this. Comics are the perfect medium for things to be really fucked up and odd. I'm not a super fan of realist comics with everything making sense all the time - it doesn't seem to exploit the medium in the way I really groove to.

Now this does feature a (gasp) art student who seems to be questioning the meaning of life or at least his life and the sad fate of his father who seems to have died of cancer. An artist writing/cartooning a story about a young artist full of angst and possible a head-injury and drug problem! Your tolerance for this sort of navel gazing might be tested. It is like when writers write about writing - it can be a trial for the poor reader.

But I think Burns is a good enough of an artist to muddy things up enough to make this intriguing. It has a lot of his obsessions in it that I've seen in works like EL Borobah and Skin Deep and especially his work before this one Black Hole. But because Burns is such the consumate cartoonist (and a slow painstaking producer of his work) he's able to revisit/recycle those body horror and bondage themes without them seeming tired to me (so far). And yes there is the nice addition of Tin Tin/Nit Nit going on as well.

There was a two year gap between X'ed Out and The Hive, I'll happily wait another two years for the next - absorbing what's seeped into my brain in the meantime.

[Lee Foust · Rating 5 out of 5]

The themes come together more obvious here in volume two (adolescent sexuality, desire, and fear of pregnancy), and that might have bored/insulted me a bit but there are even better visuals and new things emerging to keep me loving this series: I'm starting to notice a maze motif in the visuals--in the boxes of the romance comix, the hive, the city, the underground tunnels... That's what adolescence feels like, a maze of experiences. The return to the father's life in snapshots worked this way too--a double, a foil, how the previous generation seemed to have a road, a preordained past only finding it a maze in the form of an endless series of uninteresting TV images--the dead-end of having a family. Do we ruin our parents' lives? Do we stop their time when time and memory begin for us? Is that the fear of reproduction, that it kills us a individuals and makes us drones? Hence Doug's fear of an honest photograph, his retreat behind a mask, a staged, artsy selfie, prerecorded sounds and others' words, his t-shirt character. Adolescence is deciding what character we'll play in real life. Burns's own doubled character, living a vivid dream life in a maze of fragmentary, nonlinear flashbacks of a real life that feels more strange than the dream. What lies in the future of that other doppelganger, the sugar skull--besides an overused t-shirt image.

[Jordan · Rating 4 out of 5]

The surreal dreamy-nightmare graphic novel, X’ed Out, is back, this time with the sequel, The Hive. Let me be clear, though: Charles Burns’ work is not ‘weird’ for the sake of being weird. It’s very intricate and well thought-out, weaving together these storylines that just so happen to be sorta fucked up. (Actually, maybe what’s weird is just how tremendous of a feat it is that this work --amidst all of the strange-- has a loud, strong, beating heart at its core.)

Here, we delve further into Doug’s past, putting an emphasis on his relationships. The picture is starting to become more and more in focus, seeing just how his past affects his present, and maybe future, too. I think that is what Burns is trying to get at. Our past, our mistakes, our inadequacies, have a way of rising back up to the surface. Things might be good for a while, but just give yourself time. You and your baggage, or her and her baggage, or whoever’s baggage, really, will get the best of you/her/it eventually.

That’s pretty bleak. But it’s entertaining, and as long as it’s happening to someone else, then hey. There’s your life lesson for the day, kids!

[Nicholas Whyte · Rating 4 out of 5]

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2056139.html[return][return]This is the second of a trilogy by Burns which started with X'ed Out, and leaps between three different storylines: Doug's memories of his life in our world, in particular his enigmatic girlfriend Sarah (who has a fascination with Louise Bourgeois); the adventures of Doug's alter ego Nitnit in the alternative insectoid world of The Hive; and the romance comics which are common to both worlds. It seems almost as if Burns is interrogating the medium of comics from two different directions, Bourgeois' startling and disturbing images and the conventionally fluffy romance stories. There is also clearly a deep revelation to come in the third and final volume about what happened between Douglas and Sarah, and I find myself rather hoping that it is something sufficiently disturbing to justify the emotional energy of the story rather than some relatively generic story about growing up.

[Jason Furman · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the second volume of what I believe is intended to be a trilogy of short graphic novels. What I wrote about the first installment remains true of this one as well:

"A short graphic novel, the first installment of a trilogy. One cannot fully judge the merits of this volume when the other two come out. In many places, it is an elliptical, dreamlike tease. If the future volumes do more to tie all of this together, then this might be the beginning of a brilliant graphic novel. If not, then I would be somewhat disappointed."

