X’ed Out, The Hive and Sugar Skull all focus on Doug, a photography major who’s struggling to navigate his life at art school, a relationship with a new girlfriend and an incessant bout of fever dreams in which those obnoxious lizard men play a pivotal role. In the lecture, Burns describes a sequence that appears in The Secret of the Unicorn being the first time that he ever saw an intercom: “I don’t know what an intercom is…When I’m looking at it, I see this voice coming out of the wall…this mouth that’s embedded into this wall. so it isn't going to be in any kind of condition to pay for my nursing home and morphine drip and robot pet. I'm about to read The Hive next—if I can glimpse a narrative among the hairless mole-people, maybe I will go back and retroactively give this book another star.

Early in X’ed Out, Doug/Johnny 23 finds himself wandering through the surreal streets in his dreamworld. That's because while he was sleeping, the world was reorganized, or perhaps reverted to its natural status--a status E.

Currently, New Zealand’s Karl Wills uses the look in his punk “Jessica of the Schoolyard” series, and filmmaker Steven Spielberg’s Tintin adaptation is supposed to appear as a 2011 Christmas release. 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. The next sequence in the story is a memory of the time Doug and Sarah went to Doug’s childhood home. Gilliam also makes use of similar imagery in Brazil, though it’s purpose seems to be more atmospheric and symbolic and exists not in the dreams, but rather in the waking world that Sam inhabits with shots that highlight tentacle-like ducts that in some scenes writhe and breathe as if alive, and always appear menacing.

At one point he teases the reader by mirroring their confusion in his characters; a few pages in, one of them complains of being lost in a series of romance comics, unable to find the missing editions to give clarity to the story. Some of what he is about can be deduced or indicated from recurring images: A man’s face; dead foetuses; eggs; a pink blanket; television screens, and so on. Like most graphic novels, even the brilliantly executed, its telling seems stuck in some tormented masturbatory adolescence. In the dream, when Doug sees Sarah as a “chosen” breeder, taken to a distant factory/hive, he feels the need to save her from her fate as much as he did the night he met her (just as Tintin would). I re-read the first two books in preparation for this final volume so I wouldn’t miss anything and so I could fully appreciate what I was sure was going to be a modern masterpiece - and all I got from doing this was the renewed admiration of the journey, and gorgeous art, that Burns provided.His new book covers similar territory, though it's hard to tell at this point quite how badly things are going to turn out: X'ed Out is the first instalment of a serial, which means, frustratingly, that you finish it with no clue as to what is going on. I had some vague idea that I’d spend four years in college and then when I got out I’d be an artist and make a living. Terry Gilliam says that the role of Sam Lowery was originally written to be a younger character, but he decided to change because Pryce did so well.

And, with the beginning of the story where a Tintin-lookalike character (the cover’s homage to The Shooting Star is an indicator of one of this book’s key references) with a bandage on his head, waking up in bed, it’s clear Burns is aiming to place the reader on the same uncertain footing as Doug with his deliberately choppy narrative style.While the X’ed Out trilogy isn’t the longest of Burns’ works, even at three volumes, it is his most ambitious with regard to storytelling. My guess is that the protagonist had a nasty accident (hinted at) or a traumatic experience (hinted at) that caused him to black out some of the memories. Sugar Skull and its companions come with a brutal message: only fear and loathing awaits those men who leave their growing up until it is too late. In 1992 he designed the sets for Mark Morris's restaging of The Nutcracker (renamed The Hard Nut) at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.