The Hive
Burns continues the story begun in X’ed Out (2010) of Doug, the victim of a mysterious head injury who vacillates between a dreamed existence, in which he’s toiling as a delivery boy in a hivelike netherworld populated by grotesque figures, and his memories of his doomed relationship with the troubled Sarah and her violent ex-boyfriend. The two realities begin to overlap. In the hive, Doug delivers old-fashioned romance comics to Lily, one of the young “breeders” enslaved to produce workers as the waking Doug reminisces about Sarah’s fondness for the kitschy comics. While the hive sequences have the nightmarish logic of a fever dream, Sarah’s disturbing behavior and Doug’s discoveries about his emotionally inaccessible father make his waking life seem somehow even more unsettling. Burns’ straightforward, hard-edged artwork, with its sensuous brushwork and dramatic shadows, makes both realities creepily convincing. Doug’s fate and the significance of the eerie hive will presumably be resolved in the third volume of this trilogy. Until then, Burns’ fans can luxuriate in the pair of bizarre worlds that he’s created. --Gordon Flagg