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 *