Last Look

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

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.

Neel Mukherjee, New Statesman

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.

New York Times

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

Vice Magazine

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.

Bookmunch

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.

Pete Redrup, Quietus

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

Thomas W. Hodgkinson, Spectator, Book of the Year

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.

Andy Shaw, MYM Magazine

A great gift.

Rachel Cooke, Observer, Book of the Year

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.

Thomas Hodgkinson, Spectator

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

Sam Thielman, Guardian, Book of the Year