This novel brings somewhat more depth to the characters relationships, somewhat more perspective on the alien world he ends up in, and another cliffhanger ending--that is just enough to keep me waiting another two years, which was the length of time between installments 1 and 2 in this novel.

[Joseph · Rating 4 out of 5]

Four and a half stars, and the weirdness continues unabated - it's like David Cronenberg directed an adaptation of Alice in Wonderland. I'm still not sure how I feel about the structure of the thing, let alone the imagery, but I appreciate that Burns respects his readers. I'd say I'm still not sure if I "like" the series, but I tore through this volume and am now wondering when we'll get the conclusion.

Something I didn't properly appreciate when reading the first volume is just how intricate and beautiful the art is. It seemed insane that two years elapsed between the publication of this volume and X'ed Out until I started processing the depth of detail and color in every panel. If you can handle the odd, grotesque surrealism, these books are worth reading for the visuals alone.

[Rick · Rating 4 out of 5]

Returning to the surreal universe first experienced in 2010's X'ed, Burns, creator of Black Hole and famed contributor to the legendary anthology series Raw, expertly reveals more of Doug's intriguing story in The Hive. As with the previous, the beautifully disturbing, non-linear tale leaps effortlessly between the real and unreal. Though in this installment, the lines further blur as elements from the bizarrely apocalyptic reality and the "normal" collide. Inspired equally by the works of Hergé and William Burroughs, Burns once again provides one of the best graphic novels of the year.

[JBP · Rating 4 out of 5]

Part two of Charles Burns' trilogy [SUGAR SKULL is next] further goes into the strange, surreal, dark mystery of just what is going on with the main character as he bounces back and forth between worlds. I'm not sure what the hell is going on and I like it. Like X'ED OUT, I just wish this was longer as now I have to wait to see what happens. Reading all three at once would be optimum. That said, even though I don't check out many of these kinds of graphic works, I really like Burns. Strange, unpredictable, erotic and violent--there's much here to enjoy. I especially like the photography element in the story as characters go around taking photos. Extremely quick read...I read it over a lunch hour at work.

[Eddie Watkins · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've flipped through Burns before, and have spent quite a bit of time gazing at a big Burroughs print of his which a neighbor has in his living room, but this and X'ed Out are the first I've read entire. Powerful, disturbing stuff. And gorgeous. Whatever these installments end up adding up to is going to be some kind of twisted masterpiece of repressed memory, nightmare, and poisoned love.

[Jeff Jackson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Worthy continuation of the Tintin meets William S. Burroughs aesthetic of "X'd Out." Virtuoso toggling between mirror-maze narratives that offer distorted reflections of each other, plus typically gorgeous artwork. Eager to read the final installment to see how it all splices together.

[Corinna Bechko · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just fantastic. Odd, poignant, beautiful to look at and mysterious. What more do you want?

[Francesca Giardiello · Rating 2 out of 5]

Come si fa a valutare qualcosa che non porta da nessuna parte?

Tanti spezzoni tutti scollegati fra loro, talmente tanto distanti fra tempi e luoghi che il lettore, perso, non riesce a godersi ciò che sta leggendo.

Se ci sono metafore, a parte quelle evidenti, mi sono completamente sfuggite esattamente come io sono sfuggita a qualsiasi attrazione doveva esercitare la lettura in questione su di me.

[Bonnie G. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Finally read the Burns trilogy and it is pretty heartbreaking- it has a lot of Black Hole-ish themes and nightmareish ideas, but he really pulls together tragic, boring realism with surreal dreams that have more of a truth to them.
I loved his romance comics that started to echo the main guys life- truly masterful.

[J · Rating 5 out of 5]

Continuing to be incredibly weird and switching back and forth between what the hell and what the fuck, the second volume of this trilogy moves the story along, but moves along the hallucinatory weird animal dream sequence along as well. Which is more real? You want to say the "realistic" part but maybe that's the real dream...

[Mateen Mahboubi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Part two of three in the Last Look Trilogy. I definitely benefited from reading the volumes in quick succession. Despite the fantastical elements, it's not that hard to follow and I'm looking forward to getting the third volume soon.