At last, it's here: the second volume in the trilogy that began with X'ed Out. And things are really getting weird now. Remember Doug, the aspiring young performance artist who, in X'ed Out, appeared to be recovering from some kind of head injury? At the end of that book, we left him in a strange netherworld (he entered it through a hole in his bedroom wall). It was inhabited by one-eyed green worms who live in a giant hive, and spend their time transporting around a precious cargo of giant white and red eggs. Was this a dream, or a hallucination?
Naturally, Burns – still best known for his teenage horror story, Black Hole – was not telling. We would just have to wait.
Two years on – X'ed Out was published in 2010 – and things are no less clear. Doug (or Nitnit, as he is known in this netherworld) is still trapped in the hive. He works in its library and spends his days delivering comic books to the women who are known as the "breeders".
As he does this lowly work, he tries to ignore the terrible smell that permeates some of the hive's corridors, and the fact that the breeders can be heard crying in the dead of night. Strangely docile, he is the polar opposite of Tintin, the energetic hero whose name is his own in reverse. Meanwhile, back in the real world, he continues to tell a still unidentified (and increasingly disgusted) young woman about his absent girlfriend, Sarah, and her menacing ex-boyfriend – the people, we assume, who are responsible for whatever it is that finally shattered his life. Sarah, he reveals, made him dress in his dead father's clothes, fed him opiates and, as he slept off the drugs, photographed him. When Doug is not talking, he mostly sleeps. But he has terrible nightmares: a girl rips open her own belly and a piglet emerges from the wound.
The Hive is even more disorienting than the book preceding it – and that was dizzying enough. I truly have no idea, yet, what is going on. But the feeling of dread Burns evokes is quite something, especially when you consider that it is Hergé whose drawings these strips first call to mind. The repetitions in the book, and its powerful imagery (the significance of some of which is not yet clear), combine to create a feeling that Doug is on the edge of revealing something truly terrible. What will it be? Has it to do with those monstrous eggs? And how on earth will Burns tie up all these carefully planned loose ends, given that he has promised us just one further volume? (The third book will be called Sugar Skull, for the macabre sweets Doug/Nitnit is forced to buy in The Hive's very last frame.)
I've honestly no idea. All I can tell you is that I fear it will be another two years, at least, before we find out. Charles Burns might be the master of all that is creepy in comics, but he isn't, by any stretch of the imagination, fast.
